Bbc

Thursday

James Walton

Losing the plot | 22 February 2018

ITV’s Marcella (Monday) represents another triumphant breakthrough in the portrayal of female cops on television. Of course, thanks to more or less every other crime show around, we already know that women in their forties can be senior police officers. But what Marcella makes even clearer than, say, Vera or No Offence is that so can women in their forties who are entirely unsuited to being senior police officers. For a start, the eponymous heroine suffers from regular mental collapses during which she often turns violent before handily forgetting — and forgiving herself for — anything bad she may have done. She also seems to specialise in cases where she

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 15 February 2018

I’m cooking almost full-time for my poor old Mum and learning on the job: shepherd’s pie, roast pork, cauliflower cheese. I’m slaving over the stove and recipe book for hours and she hardly touches any of it. ‘Come on. Eat up. Do you good,’ I say, not unconscious of the role reversal. The other day I tried a slow-cooked beef casserole. The BBC website advised browning the meat first. Sheer political correctness. I simply lobbed the ingredients in a pot, poured on the boiling water, shoved the pot in the oven, got in my car and drove to the pub. About once a week, I drive over to my petrolhead

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Hare-brained

Shortly after my rave review of McMafia eight weeks ago, I got a long message from an old friend chastising me for being so horribly wrong. Could I not see that the series was boring, convoluted and badly acted? Was I aware of how many better series there had been on Amazon and Netflix recently because, if I wasn’t, she could give me a few recommendations… Several other people wrote to me in a similar vein and I felt terrible. Life is short and TV production is so voluminous these days that now more than ever we need critics to sift the bullion from the dross. Sure, reviews are a

Friday

Tom Gross

The good news about Gaza you won’t hear on the BBC

Donald Trump’s election as US president has meant the whole notion of ‘fake news’ and ‘alternative facts’ is now very much part of a wider conversation. But for decades before the Trump era, more honest or open-minded journalists were aware that some of their colleagues often didn’t tell the whole truth about all kinds of matters, or cherry-picked what they reported. And perhaps no subject has been so misreported as the Palestinian issue. Western media has often focused on this issue to the detriment of many other conflicts or independence movements throughout the world. The BBC, in particular, has devoted an inordinate amount of its budget and staff to covering the West

Thursday

Rod Liddle

Sometimes men deserve to be paid more

It is 100 years since women got the vote and I have been joining in the celebrations, on public transport — lightly tapping attractive women on the knee or gently massaging their lovely shoulders and saying, cheerfully, ‘Well done, babes!’ Some react with anger and irritation to my heartfelt congratulations, especially when I ask for their phone numbers so that we might discuss suffrage further — which is, I suppose, an indication they did not really want the vote in the first place. Certainly it imposes a terrible pressure upon them — they are forced, every five years, to make a clear decision. The statistics suggest many resent this imposition

Kate Chisholm

State of independence

When the BBC’s Arabic-language network went out on air for the first time 80 years ago, on 3 January 1938, its mission was to provide ‘reliable news’ to a region that was being fed German and Italian ‘propaganda’ via short-wave transmissions from those countries. News is still its main focus, says Bassam Andari, news-gathering editor for the Arabic service, who has been with the corporation since 1994, arriving in London from Lebanon. He grew up listening to the station during the civil war in that country in the 1970s. ‘My mother would switch the radio on to the BBC every morning to find out what was happening in the world,

Tuesday

Ross Clark

The Today programme has become Woman’s Hour

Anniversaries are very interesting, of course, but all the same I think a news programme ought to revolve around, well, the day’s news. That is something which increasingly seems to be missing from the Today Programme, once the BBC’s flagship news programme. Overnight, as I have read elsewhere, stock markets have plummeted around the world. Michel Barnier has made further statements on a future Brexit trade deal, again appearing to try to block the comprehensive trade deal which the government, and I suspect most business interests across the EU, want. But these were matters only sketched-over in a bizarre edition of the Today programme which devoted virtually every single item

Sunday

Douglas Murray

Will the BBC go back to ignoring grooming gangs?

