Bbc

Thursday

James Walton

Night moves

The Night Manager (BBC1, Sunday) announced its intentions immediately, when the opening credits lovingly combined weapons and luxury items. ‘Blimey,’ we were clearly intended to think, ‘it’s a bit like James Bond.’ True, the main character works — at this stage, anyway — in the hotel trade rather than as a secret agent. Yet, when it comes to dress sense, being irresistible to the ladies and alternating between looking suave and enigmatically purposeful, Jonathan Pine (Tom Hiddleston) has little to learn from the great man himself. Pine was first seen heading to work in 2011 through an uprising in Cairo where dozens of extras were demanding the overthrow of President

Tuesday

Rod Liddle

The BBC isn’t much help for navigating through the Tory EU wars

Trying to navigate your way through the internecine wars in the Conservative Party over the referendum? Please allow the BBC’s Political Editor Laura Kuenssberg to help. This was her intro on the BBC website yesterday: Silence abhors a vacuum, and forgive me if you are not a fan of political conspiracy, and on a day like today you don’t have to look very far for huge ideological disputes, even if they’re not quite yet punch-ups. Good, glad that’s clear, then. A sentence which is a string of non-sequiturs kicked off with a remarkable image. Does silence abhor a vacuum? I suppose it might abhor a vacuum cleaner, because they can

Monday

Steerpike

Watch: George Galloway clashes with Jo Coburn on Daily Politics

Over the weekend a number of Brexit activists walked out of an anti-EU Grassroots Out rally after George Galloway was revealed as the guest speaker. Although the Respect party leader was introduced by his new chum Nigel Farage at the event, even Ukip supporters voiced opposition to his involvement. So when Galloway appeared on today’s Daily Politics, it wasn’t out of the question that the presenter Jo Coburn might bring up the incident. Alas her attempt to ask him about whether his involvement could prove to a divisive issue fell flat, as Galloway took issue with her line of questioning. An excruciating exchange between the two followed: JC: But are you worried that you

Tuesday

Peter Mullen

The BBC has become obsessed with sex

So Pope John Paul II had a mistress. That’s not quite what the BBC’s Panorama asserted, but they chucked around enough hint, innuendo and nudge, nudge to make us believe he had. And there was similar suggestiveness in a Today programme interview on Monday morning between John Humphrys and the liberal Catholic journalist Edward Stourton. Humphrys delighted in the whiff of salaciousness and wondered aloud whether Stourton’s discovery of hundreds of letters between the former Pope and the Polish-American philosopher Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka indicated that the pair were lovers. After much whetting of our licentious appetites, the BBC concluded that they were ‘More than friends but not quite lovers.’ They were certainly collaborators: Anna-Teresa

Monday

Steerpike

Nicholas Soames takes Robert Peston to task over his dress sense

Since Robert Peston departed the BBC to join ITV as their new political editor, he has taken a relaxed approach when it comes to workwear. Earlier this month he raised eyebrows when he wore a cap and a faux fur coat for a news broadcast. Now the Tory MP Nicholas Soames has called him out over his casual fashion sense. The incident occurred after Peston attempted to compliment Soames on a disparaging tweet the Tory grandee had written about John Redwood, the Conservative MP: I might have implied recently that @nsoamesmp lacked manners & could be funnier. I retract https://t.co/pALWxWm1Hy — Robert Peston (@Peston) February 15, 2016 Alas Soames — who is Winston Churchill’s

Friday

Thursday

Dan Hitchens

Dan Walker’s creationism shouldn’t disqualify him from breakfast TV

According to the Times, Dan Walker, the new BBC Breakfast presenter, is ‘a creationist’. A ‘senior BBC figure’ is quoted as saying that this ‘nutty’ belief would make life difficult for Walker if, say, he had to present a story about a 75,000-year-old fossil. How could he if he thinks the earth is less than 10,000 years old? Rupert Myers goes further in the Telegraph: ‘Creationists cannot be trusted to report objectively,’ Myers claims, ‘or to interact reasonably with their interviewees and with the public’. Before jumping to conclusions, it’s worth saying that Dan Walker’s beliefs aren’t publicly known. Anyone who thinks God made the world is a ‘creationist’ in some sense.

