Bbc

Thursday

James Delingpole

‘Atlantis’ shows our civilisation is doomed

This week saw the final episode of possibly the greatest television series ever. Breaking Bad wasn’t made by the BBC, of course. Nor, so far as I know, did it make any attempt to buy the broadcast rights. That’s because, obviously, the Beeb has far more important, special things to spend your compulsory licence fee on, in keeping with the Reithian tradition. Stuff like Atlantis (BBC1, Saturday). Atlantis was designed to fill the Saturday evening family entertainment slot that has previously been occupied by Merlin. And I do mean ‘designed’. It’s so crudely manufactured it makes One Direction look like Led Zeppelin. It’s as ersatz as a cup of acorn

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Rod Liddle: Ever since I criticised a leftist icon, the Beeb hasn’t stopped calling me

Ring, ring goes the telephone every minute God sends. Sometimes I pick it up and say hello, sometimes I don’t. I know who is calling, anyway. It is one or another media representative from the bien-pensant absolutist liberal left, and they are all in a dither about a man called Ralph Miliband, of whom they had probably never heard until a few hours ago, and whom they have most certainly not read. Their sense of excitement, these youngish callers from a multiplicity of BBC news stations and, of course, Channel 4 News, is palpable; it fizzes and crackles down the line, their outrage and their delight at possibly finding someone

Wednesday

Douglas Murray

Samuel Huntington’s ‘Clash of Civilizations’ is still upsetting the complacent

It is twenty years since Samuel Huntington’s essay ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’ was first published in Foreign Affairs. On Monday night I took part in a discussion on BBC Radio 3’s Nightwaves about the article (and the resulting book) which turned oddly nasty. I have always been a qualified admirer of Huntington’s most famous work (‘qualified’ because like most people who have read the book I admire its range and grasp while disagreeing with certain of its conclusions). But broadly admire it or not, it appears to be a difficult work to discuss. This is largely because it suffers the double-bind of being misunderstood by people who have not read it. Nine

Monday

Steerpike

Robbie Fowler’s simile was bad, not sexist

Viewers of Saturday’s edition of Final Score on BBC 1 would have seen former Liverpool and England striker Robbie Fowler apologising (doubtless after a prompt from the voice in his ear-piece) for using the expression ‘like a couple of girls’. He was referring to Jan Vertonghen and Fernando Torres’s silly tussle during the 1-1 draw between Tottenham Hotspur and Chelsea, in which Torres was harshly sent off. Mr Steerpike is all for war on clichéd simile (and for telling preening footballers where to get off), but ‘like a couple of girls’ is not sexist. Fowler was picking at the pettiness of Vertonghen and Torres; he was not damning the massed ranks of the

Friday

Camilla Swift

Spectator Play: The highs and the lows of what’s going on in arts this week | 27 September 2013

When you hear the words ‘English art’, there are very few people who would immediately think of embroidery. As Dan Jones said when he was asked if he would like to present a programme about ‘the golden age’ of English embroidery, ‘Embroidery? What, like sewing?’ But accept the offer he did, and found that there’s a lot more to embroidery, as an art form, than ‘just’ sewing. In this week’s magazine he writes about everything he learnt about ‘one of English history’s most underappreciated art forms’. Here’s a clip from one of the previous ‘Fabric of Britain’ programmes – this one on knitting. Downton Abbey has returned to our screens

Thursday

Dan Jones

English embroidery: the forgotten wonder of the medieval world

Think of an art at which the English have excelled and I doubt you would come up with the word ‘embroidery’. As I muttered when my agent asked whether I should like to make a film for BBC4 about the golden age of this forgotten but brilliant native art form: ‘Embroidery? What, like sewing?’ But no, not like sewing. Or, actually, only a little bit. During the ‘high’ Middle Ages, English embroidery was one of the most desired and costly art forms in Europe. It was known as opus anglicanum or ‘the work of the English’ — a generic name that instantly conjured notions of craftsmanship, beauty, luxury and expense

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

Bet on Royal Mail, not Twitter

Royal Mail delivers to 29 million UK addresses; last year it generated £9 billion of revenues, of which £324 million remained as profit before tax; and it is likely to be valued at £3 billion in its privatisation share sale, indicating a price-earnings ratio modestly below ten. Twitter — the microblogging phenomenon beloved of self-admiring celebs, but now so ubiquitous as a mode of communication that it is compulsory for British ambassadors abroad — has 200 million users and is expected to generate revenues of just £365 million this year, maybe twice that next year. Twitter says it’s profitable but has so far kept its accounts private, and is nevertheless

