Bbc

Monday

Julie Burchill

The naked truth about sex on TV

What a year it’s been for sex on TV. As we emerge blinking from the annual glut of televisual entertainment, I can’t get over how far we’ve come. Bridgerton, Babylon Berlin, Lady Chatterley… everybody’s at it, with no period in history so tragic that a few cheap thrills can’t be extracted from it. If you’d have told the teenage me that in my lifetime I’d see a comedian with breasts playing a piano with a penis on television, I’d have very much approved; having seen Jordan Gray do so on Channel 4’s Friday Night Live last year, I wish I hadn’t. Sex on TV has been such a long, strange

Sunday

Katy Balls

How much trouble is Sunak in?

This week Rishi Sunak will meet with his Cabinet at Chequers as he tries to focus minds in his government and party towards the next election. However, while the Prime Minister wants to focus on his five priorities – half inflation, reduce debt, grow the economy, cut waiting lists and stop the boats – a Tory sleaze row threatens to overshadow his best efforts. Sunak is fighting fire on multiple fronts. First, his party chairman Nadhim Zahawi has had to issue a statement on his tax affairs in which he says an error that has reportedly resulted in him paying millions belatedly was ‘careless and not deliberate’. This has already

Monday

Alexander Larman

His Dark Materials is the perfect Christmas viewing

When you’re sitting on the sofa in the week ahead, stupefied into submission by food and alcohol and relatives and God knows what else, you’ll be tempted to watch something that will divert you from the gluttony. And, yes, the likes of Elf, It’s A Wonderful Life and Love Actually are all available, as they were last year. But maybe you’ll want to watch something that is not just entertaining but that makes the viewer think. Something that also has a provocative religious theme that is, if not quite the three wise men and the star of Bethlehem, as relevant this time of year as it ever is. Step forward the third series of His

Wednesday

James Delingpole

A Soviet version of Martin Parr: Adam Curtis’s Russia 1985-1999 –TraumaZone reviewed

Russia 1985-1999: TraumaZone – even the title makes you want to scream – is Adam Curtis’s Metal Machine Music: the one where he frightens off his fans by abandoning the trademark flourishes that made him so entertaining and instead goes all pared-down and raw and grim. If you don’t know or remember what those trademark flourishes were, let me refer you to a cruelly funny pastiche which you can easily find on YouTube called The Loving Trap. This sends up poor Adam as a pioneer of the collage-umentary, a genre resembling ‘a drunken late-night Wikipedia binge with pretence to narrative coherence’ which ‘vomits grainy library footage onto the screen to

Wednesday

Charles Moore

Has a Conservative government got any power at all?

In the House of Commons on Monday, someone accused Liz Truss’s government of being ‘in office but not in power’. By chance, I was sitting in the peers’ gallery immediately behind the author of that famous phrase, Norman Lamont, who applied it to John Major’s administration in his resignation statement as chancellor in 1993. It grows ever more apt. I sometimes wonder if modern politicians positively welcome this situation. It is a general feature of the structures of the EU, where no elected politician has real power, but none seems to mind. Much of the joy of ‘compassionate’ Conservatives at the trouncing of Truss appears to derive from the proof

Monday

Isabel Hardman

Liz Truss apologises for the chaos. What next?

Finally, we hear from the Prime Minister. Liz Truss has given an interview to the BBC’s political editor Chris Mason. It comes at the end of a day in which she was accused of ‘hiding under a desk’ and emerged in the Commons only for a silent half an hour of blinking occasionally. She apologised, saying: ‘Firstly I want to accept responsibility and say sorry, for the mistakes that have been made.’ Truss did not appear comfortable this evening. It would have been weird if she did The Prime Minister has left others to argue that the government is still functioning. What she hasn’t done, until now, is offer any

Sunday

Matthew Taylor

Sunday shows round-up: Is Truss a ‘libertarian jihadist’?