James Walton

In excess

Judging from its website, Hebden Bridge’s tourist office considers the fact that BBC1’s Happy Valley is filmed in the town something of a selling point. Personally, I can’t see why. (Perhaps points of especial tourist interest might include the cellar where Sergeant Catherine Cawood was almost battered to death, or the caravan site where drug dealers fed heroin to the teenage girl they’d kidnapped and raped.) And now that it’s back for a second series, viewers of Sally Wainwright’s Bafta-winning drama are still unlikely to confuse Hebden Bridge with, say, Chipping Norton. In Tuesday’s opening scene Catherine (Sarah Lancashire) filled in her sister on the events of her day. ‘Three

Thursday

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s notes | 4 February 2016

In 2000, the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, accused Magdalen College, Oxford, of class bias in failing to admit a student called Laura Spence, a pupil at a Tyneside comprehensive. This was grossly unfair — how could the Chancellor know the details of a particular case? It was also outrageous in principle: why should a politician tell a university whom to admit? This Sunday, David Cameron did much the same thing. In the middle of his EU negotiations, the migrant crisis and the other genuinely important things the Prime Minister must deal with, he found time to offer an article to the Sunday Times, headlined ‘Watch out, universities; I’m

Miles Goslett

BBC1’s Kids Company ‘expose’ was nothing of the sort

To her supporters, Camila Batmanghelidjh is a deeply caring woman whose charity Kids Company was cruelly extinguished last summer thanks to unfair press speculation about its finances which later turned into a fully-blown media witch-hunt. To those of us who know our way around the Kids Company story, Camila Batmanghelidjh is certainly deeply caring, but the person she appears to care most deeply about is herself. Exhibit A: Lynn Alleway’s fly-on-the-wall film (‘Camila’s Kids Company: the Inside Story’) broadcast on BBC1 last night. In it, Batmanghelidjh didn’t bother to mask her love for the camera. She lapped up the attention Alleway showed her, never happier than when providing a running

James Walton

Weekend world

When the time comes to make programmes looking back on the 2010s, I wonder which aspects of life today will seem the weirdest. Quinoa? The fact that we were expected to be ‘passionate’ about our jobs? Being so overexcited by new technology that we constantly stared at phones? Or maybe it’ll just be how many almost identical TV series looking back on previous decades we used to watch: the kind where a family dresses up in period costume and lives for a while like people from previous eras, carefully ticking off the signifiers as they go. (Space hoppers and Chopper bikes for the Seventies, Rubik’s Cubes and shoulder pads for

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

What fun it will be if Trump becomes president

I suppose spite and schadenfreude are thinnish reasons, intellectually, for wishing Donald Trump to become the next American president (and preferably with Sarah Palin, or someone similarly doolally, as veep). But they are also atavistically compelling reasons nonetheless. Think of the awful, awful people who would be outraged and offended. If you recall, 8 May last year was awash with the bitter tears of lefties who couldn’t believe the British people had been so stupid as to elect a Conservative government. There were the usual hilarious temper tantrums and hissy fits. Typical of these was an idiotic college lecturer called Rebecca Roache who loftily announced that she had gone through

Monday

Steerpike

Coffee Shots: Robert Peston goes with the faux

When Robert Peston was at the BBC, his bosses were left unimpressed when his floppy hair became the story during a live News at Ten broadcast from windy Athens. After filming Peston received an email from a BBC executive telling him that a haircut was ‘imperative’. Happily Peston’s new bosses at ITV appear to be more accepting of his eccentricities. Today the broadcaster’s new political editor has attracted attention with what appears to be a faux fur collar. Alas the fashionable number did not appeal to everyone, with one viewer likening his appearance to that of a street magazine seller : Flat cap and fur-trimmed parka. Really not a good look for Robert Peston pic.twitter.com/tUuPZCXf2Z —