James Delingpole James Delingpole

James Delingpole: As a Brummie, I am aggrieved with Peaky Blinders

You wait a whole lifetime for a lavishly shot, starrily cast, mega-budget gangster drama set in Birmingham to come along. Then when it does, it’s absolute rubbish. Well, I’m sorry but it is and as a Brummie — near enough: I grew up in a village called Alvechurch, just outside, and I come from a long line of Midlands industrialists — I feel particularly aggrieved by the entirely unjustified acclaim being heaped on the dismal Peaky Blinders (Thursday, BBC2). Let’s start with the accents. Some sound like a mélange of Liverpool and generic northern; others sound Irish, even when spoken by characters who aren’t supposed to be Irish. The series

Friday

Camilla Swift

Spectator Play: The highs and the lows of what’s going on in arts this week | 13 September 2013

As the new artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Gregory Doran might be expected to lie low as he settles into his new role. But on the contrary – Doran is full of ideas about how to develop the company, as Robert Gore-Langton finds when he interviews him in this week’s Spectator. As well as a plan ‘to stage every play Shakespeare wrote over the next six years’ – that is between now and 2018 – he has also banned Shakespeare from Stratford’s Swan theatre, deciding instead to put on plays ‘by his contemporaries’. Top actors and top ideas are all part of his plan – which you can

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Why the BBC couldn’t see any serious problem with its huge pay-offs

‘Corruption’ is a subtle word, because it describes a process rather than an event. It does not merely mean bad behaviour: it means behaviour that becomes rotten out of something which was once good. That is why it often afflicts high-minded organisations more than ordinary businesses. People who think they are collectively moral are more self-deceiving than the average market trader. Hence the current embarrassments of the BBC about huge pay-offs. The reason that the Trust and executives are now publicly blaming each other over the issue is not because one side was in the wrong and the other in the right, but because, at the time, no one involved

Tuesday

Lloyd Evans

Sketch: Dancing on the head of a BBC pin

The BBC’s managerial superstars, past and present, arrived at the Public Accounts Select committee yesterday afternoon to answer questions about executive pay. Like a frightened flock of geese they all began waddling in the same direction. Away from responsibility. Up first was Mark Thompson. The former D-G had jetted in from New York and his aim was to exonerate himself with a bulldozer strategy. ‘I paid senior staff fortunes to remove them swiftly. Delay would have cost more. I saved the BBC millions. I was brilliant. No one can touch me. Beat that.’ The Thompson tank was very effective and flattened all questioners. The issue then turned to the BBC

Monday

Douglas Murray

The BBC Trust is a classic New Labour horlicks

Nobody is ever ‘invited’ to appear before Margaret Hodge and the Commons public accounts committee. They are always ‘hauled’ before her. Thus it was with a whole phalanx of BBC executives, past and present, this afternoon. There are really two things which came out of the appearance of Lord (Chris) Patten, Mark Thompson et al. The first is the obvious reminder that the BBC has become a strangely upside-down organisation of late. Rich in senior management, it has spent recent years farming out major portions of news and other programme-making, apparently so that it could concentrate on the really important task of management. Of course the BBC is not the

Friday

Camilla Swift

Spectator Play: The highs and the lows of what’s going on in arts this week | 23 August 2013

For many people, stories and story-telling formed the basis of their childhood. But there are others whose childhood is devoid of books, and it’s these children that Oxford’s new Story Museum aims to help. As Robert Gore-Langton puts it, ‘beyond [Oxford’s] dreaming spires is an urban hellhole of burning cars, despair and unemployment’, and, he points out, ‘it is ranked number 32 in Crap Towns: The 50 Worst Places to Live in the UK.’ In his piece, he talks to Anne Fine, Amanda Mitichison, Terence Blacker and Keith Crossley-Holland on the joy – and importance – of reading aloud. Below is just one of The Story Museum’s attempts to get children

Thursday

James Delingpole

Is David Starkey God?