Jeremy Hunt – ‘The Prime Minister is in charge’ To say things do not look rosy for Liz Truss would be quite the understatement. With the government now on its second Chancellor in as many months, and its once flagship policies being hastily swept under the carpet, the Conservative party appears to be in damage limitation mode. Laura Kuenssberg spoke to the new Chancellor this morning, in a pre-recorded interview, asking him if Truss was now such a damaged figure that he was the one really calling the shots: ‘There is a very difficult job to be done right now’ Hunt told Kuenssberg that he would be looking at all

Wednesday

James Walton

Fairly desperate: BBC1’s Unbreakable reviewed

On first impression, you might have thought that Unbreakable was just a fairly desperate reality show cobbled together from I’m a Celebrity, Mr and Mrs, Taskmaster and It’s a Knockout. After all, the format is that people of varying degrees of fame – from Simon Weston to, er, the bloke who presents MTV’s Celebs on the Farm – arrive with their partners at what presenter Rob Beckett calls ‘a big posh gaff in the country’. Once there, they’re made to perform a series of game-like tasks as Rob looks on and guffaws. Naturally, the series does make a few cunning tweaks to its obvious forebears. Unlike in Taskmaster, for example,

Daisy Dunn

The genius of More or Less

In a week of slim audio pickings, I spent time reacquainting myself with some of the BBC classics and can confirm that, yes, More or Less still warrants a place in that category. Like Thinking Allowed, which also drew me back, the programme works wonders with data and statistics, and benefits from having a calm and unobtrusive presenter. While most of the questions put to the stoical Tim Harford are delightfully pedantic, some have that special quality of convincing you that, while you’ve never given the topic a second thought, you are in fact deeply invested in it, and absolutely must know whether or not the thing that’s been alleged

Monday

Rod Liddle

The BBC’s Meloni problem

Here is a quote from the BBC Europe Editor, Katya Adler’s, very short piece on the BBC Radio 4 Six O’Clock News this evening, concerning the electoral victory of Giorgia Meloni in Italy: Millions of Italians didn’t vote for her. They say they do not recognise themselves in her nationalist, protectionist proposals, her anti-immigration rhetoric and her conservative family mores. Isn’t that remarkable? Can you imagine the awful Adler, or indeed any correspondent, commenting on the victory of a left-wing candidate:  Millions of people didn’t vote for her. They say they do not recognise themselves in her mentally unbalanced identity politics, ranting support for cripplingly high taxation, foreign policy characterised

Thursday

Rod Liddle

The BBC’s new direction

I am becoming terribly worried about the people of Sunderland with regard to how they will cope in this coming winter. The greatly increased fuel bills will affect all parts of the country, of course – but none more so than the Mackems who, I suspect, will largely die as a consequence. Their particular problem was highlighted by the local Labour MP, Bridget Phillipson, on BBC2’s Politics Live hosted by the excellent Jo Coburn. Ms Phillipson said people in her constituency opened their doors to her wearing their coats and possibly mufflers, because they were trying to reduce their energy bills. The temperature up here has not dropped below about

Friday

James Innes-Smith

The utter misery of BBC’s Marriage

‘Who are these people and why should we care about them?’ This is the most important question any screenwriter must ask before committing pen to paper. Sadly it’s a question I failed to come anywhere near answering during the interminable ‘realism’ of the BBC’s much discussed (and much praised) Marriage. Sean Bean and Nicola Walker play Ian and Emma, an uptight midlife couple caught in the tedium of marital graft after 27 years together. The four-part ‘drama’ has been widely commended for showing the profound inanity of ordinary people’s domestic lives. While I consider myself to be pretty ordinary, I failed to recognise either of these dullards as anything other

Thursday

Nick Robinson

Why political interviews matter

She’ll never do it. She’d have to be mad. Why take the risk? That’s what everyone said when I announced at the end of my BBC1 interview with Rishi Sunak that we were still hopeful that Liz Truss would also agree to a half-hour in-depth conversation in prime time. Well, guess what? She has agreed and will come into Broadcasting House just a week before most people expect her to move into No. 10. Too late to have any impact on the result, say the cynics. That ignores the fact that 10 to 15 per cent of the Tory selectorate will not, I’m told, vote until the last minute. More

Kate Chisholm

Why we must defend Radio 3 from threatened cuts

Who doesn’t love Eurovision? All that razzmatazz. The ghastly frocks and gloopy pop songs, the false bonhomie and bare-faced bias when the voting comes around. It’s an irresistible annual event, guaranteed to put a smile on your face and provide the pretence that we are all one happy European family. But all that showbiz comes at a cost (€6.2 million, and rising), with the host country’s broadcaster expected to cough up about one-third of that. What might have to be lost by the cash-strapped Corporation in the next year, or curtailed, to ensure that we put on the biggest and best show ever next year? The BBC budget has become

Wednesday

Matt Ridley

Has the lab leak theory really been disproved?