Thursday

Steerpike

Evan Davis slips up introducing Hilary ‘Big’ Benn on Newsnight

While Hilary Benn has been called a lot of names in recent months by hard-left activists after he voted in favour of airstrikes in Syria, Mr S suspects that the moniker given to him on tonight’s episode of Newsnight will be a first. Introducing an interview with Benn on the war in Yemen, Newsnight‘s Evan Davis appeared to be feeling creative with regards to the shadow foreign secretary’s name — referring to him as ‘Hilary Big Benn’: ‘And a little earlier I spoke to the shadow foreign secretary Hilary Big Benn and I began by asking him what he wants the British government to do now in light of the criticisms in the report.’ Mr S

Kate Chisholm

Lessons in the surreal

The new season of the Serial podcast (produced by the same team who make This American Life) was launched last month, releasing one episode a week as the investigative reporter Sarah Koenig looks this time into the strange story of Bowe Bergdahl. He’s the US army soldier who walked out on his platoon in 2009 while stationed on a remote outpost in Afghanistan, close to the Pakistani border. Unsurprisingly, he was captured by the Taliban and held captive for five years before being released, in a prisoner exchange with those held in Guantanamo Bay. At first it looked as though he would be given a hero’s welcome (his release announced

Wednesday

Steerpike

Watch out Laura! Corbynistas strengthen ties with Robert Peston

Even though Robert Peston has only been in his new job as ITV’s political editor for little more than a week, he has already managed to slip-up. On top of experiencing difficulties getting into the ITV building, the former BBC economics editor — who Marr once described as a man ‘crippled by a sense of his own lack of self-worth’ — managed to refer to Liz Kendall as ‘Liz Corbyn’ during one of his first broadcast interviews. However, should any of his former BBC colleagues struggle to take him seriously, they may now need to reconsider. With relations between Labour and the BBC at an all-time low over accusations of anti-Corbyn bias, ITV look set

Friday

James Delingpole

Green sentimentalists forget something: nature is utterly brutal

Wild Lone is one of the most violent books I’ve ever read. It was published just before the last war and it doesn’t pull its punches: mothers are slaughtered with their babies; brothers and sisters are eaten alive; callous parents look on indifferently as their sick children die slowly beneath them; the few survivors almost invariably succumb to disease, cold or starvation. Every child should read it, for it tells you how the world really is. The natural world, I mean. It was written by one of the last century’s great amateur naturalists, Denys Watkins-Pitchford, under his nom-de-plume ‘BB’ and it purports to be the biography of a ‘Pytchley fox’ called

Thursday

Stephen Smith

Pornographer-in-Chief

Like Black Rod and the Poet Laureate, screenwriter Andrew Davies occupies one of the most colourful and arcane offices in public life. He is Pornographer-in-Chief, a title that was first bestowed by the journalist Paul Johnson on the boss of Channel 4, Sir Michael Grade. Davies has assumed the mantle by virtue (or vice) of sexing up cherished texts from the literary canon for the gratification of television producers. His adaptation of War and Peace has taken critical grapeshot for including incestuous romps that do not strictly feature in the novel. Simon Schama, who bashfully admits he has made his way to the end of the book only eight times,

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

The BBC’s promises to change after Savile are as sincere as a prostitute’s smile

It should be easy to admire the BBC’s handling of the Savile scandal. Two of its journalists, Liz MacKean and Meirion Jones, broke the story. Panorama then ran a devastating account of the corporation’s failings which is still worth watching online. This morning the Today programme properly led with the leak of Dame Janet Smith’s report on the multiple rapes Savile committed on BBC premises, which again showed an admirable capacity for self-criticism. Unfortunately, that is all it did. Organisations and individuals are defined not just by their mistakes but how they react to their mistakes. Do they deny and bluster? Or do they confront their flaws and try to

Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

Savile report: 107 BBC staff had heard about Jimmy Savile’s behaviour

So who knew about Jimmy Savile? Dame Janet Smith discloses that no fewer than 107 staff had heard rumours about his predatory behaviour. Some thought he was a paedophile; some even believed that Savile was a necrophiliac. But whilst ‘rumours and stories’ within the BBC about Savile were rife, the Dame Janet Smith inquiry found that many within the corporation were simply content with laughing them off. A leaked extract from the inquiry report found: Most of those who heard rumours about Savile’s sexual life did not appear to have been shocked by them. Many seem to have regarded them as amusing…The rumour most generally heard in the BBC was that Savile was sexually