‘Somerset. Winter 877,’ said the subtitles below an arty, BBC-nature-doc style close-up of a coot paddling amid the reeds on the eerie black waters of the Somerset levels. ‘Yes!’ I went, mentally punching the air. ‘I’m in safe hands here, I can tell. Bet they’re going to get all the costume details totally right. There might even be battle scenes. Not crap three-men-with-shields-filmed-over-and-over-again-from-different-angles-with-a-shaky-camera like in the bad old days. But totally convincing CGI-enhanced ones. The Battle of Ashdown, done even more realistically than it was in 871. Yay!’ Then it got even better. The voiceover began mellifluously reading excerpts from the Anglo-Saxon chronicle about ‘se cyning Aelfred’ — and there

Kate Chisholm

A bearded, medallion-wielding, miniature puppet won’t persuade us to go digital

Will digital radio ever really take off? We were supposed to be switching over to digital-only reception in 2015 (three years after the TV switchover) but with only 36.8 per cent of listeners as yet tuning in to a digital station the future of DAB is beginning to look very uncertain (and most of those 36.8 per cent will also be listening to an old and much-loved analogue wireless set or transistor). Ed Vaizey, the government’s minister for culture, communications and the creative industries, has said he will announce a new date for the switchover ‘by the end of the year’, but this seems an unlikely target given that more

Wednesday

Camilla Swift

Is the RSPCA no longer an animal welfare charity?

In January of this year, Melissa Kite wrote our cover story about how the RSPCA has morphed from being an animal welfare charity into an animal rights group.  She wrote of the ‘culture of fear at their headquarters’, and explained ‘how deeply suspicious some animal experts have become of this once-respected body’. Since then, the problems have only worsened. In July it was revealed that the charity’s Chief Executive, Gavin Grant, was paid ‘between £150,000 and £160,000’ a year – at least £30,000 more than his predecessor.  Last week it was found that the charity has access to the Police National Computer, allowing it to investigate any suspect, witness or defendant’s criminal record. One RSPCA whistleblower –

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Taps for The Washington Post

So it has come to this. The Washington Post, paper of Bradlee and Woodward and Bernstein and all the rest, has been sold to Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. For $250m. That, apparently, is roughly the daily fluctuation in the value of Bezos’s Amazon shares. For a man worth more than $20bn, buying the Post is a bit like the rest of us buying a new bicycle. That’s how far – and how fast – the once mighty Post has fallen. Even so, it’s startling that the Grahams, who have owned the paper for 80 years, have decided to sell. As I write at Think Scotland today, the Graham family has ‘sunk their own flagship the better to save

Saturday

Camilla Swift

Spectator Play: The highs and the lows of what’s going on in arts this week | 3 August 2013

‘Shakespeare’s Globe’, as the theatre has been called since it was founded in 1997, is unusual for a theatre in that it makes a large annual profit, without receiving public funding. How? Its unique angle means it has no need to market itself – what’s more attractive to an American audience than Shakespeare, in London, in a reconstructed Shakespearean theatre? But its decision to put all Shakespearean productions on hold to make way for another dramatist is a decision which Lloyd Evans isn’t too sure about. Samuel Adamson’s Gabriel may be accompanied by some lovely Purcell music, but the actual play’s content leaves much to be desired. Theoretically, there’s nothing

Thursday

Clarissa Tan

Clarissa Tan experiences the greatest show on earth, and laughs

I watched Top Gear (BBC2, Sunday) for the first time in my life last week (the rock under which I’ve been living is pretty large, practically a boulder). I thought I’d better plug this knowledge gap before it got too embarrassing, seeing that Top Gear is the greatest show on earth, the travelling Big Top de nos jours, a daredevil combo of acrobatic stunts, mechanical wizardry and freakery. Fakery too, apparently, as it’s emerged that in a recent episode scenes that looked spontaneous were actually staged. These involved flashes of watery chaos, upturned tables and angry diners shaking their fists as an amphibious vehicle hastily built and even more hastily

Peter Phillips

70th anniversary of Composer of the Week

Mention of the 70th anniversary of Composer of the Week brings to mind a distinguished list of long-running programmes on Radio 3. They all beg the question of how they have managed to survive so long in an atmosphere of constant doubt about the value of a station that has so few listeners. Time and again it has seemed as though dumbing down would be the fate of all these old shows, if not of Radio 3 itself, and every time a peculiarly British mix of grudging respect for the arts alongside a trenchant nostalgia for familiar things — of the kind that has kept The Archers going since 1951