The future of modern Britain looks set to be an unusually complicated affair. Take just one piece of news that came out of the trial of Darren Osborne over recent days. According to relatives of the Finsbury Park attacker, the first trigger towards his radicalisation was watching the BBC drama Three Girls about the Rochdale grooming gangs. Evidence suggests that this drama put him on the path to deciding to hire a van and drive it into a group of Muslims in Finsbury Park a few weeks later, murdering 51-year old Makram Ali. Now of course the BBC’s drama department should not be held responsible for the death of Mr

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

The right stuff | 1 February 2018

Geoff Norcott is lean, talkative, lightly bearded and intense. Britain’s first ‘openly Conservative’ comedian has benefited enormously from the Brexit vote and he’s popular with television producers who need a right-wing voice to balance out the left-leaning bias of most TV output. ‘It’s funny meeting TV types,’ he tells me. ‘They say, “We really want to hear alternative viewpoints.” And I’m thinking, “By alternative you mean majority,”’ Norcott, 41, was raised on a south London estate. ‘Both my parents were quite political. My dad was a trade unionist who got quite high up in the NEC [Labour’s national executive committee] and my mum ran as a Lib Dem councillor. So

Tuesday

Steerpike

What the BBC won’t tell you about the leaked Brexit forecasts

The leaked government Brexit forecasts have this morning been reported by the BBC just as its leakers intended: as embarrassing proof that Brexit is bad for the economy. If it had any vague interest in being impartial, perhaps the Beeb would have bothered to make the rather obvious point: not only have we seen such forecasts before, but the new figures are more optimistic than HM Treasury’s last effort. The government’s April 2016 analysis said that the economy would be 3.8 percentage points smaller than it otherwise would have in 15 years if we were to stay in the EEA; that has now been revised down to a 2pc hit.

Thursday

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 18 January 2018

The BBC programme The Coronation, on Sunday evening, was extremely interesting, principally, of course, because of the Queen’s appearance on it. But what was left out was notable. The programme gave a careful narrative, and some explanation, of the stages of the service and of the jewels and regalia (the Queen’s main supporting actors in the show). It never explained or even mentioned that the ceremony in which the anointing and the putting on of the crown were framed was the communion. It told us that, in 1953, the anointing had been considered too sacred a moment for the cameras to film. It did not tell us that the same

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Women’s pay could bankrupt the BBC

I hope you are enjoying the BBC drama series Hard Sun. It is described as pre-apocalyptic science fiction, set in the present day UK. The head of MI5 is a Nigerian woman and everybody else in it lives in a mixed-race family — so, if you are a racist, you might well query that aforementioned description pre-apocalyptic: it’s upon us! The rest of us will simply think it’s ludicrous and bears no relation to the country in which we live, and might become irritated by the BBC forcing this PC social engineering down our throats at every possible opportunity. Although we may already have filled up our beakers of irritation

Saturday

Charles Moore

Carrie Gracie’s first-world problem

Carrie Gracie is more or less in the right, but I did laugh out loud when I heard her, on the BBC programme she was herself presenting, say that her resignation from her post as China editor over the equal pay issue had brought wonderful sympathy from ‘across the country and internationally’, as though speaking of the plight of the Rohingya. People who earn six-figure salaries and are allowed, by the organisation which employs them, to complain on air to millions about an aspect of their pay are not easy for most of us to regard as persecuted victims. Even Ms Gracie’s ‘resignation’ from her Beijing post seems to permit

