Lord Hall will be glad that he didn’t attend last night’s Costa Book Awards. Robert Harris, who chaired this year’s judges, took the opportunity to criticise the corporation’s book coverage when announcing the winner.
Harris says that it is ‘an absolute disgrace’ that there is ‘no dedicated book programme’ on television. The 57-year-old author urged Tony Hall to do more given that the BBC is a ‘monetary funded organisation’.
‘The Costa Prize attracts people into the trade and it has being doing that for 44 years ever since 1971 and one thing I would just like to say is that in the 1970s books had it a bit easier,’ he told guests at the champagne bash at Quaglino’s, Mayfair, which saw Helen Macdonald win the gong for H is for Hawk. ‘Books pages in newspapers were larger, books seemed more central to the culture, there were only three television channels in the 1970s but amazingly there were two dedicated books programmes, The Book Programme with Robert Robinson and Read All About it with Melvyn Bragg.
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