Bbc

Thursday

James Walton

Adult entertainment | 26 January 2017

The mid-life crisis novel, I think it’s fair to say, is traditionally a male form. But in Louise Doughty’s Apple Tree Yard, the person feeling a bit trapped in what might seem a pretty nice life — while also fretting about how much (or how little) sex the rest of it will contain — is fiftysomething Yvonne Carmichael: wife, mother and all-round radiator of female competence. In BBC1’s adaptation of Apple Tree Yard (Sunday), Yvonne was first heard giving us a brief meditation on the provisional nature of civilised behaviour — a voiceover, it turned out, being delivered as she travelled in the back of a prison van. We then

Sunday

Katy Balls

Theresa May lost for words on Marr over Trident ‘malfunction’

This morning Theresa May appeared on the Andrew Marr show to talk Trump and Trident. While the Prime Minister successfully batted away suggestions that she wasn’t doing enough to challenge the US President on feminism — stating that the fact she will be there ‘as a female prime minister’ when the two meet is the biggest statement to be made about the role of women — she struggled on the latter topic. Following a report by the Sunday Times that a serious malfunction in June of Britain’s Trident nuclear weapons deterrent was covered up by Downing Street, Marr asked May if she had known about the Trident misfire when she told MPs it

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

Spot the ball

The purest form of radio is probably sports commentating, creating pictures in the mind purely through language so that by some magic the listener believes that they were there, too, when Geoff Hurst scored that final goal, Shergar ran out the field at Epsom, Mo Farah sped ahead on Super Saturday. As Mike Costello said last Thursday on Radio Five Live’s celebration of 90 years since the first outside broadcast from a rugby match on 15 January 1927, ‘We’re all blind when we listen now, just as we were back in the 1930s.’ The technology has changed radically but radio still relies on the skill of an inspired individual to

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Safe and sound

This week the Southbank Centre began its ‘Belief and Beyond Belief’ festival — a series of concerts and talks claiming to explore the influence of religious inspiration on music. Last summer, after reading its miserably right-on publicity material, I wrote in this column that ‘Beyond Parody’ might be a better title. Jude Kelly, the Southbank’s artistic director, accused me of jumping to conclusions before the programme had been finalised. Well, now it has. In addition to concerts with no discernible connection to their composers’ faith, we’ll be treated to ‘How to be a Shaman’, ‘Mindfulness’, ‘What If God Was A Woman?’ and ‘Right to Die?’. Plus speeches from Mona Siddiqui,

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Dual control | 19 January 2017

Revolting (Tuesdays) is the BBC2 comedy series that spawned the now-infamous sketch ‘Real Housewives of Isis’. It has been watched on the BBC’s Facebook page nearly 30 million times and rightly so because it is fearless, funny and near the knuckle. A pastiche of reality TV shows set in places like Beverly Hills, the sketch depicts three young British jihadi brides brightly discussing their domestic lives in some Raqqa-like hellhole. ‘Ali bought me a new chain,’ boasts one, ‘which is eight feet long. So I can almost get outside, which is great.’ Cue shot of black-hijabed housewife lurching towards the doorway of her bombed-out home, dragging the cooker to which

Sunday

Steerpike

Watch: Andrew Neil grills Max Mosley over Impress funding

With the deadline for the government’s public consultation on press regulation now passed, Karen Bradley must decide whether or not to trigger Leveson 2. Should section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act be activated, any publication not signed up to Impress — the press regulator largely funded by Max Mosley — would have to pay all the costs in a libel case even if it successfully defends the claim. So, with that in mind, Mosley appeared on the Sunday Politics this morning to put forward the case for Impress. Alas things didn’t get off to the best start when Andrew Neil began by asking where Impress’s funding comes from. Mosley went on

Friday

Steerpike

Question Time’s golden moment

As David Dimbleby decamped to Solihull for the first Question Time of the year, it was Donald Trump’s washing habits that were top of the BBC news agenda. With an ‘unverified and potentially unverifiable’ document suggesting Russian spies have compromising information on the President-elect, Dimbleby began by asking the panel — comprised of David Lidington, Gisela Stuart, Arron Banks, Paul Mason and space scientist Monica Grady — whether Trump was fit to be president. Alas Dimbleby struggled to keep a straight face as he asked Banks about his trip to the golden lift in Trump Tower: DD: I’ll be careful what I say here, the golden lift… AB: If you could not

