Bbc

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

Thursday

James Kirkup

Could coronavirus change British politics?

Even if the Covid-19 coronavirus does not become a mass killer on the scale of, say, the Spanish Flu in 1918, the mere possibility of such severity still carries huge weight. Just the potential for a disastrous pandemic demands a response whose seriousness and nature will have political and social implications. Even in this first week of the full UK response, some of those implications are clearly visible. And some of the inferences and lessons that can be drawn from this week are, to my mind, quite positive – small points of light in a dark and threatening sky, if you like. 1. The State matters Small-state libertarians have always

Saturday

The Spectator

Letters: How to really revitalise the North

Devolved or decentralised? Sir: Paul Collier (‘Northern lights’, 22 February) conflates what devolution has come to mean, in UK terms, with decentralisation of authority. Thus it is adrift to imply that Edinburgh has benefited from a conscious decentralising of powers from central government. It was simply that Scotland as a whole got devolution and Edinburgh is its capital city, whereby it administers the devolved responsibilities. Until such time as commentators and politicians distinguish properly between devolution and decentralisation, they will continue to prompt fears that England could be balkanised rather than treated as a national entity on a par with Scotland. Situate its devolved English parliament and government in a

Wednesday

Patrick West

Why are BBC dramas so obsessed with rewriting history?

If there was a Bafta award for Most Woke Television Drama, a BBC production would win every year hands down. Consider some of 2020’s highlights alone: Noughts and Crosses, set in an alternate world where the ruling class is black and in which white people are the victims of racism; My Name is Leon, about a mixed-race boy growing up in care; and A Suitable Boy, a drama about arranged marriages with an entirely Indian cast. And of course, there’s always the female lead in Doctor Who, a series that now features storylines about civil rights, the environment and even allusions to Brexit. That’s fine really, and nothing new by

Saturday

Douglas Murray

How low can the BBC go?

Last weekend’s papers claimed that the government desires a ‘massively pruned back’ BBC. Former Conservative cabinet minister Damian Green and someone called Huw Merriman spoke out against this, which allowed the BBC to put the headline ‘BBC licence fee: Tory MPs warn No. 10 against fight’ atop its characteristically impartial coverage. I suppose there are various reactions one can have to this, ranging from outrage at supposed ‘cultural vandalism’, via a vague shrug, all the way through to the full Charles Moore. In recent years I have moved through all these stages. The discovery that mattered most was the realisation that the less BBC I had in my life, the

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The blindness of cultural Marxism

Words we are not allowed to use any more now include ‘cultural Marxism’. Suella Braverman, now the Attorney General, used them last year and was immediately upbraided by the organisation Hope Not Hate. Very right-wing people sometimes use it too, you see, so it must never be uttered by anyone else. Banning the use of the phrase ‘cultural Marxism’ is about as culturally Marxist as it is possible to get, but I don’t suppose the cultural Marxists at Hope Not Hate appreciated the irony. Cultural Marxism is a largely 1960s excrescence in which everything must be seen through the prism of unequal power relations, other than which nothing else matters

Douglas Murray Douglas Murray

I’ve seen wars more amusing than BBC comedy

Last weekend’s papers claimed that the government desires a ‘massively pruned back’ BBC. Former Conservative cabinet minister Damian Green and someone called Huw Merriman spoke out against this, which allowed the BBC to put the headline ‘BBC licence fee: Tory MPs warn No. 10 against fight’ atop its characteristically impartial coverage. I suppose there are various reactions one can have to this, ranging from outrage at supposed ‘cultural vandalism’, via a vague shrug, all the way through to the full Charles Moore. In recent years I have moved through all these stages. The discovery that mattered most was the realisation that the less BBC I had in my life, the

Tuesday

Katy Balls

No. 10’s latest BBC row is a helpful distraction

How do you move on from a week of torrid headlines over a power struggle between senior No. 10 aides and a recently departed Chancellor? The old Tory playbook – mastered by Boris Johnson’s former election guru Lynton Crosby – would suggest throwing a dead cat. The dead cat strategy used when a party wishes to change the conversation by any means necessary. The idea is that by the time it’s done people will stop talking about the thing you want to move away from and instead become distracted and effectively go: ‘Jeez, mate, there’s a dead cat on the table!’ It’s worth remembering this device when considering that we

Monday

Philip Patrick

The BBC has much to learn from Japan’s national broadcaster

NHK is Japan’s version of the BBC – it was actually modelled after the Beeb way back in the 1920s. It has four terrestrial, two satellite TV stations, and three radio stations. It is advert-free, and funded by a license fee. It could be seen as one of Auntie’s nephews perhaps, with many of the same family traits, but a few important differences that embattled BBC executives might do well to take notice of. Unless you have a weird fondness for the noisy and inane (see the Takashi Fuji episode in ‘Lost in Translation’) NHK is probably the only ‘terebi’ you would want to watch in Japan. It is renowned

Wednesday

Damian Reilly

In defence of the BBC

I sometimes wonder if I’m the last person left in Britain who loves the BBC and thinks it represents brilliant value for money. Yes, there is much with which to be infuriated – like most Leavers, for example, I find watching Gary Lineker present Match of the Day about as enjoyable as I imagine Remainers would watching Nigel Farage do the same job. And yes, the Today programme segment earlier this week on the latest developments in telephone hold music was idiotic. But does the BBC really deserve, once again, to be threatened with licence fee reform? The argument against the BBC licence fee is that it is effectively a

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Why is the BBC criminalising low income women?