Friday

Steerpike

Watch: Question Time audience member calls out Labour hypocrisy over Toby Young

This week Question Time moved to Islington. David Dimbleby chaired a panel comprised of Dominic Raab, Labour’s Dawn Butler, Gina Miller, comedian Nish Kumar and Piers Morgan. However much of time was spent discussing Toby Young, who resigned from the Office for Students this week. With various derogatory comments made about Young, it fell to an audience member to address the elephant in the room: Labour’s hypocrisy. He said that it was inconsistent of Labour to call for Young’s sacking while they had only suspended Jared O’Mara, the MP for Sheffield Hallam, while the party investigates misogynistic and homophobic comments he is alleged to have made online: ‘Labour and the Tories can

Thursday

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 11 January 2018

Gavin Stamp, who died just before the year’s end, will be mourned by many Spectator readers. For years, particularly in the 1980s, he was the paper’s main voice on architectural questions, notably as they affected the public space. His voice, both angry and compassionate, would be raised whenever he thought someone in authority — in church, state, local government, big business — was damaging what belonged to the people. He was very important at changing official attitudes imbued with fag-end modernism. No one expounded better the conception of a building’s public purpose, so to hear him talk about, say, Lutyens’s Memorial to the Missing of the Somme at Thiepval, was

Kate Chisholm

Lessons from Rwanda

What an incredible statement we heard on My Perfect Country. ‘I can walk into a boardroom and forget I am a woman,’ pronounced Isabelle Masozera, a PR executive, on the World Service programme, which this week visited Rwanda to find out what is happening there to make it qualify for ‘my perfect country’ status. Her words hit home because of the BBC’s current difficulties over equal pay and opportunities. It appears that the corporation has been less than speedy or judicious in its response to the revelations last year about the substantial differences in earnings between some of its male and female employees. Badly handled, it led to the bizarre

Sunday

Carrie Gracie

Equal pay matters – that’s why I have resigned as BBC China Editor

I have been a BBC journalist for three decades. With great regret, I have left my post as China Editor to speak out publicly on a crisis of trust at the BBC. The BBC belongs to you, the licence fee payer. I believe you have a right to know that it is breaking equality law and resisting pressure for a fair and transparent pay structure. In thirty years at the BBC, I have never sought to make myself the story and never publicly criticised the organisation I love. I am not asking for more money. I believe I am very well paid already – especially as someone working for a

Saturday

Rod Liddle

Spotted: a right-wing comedian on the BBC

I just exulted to my wife that Simon Evans had been on Radio Four’s The News Quiz. He’s a very funny man, Evans, but is also regarded as Britain’s only right-wing comedian. There are actually quite a few others – Leo Kearse, for example. Anyway, Evans was in excellent form, defending Donald Trump and describing the NHS as a Socialist Utopia which did not work. The audience wasn’t sure what it should do, and Evans was of course ribbed for his opinions by the other three panellists and indeed the compere. Which is when I thought: hang on, why should I be grateful to the BBC for allowing one single

Wednesday

Steerpike

Grauniad reviews organised crime drama: ‘shades of Brexit’

Although we’re only three days into 2018, the Guardian has put in an early contender for the coveted title of most Grauniad article of the year. Proving that Brexit misery can be found in pretty much anything so long as you look hard enough, the paper has published an intriguing review of McMafia, the BBC’s new glossy mini-series on organised crime The series tells the story of Alex Godman – a man who has spent his life trying to stay clear of his family’s criminal past, but when tragedy strikes, he becomes embroiled in the world of international crime – including money laundering and shootings. The drama has so far

Thursday

Theo Hobson

The BBC’s religious programming shake-up could easily make things worse

So the BBC resolves to improve its treatment of religion, to take it more seriously as a major force in our culture. Good. But if clumsily undertaken such intentions can backfire, and deepen the liberal elite’s disdain for religion. Imagine if Thought for the Day was doubled in length, or if Songs of Praise was aired twice a week. The challenge is to find new forms of religious broadcasting that unsettle assumptions. I can only think of one example of this in the last decade: Rev, the sitcom that combined affection for the C of E with satire. Because it was irreverent, it could also be profoundly sympathetic – it