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

Word perfect | 12 January 2017

All that’s needed for Radio 4’s One to One series (Tuesdays) to succeed is a sharp-eyed interviewer, ready with the right question at the right time, and an articulate guest, not afraid to speak freely and openly, but with integrity, all too rare these days. In the opening programme, Julia Bradbury talked to Dr Martin McKechnie, an A&E consultant, about the challenges he faces day in day out. It was a timely reminder that not everything in the NHS is broken beyond repair. Most striking, perhaps, was not so much Dr McKechnie’s calm fortitude in the face of terrible human distress (remarkable thoughthis was) but the way he casually dismissed

James Walton

Shall we dance?

‘Blimey! How on earth did they think of that?’ is unlikely to be anyone’s response to Our Dancing Town (BBC2, Tuesday). A few years ago, The Great British Bake Off was adapted into The Great British Sewing Bee by the simple process of fitting another domestic activity to the same formula. Now — after what I imagine was a brain-storming session lasting approximately 30 seconds — the BBC has taken the idea, structure and tone of Gareth Malone’s singing programmes and applied them to a series about dance. Enthusiastic evangelist for the life-changing potential of his chosen art form? Lots of initial sceptics dolefully shaking their heads and insisting that

Tuesday

Liam Stokes

Is factual accuracy too much to ask from BBC presenters like Chris Packham?

On Sunday evening, the BBC presenter Chris Packham took to social media to tell the world that they should support his anti-shooting campaign because declining populations of lapwings are ‘still being shot’. Unfortunately for him, this is utter tosh. No one is shooting lapwings, as Packham acknowledged five hours later in an apology on Twitter. 12 hours after that, a similar retraction appeared on his Facebook page. Yet even now, almost 48 hours on, neither of the original posts have been deleted. This fixation with the passing of mere hours may sound petty, but in the context of social media 48 hours is a lifetime. Packham has 48,608 followers on

Monday

Steerpike

BBC struggles with the N-word

Since Netflix released The Crown, the network has received much praise for its dramatisation of the Queen’s early years. In fact, the critical acclaim has led some screenwriters to declare that they would now rather write for Netflix than the BBC. Happily, last night’s Golden Globe awards gave cause for celebration to both parties. While the BBC drama The Night Manager won several gongs, The Crown, too, came away triumphant — winning best television series while Claire Foy picked up the best actress gong for her performance as Queen Elizabeth II. So, happy days? Perhaps not. Mr S was curious to hear that Netflix was not name-checked once this morning on Radio

Friday

Steerpike

BBC introducing… the real housewives of Isis

This time last year, Barry Humphries revealed how political correctness had killed comedy at the BBC. His plan to tell a joke about Jeremy Corbyn hit a wall when a faceless BBC executive said he could only do so if he also made a joke about David Cameron. So, Mr S can’t help but wonder if the BBC is taking a new direction with its comedy in 2017. BBC Two’s latest comedy show Revolting includes a sketch entitled the ‘Real Housewives of Isis’, which sees four jihadi brides ‘lift the lid’ on life in the Islamic State. The Brit runaways are seen planning their outfits for the next beheading (clue: they

Thursday

James Delingpole

Holmes spun

One of the few intelligent responses from the liberal-left to our radically altered political landscape was an essay published last year in the impeccably right-on Vox. It began: ‘There is a smug style in American liberalism …It is a way of conducting politics, predicated on the belief that American life is not divided by moral difference or policy divergence — not really — but by the failure of half the country to know what’s good for them.’ You could apply very much the same argument to Britain and, as evidence, you could cite the first episode in the new series of Sherlock. (Shitlock as I prefer to call it, in

Wednesday

Michael Henderson

Kenneth Clark was much better at opening people’s eyes to great art than Marxist John Berger

