Television

Thursday

Howard Jacobson

The bluff and bluster of Boris’s bland boy Brexiteers

From the balcony where I take my daily exercise there is a view of the commercial centre of London that is so susceptible to changes of the light you feel you are in a different city every day. When the dying sun is reflected in its glass towers, the city looks like Las Vegas burning. Under a dark sky it could be Pittsburgh. The other day was so louring that I saw Moscow. ‘I’m looking at the Kremlin,’ I shouted in to my wife. She’s been worrying about me. She thinks it’s time I relaxed the promise I made myself not to go out until the virus has gone and

Wednesday

Ellen Lister

There’s nothing normal about getting nude on set

I remember how I felt the first time I saw Daisy Edgar-Jones’ nipples. Sitting on my sofa at home during lockdown, watching the BBC Three adaptation of Sally Rooney’s prize winning novel, Normal People, my jaw dropped as Edgar-Jones casually stretched an arm above her head, her bare chest fully exposed towards the camera. “She’s so brave!” I shouted out of nowhere, at my boyfriend. “What?” he replied, eyes glued to the screen, lost in his own (potentially quite different) stream of thought. Whilst both Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal appear in the nude throughout the series, it was Edgar-Jones’ full frontal nakedness in particular that shocked me.Having worked on film

Thursday

Peter Jones

Movie-makers should look to the Athenians before cashing in on this crisis

Covid-19 has not yet reached its peak but already the moguls of the small screen are plotting how to monetise, with exquisite sensitivity, of course, the tragic deaths of thousands of people. They would be wise to listen to the Athenian lovers of tragedy. In 499 bc the powerful Greek city of Miletus on the coast of western Turkey (Asia Minor) raised a revolt against its Persian overlords. It failed and in 494 bc Persia took its revenge: the city was sacked, its women and children sold into slavery, and most of its men slaughtered. Just a year or so later, the poet Phrynichus turned this historical incident into a

Saturday

Melissa Kite

How I fell out of love with the BBC

One of the many technological things I don’t understand is, how come I’m paying to watch television? I know why I used to pay. I used to switch on a box in the corner of the room and marvel at the choice of three quite interesting programmes and something slightly racy on Channel 4. It was all reassuringly underwhelming, with everyone doing as well as could be expected given the circumstances. The cardboard sets on a lot of the shows wobbled and we were happier for it, one could argue. There was an obvious balance of earnestly attempted light entertainment and archly presented informative content and I for one didn’t

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

Why the BBC licence fee makes sense

A consensus seems to be forming that the BBC licence fee is for the chop. In a digital age, the reasoning goes, we should not be forced to subscribe to huge bundles of content, with no choice over what we pay for and what we don’t. This argument, intriguingly, is both true and false at the same time. It is worth remarking that Netflix and Spotify succeeded by adopting a very similar model to, er, the BBC What’s true is that technology has removed two constraints which made the licence fee necessary in the first place. At the BBC’s outset, the airwaves were limited, creating a monopoly. Moreover it was