The BBC has a penchant for staging debates on the decriminalisation of drugs. I should know because I am often drafted in as the right-wing loon to provide a bit of balance to the enlightened drugs expert putting the more fashionable view. These debates always go the same way. I argue that if a substance is dangerous enough to be banned then you need to punish the users as well as the suppliers because it is they who are creating the market. Without these consumers, the drug-pushers would have nothing to sell. The enlightened expert is then invited to say how damaging it is to drug-users to be given a

Monday

Brendan O’Neill

Spare us Nish Kumar and the BBC’s anti-Brexit sneering

Friday was Brexit day. The day that the largest act of democracy in the history of this country was finally enacted. The day when the wishes of 17.4m people finally became a reality. And how did the BBC, the national broadcaster, mark this extraordinary democratic day? With a sneer, of course. A smug, aloof, bitter sneer at the entire country. Not only did BBC reporters huff and moan at the mass pro-Brexit gathering in Parliament Square, coming off like anthropologists who had happened upon some bizarre, exotic tribe. It also chose that day to push out anti-Brexit nonsense via its kids’ wing, CBBC. Yes, even children must now be subjected

Thursday

Charles Moore

Why bother joining the Labour party?

Now that there is yet another chance to vote for a leader of the Labour party, if you are prepared to pay £25 next week, lots of my friends, none of them Labour supporters, are joining up. Their idea is to vote for the Corbyn ‘continuity candidate’, who seems to be Rebecca Long Bailey, thus ensuring, they think, continuous Conservative rule. As someone who is not a member of any political party, and is therefore eligible to join Labour, I am thinking of following suit; but something gives me pause. There is a real question whether the extremists in Labour are any worse than the moderates. The Corbynistas are, for

Thursday

James Delingpole

BBC’s A Christmas Carol was the victim of tub-thumping lefty politics

‘People trust us,’ claimed Lord Hall, recently. But like a lot of what you hear from the BBC these days I’m not sure that that is strictly accurate. The BBC’s shamelessly biased news coverage over Brexit was bad enough but what has really started in sticking in viewers’ craws is the way its relentlessly woke politics have now infected pretty much the entirety of its entertainment output. There is almost no escape from the BBC’s finger-wagging lectures, not even when it’s Christmas and you’re desperately trying to have fun. As exhibit A, allow me to present A Christmas Carol. ‘Charles Dickens, Christmas and the BBC: what could possibly go wrong?’,

Wednesday

Andrew Marr

Andrew Marr: Twitter fooled everyone during this election

It’s an unfashionable thought, but having spent many hours in the university sports hall where constituency votes for Boris Johnson and John McDonnell were counted, I feel freshly in love with democracy. There they all were, local councillors and party workers from across the spectrum; campaigners pursuing personal crusades, from animal rights to the way fathers are treated by the courts; eccentrics dressed as Time Lords. In the hot throng, there were extremists and a few who seemed frankly mad. But most were genial, thoughtful, balanced people giving of their free time to make this a slightly better country. Stuck in Westminster during relentless parliamentary crises, it’s easy to lose

James Delingpole James Delingpole

The only way to survive Christmas TV is to avoid anything seasonal and watch Giri/Haji

The key to surviving the next couple of weeks of TV is to avoid like the plague anything that smacks of seasonal viewing. So, no Christmas specials (such as the semi-celebrity, elderly grown-ups version of University Challenge where the questions are even more laboriously PC than on the student edition), no Harry Potter, no adverts featuring tinsel, dragons and patronisingly diverse families making merry. Basically, you want to steer clear of terrestrial TV altogether — but with one exception. You may use BBC iPlayer to download the only decent drama series that slipped through the net: Giri/Haji. Joe Barton’s blackly comic Anglo-Japanese thriller was by some margin the most original

Kate Chisholm

How podcasts have transformed radio

As if on cue, Lemn Sissay’s new series for Radio 4 tackles all those questions we would rather ignore in this season of good cheer and overindulgence. He starts out with a programme about homelessness, reminding us that the Christmas story begins with a young unmarried couple, ostracised because she’s pregnant and her current partner is not the father, who are desperately in need of a bed for the night. Cut to 2019 years later. ‘How do you decide how much to give?’ he asks a young woman in his audience who, it turns out, works with a charity for homeless people. ‘Do you ever feel you’ve not given enough?’

Thursday

Charles Moore

My run-in with Westminster’s TV news circus

Leaving an evening meeting in Westminster on Monday night, I walked to Charing Cross. Approaching the public path which runs across College Green by Parliament, I found, as so often nowadays, that it was fenced off to allow those pop-up studios which the big television channels erect to create their instant news circus. Fed up that the normal way was yet again blocked by what Psalm 84 calls ‘the tents of wickedness’, I lifted the barrier open and walked through. Two security guards leapt out of the nearest hut and tried to block me. I pressed on, however, and they could only scamper after me calling out ‘Health and safety! Health and safety!’ At

James Walton

Why on earth did Glenda Jackson give up acting? BBC1’s Elizabeth is Missing reviewed

Watching BBC1’s Elizabeth Is Missing made one of the more puzzling decisions of recent decades seem more puzzling still. Entirely her call of course, but why on earth did Glenda Jackson give up acting (something she was better at than pretty much everybody else in the world) to become an unremarkable Labour MP (something that any number of people could surely have done just as well) for more than 20 years? Whatever her thinking, though, Jackson’s first TV role since 1992 was an overwhelmingly powerful and therefore quite sad reminder of what we’ve been missing. In Sunday’s single drama, based on the bestselling novel by Emma Healey, Jackson played Maud,