The BBC carried a story this week with the headline ‘Covid origin studies say evidence points to Wuhan market’. Bizarrely the paper in Science they are referring to, by Michael Worobey and colleagues, says no such thing. It says: ‘the observation that the preponderance of early cases were linked to the Huanan market does not establish that the pandemic originated there’. All three of the scientists quoted in the BBC story have been highly dismissive about even discussing the possibility that the pandemic began as an accident in a Wuhan laboratory. Their vested interest is clear: they worry that the reputation of their field of virology would be threatened by

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters: What William Blake meant

Procurement profligacy Sir: In response to Susan Hill’s query ‘Who allows the profligacy in NHS hospital procurement to continue?’ (‘Best medicine’, 16 July), it seems the national scale of public sector bureaucracy is just too great. Given the size and spending power of the NHS, no one should come close to achieving equal efficiencies in economies of scale, nor gain better prices from suppliers. But this is not the case. As a non-clinical procurement professional in the NHS, having come from the private sector, I’ve been surprised to consistently find the national purchasing authority of the NHS (formerly ‘NHS Supply Chain’, now ‘SCCL’) to be the worst pricing option available

Thursday

Dot Wordsworth

‘Our’ by ‘our’, Boris’s resignation speech

There was a word I didn’t understand in Boris Johnson’s resignation speech (in which he did not resign). He spoke of ‘our fantastic prop force detectives’. Prop? Prop forwards, clothes props, proprietors, propositions, propellers? Perhaps they are personal protection officers, though I don’t think those are detectives. Or it might be family slang made up by Wilfred, two: ‘Ook, Papa, prop-props…’ More cunningly deployed in the 900 words of the speech was our. Not just our props but ‘our police, our emergency services, and of course our fantastic NHS… our armed services and our agencies… our indefatigable Conservative party members… our democracy’. First he had thanked ‘Carrie and our children’.

Saturday

Charlie Walsham

How the BBC was captured by trans ideology

During Pride month this year a banner has been emblazoned across the BBC’s internal staff website used by every single employee. It features the following text: ‘BBC Pride 2022: Bringing together LGBTQ+ people of all genders, sexualities and identities at the BBC.’ Most people who work at the BBC aren’t concerned about this. But the slogan really should ring alarm bells, because behind its seemingly benign message of inclusivity is a latent political message about trans rights that is undermining the corporation’s impartiality. As a BBC employee I am proud and delighted that the corporation is striving to be a welcoming employer for people from all walks of life, whatever

Thursday

John Phipps

The cruelty of reality TV was part of the appeal

Jade Goody appeared on Big Brother in 2002. She was a short, loud, blonde-haired woman who broadcast her every thought and feeling, either in her thick Cockney accent or with her unforgettable face. She became a star. In 2007 she appeared on Celebrity Big Brother, where she made racist comments about her fellow contestant, the Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty. Effigies of Goody were burned in India; the Sun called her ‘the face of hate’. Hoping to redeem herself, she agreed to appear on Indian Big Brother, where she was told she had cervical cancer with the cameras still rolling. She died less than nine months later. It was a three-act

Thursday

James Delingpole

The best TV spy drama since Smiley’s People: Apple TV+’s Slow Horses reviewed

How thriller writers must miss the Cold War! Early John le Carré and Len Deighton had it easy when trying to create a convincingly menacing enemy: the Soviets, obviously. But their successors are forced to go through all manner of desperate contortions to generate their bad guy McGuffin. They can’t do Muslims because that’s Islamophobic; they can’t do the Chinese because the entertainment industry (like everywhere) is too in thrall to the CCP. So they end up promoting paper tigers like ‘right-wing extremism’, as Mick Herron does in the first of his Slow Horses series. Herron has been rightly hailed as the new Le Carré. His black-comedy novels about a