It is one of those interesting quirks of postwar cultural history that John Berger, who has died at the age of 90, could have presented Civilisation. Millions of viewers who saw that unsurpassed – unsurpassable – series when its 13 programmes were screened in 1969, or who have seen it in the years since, associate Civilisation with Kenneth Clark – Lord Clark of Civilisation, as he came to be known. But Berger might easily have got the nod. It was Clark himself who suggested to Michael Gill, Civilisation‘s producer, that he might find a more congenial ally in Berger, who, of course, three years later presented Ways of Seeing as a counter-argument to

Tuesday

Nick Cohen

Sherlock Holmes and the Mystery of the Murdered Script

In the first days of January ‘17, the Arctic air frosted over London forcing even the most careless citizen of that metropolis to accept the mastery of those great elemental forces which shriek at mankind through the bars of his civilisation. Holmes would not move from his fire, and was as moody as only he could be when he had no case to interest him. ‘Why,’ said I, glancing up at my companion, ‘that was surely the bell. Who could come tonight? Some friend of yours, perhaps?’ ‘Except yourself I have none,’ he answered. ‘A client, then?’ ‘If so, it is a serious case. Nothing less would bring a man

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 29 December 2016

Unencumbered Sir: Matthew Parris’s bizarre reference (‘Unforgiven’, 10 December) to the UK economy as merely ‘medium-sized’ is a classic instance of Remainers’ tendency to pass Britain off expediently as a vulnerable country on the margins of Europe, which couldn’t survive without our EU umbilical cord. The UK is actually the fifth or sixth largest of the world’s nearly 200 national economies. If we are only medium-sized, how can all the world’s ‘even smaller’ economies — such as India, Canada, South Korea or Australia — possibly hack it as independent sovereign states outside any supranational governance bloc like the EU? How have they managed so far? Mr Parris does at least

James Walton

Weird and wonderful | 29 December 2016

As you’ve probably noticed, TV critics spend a lot of their time trying to identify which other programmes the one they’re reviewing most resembles. Sadly, in the case of BBC2’s The Entire Universe, this noble quest proved futile. Written and emceed by Eric Idle, the show did contain plenty of familiar television elements: songs, dance troupes, Warwick Davis making jokes about how small he is, a lecture by Professor Brian Cox on the nature of the cosmos. Yet the way it mixed them together was so unprecedentedly odd that it may well have made the average Boxing Day viewer feel they must be drunker than they thought. The basic gag

Kate Chisholm

Chance would be a fine thing | 29 December 2016

It’s been a turbulent year, and not just in the outside world. Inside radio, digital is changing not just when and how we listen but content, too. Classic FM overturned its daily schedule in the run-up to Christmas to stage an all-Mozart day with nothing but the virtuoso’s works for 24 hours. It was a bold step by the commercial station, reliant on advertisers (and therefore listener figures) for its survival. How many non-Mozart-enthusiasts would be turned off by such a monothon? That Classic FM was prepared to take the risk suggests that the conventional division of the day into separate programmes, making sure there is something for everyone in

Monday

Steerpike

Laura Kuenssberg suggests the Queen did back Brexit

During the EU referendum, the Sun ran a front page with the headline ‘the Queen backs Brexit’. The paper reported that the Queen clashed with Nick Clegg, who was then Deputy Prime Minister, over Europe at a lunch in 2011 — at which she declared the EU was ‘heading in the wrong direction’. In the days and weeks that followed, the paper received much flak over the legitimacy of the story, with blame being pointed in Michael Gove’s direction. In fact, Clegg later used an interview with the BBC to pour scorn on the story: ‘I mean, the idea that the Queen of all people would even bother to give someone as insignificant as

Thursday

Steerpike

Stalin’s five year plans? A success, says BBC

Following Fidel Castro’s death, the BBC were accused of giving too much airtime to tributes to the Cuban dictator. When it came to print, BBC News described him as ‘one of the world’s longest-serving and most iconic leaders’ only mentioning in the fourth paragraph that ‘critics saw him as a dictator’. So, Mr S was curious to learn that the corporation, too, is able to see the positives when it comes to other left-wing dictators of Christmas past. Step forward Stalin: The BBC teaches children that Stalin's 5 year plans were successful. https://t.co/cSsxKgcrd8 — James Bartholomew (@JGBartholomew) December 18, 2016 On the BBC’s Bitesize study site, there is a revision guide on Stalin’s Five