In Keep Talking, David Dimbleby takes us through a gentle romp of a stellar, unrivalled broadcasting career spanning, incredibly, 70 years. There are no great revelations (even the name of the BBC boss who tried to fire him from Question Time is withheld), no dramatic insights to make us rethink well-known events, no ponderous thoughts on broadcasting for media studies students to pore over (andthe book is all the better for that).
As the face of the BBC’s coverage of our most important national events over the decades, from general election nights to every major royal ceremony, Dimbleby has been authoritative, well-informed, impartial and appealing. These middling memoirs – more a light recounting of his career’s high (and some low) points than an exhaustive auto-biography – are all that, and more.
Just occasionally we get a glimpse of stocking, but it’s not exactly shocking. Looks like he’s more of the mainstream metropolitan centre-left than the moderate one-nation Tory many suspect him of being – which is hardly surprising, given that moderate metropolitan leftism is the guiding ethos of the BBC.
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