Bbc

We are all surely familiar with those stories of naive young Brits who travel abroad and are persuaded by a charming new holiday friend to bring back what they’re told is an innocuous package, only to end up on the sharp end of drugs smuggling charges. The latest series of the BBC’s World of Secrets somewhat inverts those expectations: it tracks the fortunes of three innocent young Brazilian sailors and a French captain who were allegedly duped by a Norwich businessman into sailing a rackety yacht across the Atlantic with £100 million worth of cocaine hidden in the body of the ship. ‘One thing you find on breakfast TV is

I was a weird kid, and though I harboured the usual innocent girlish ambitions of being a drug fiend and having sex with pop stars, I also nursed a desire to appear on Woman’s Hour. As a shy, provincial virgin, the programme opened up a world of women’s troubles from anorexia to zuigerphobia – and I was keen to have A Complicated Life. Here was the wet hand of today’s lily-livered sensibilities I had anticipated From my twenties to my fifties I appeared on it several times; my last outing was in 2016, as – like most other institutions – it was captured by the trans cult, leading to the

It was 50 years ago this week, on 7 November 1974, that Lord Lucan fled what was destined to become the most talked about crime scene of the 20th century. A coroner’s inquest jury named him as the killer of Sandra Rivett, his children’s nanny, but his disappearance ensured that he was never convicted of the crime – or of the attempted murder of his wife, Veronica. Stripping away the sensationalism of the story needn’t render it boring Understandably, given the mystery that still envelops his precise actions and whereabouts, Radio 4 has chosen to mark the anniversary with a soft question rather than to provide answers. Soft, but also

When does a new opera enter the repertoire? Judith Weir’s Blond Eckbert has only had a couple of UK productions since its première at English National Opera in 1994, but it’s been doing reasonably good business on the continent, where its source material – a story by German writer Ludwig Tieck – presumably has more cultural currency. In any case, it’s back now, as part of English Touring Opera’s autumn roster, and both the staging (by ETO’s general director Robin Norton-Hale) and the performances deserve to make Weir’s haunted, oddly unsettling opera a lot better known. If my toes had curled any harder I think I’d have dropped a shoe

If you wish to know how to become a master negotiator, a formidable body of books will now offer to train you in that art, but I’m not entirely sure it can be taught. The greatest natural asset, I suppose, is the ability to enjoy the game: the performative mulling, tough-talking, buttering-up, pitching of curve balls and – when absolutely necessary – flamboyant execution of a real or bluff exit. Yet even for those of us who are clumsy and reluctant hagglers, the mechanics of striking a deal can be fascinating. This is the stuff of the Dealcraft podcast, hosted by Jim Sebenius, a professor of the Harvard Business School,

Earlier this year, ITV brought us Red Eye, a six-part drama set mainly on an overnight plane from London to Beijing. Displaying a heroic indifference to plausibility, the show was an increasingly deranged mash-up of every thriller convention known to man – while still posing (when it remembered to) as a thoughtful exploration of realpolitik. By the end, it was all so daft that the biggest influence no longer seemed to be Speed, but Airplane! Funnily enough, this week’s Nightsleeper was much the same thing – only this time on an overnight train from Glasgow to London. The first sign that the passengers wouldn’t get a restful sleep before Euston

This week’s Archive on 4 is a treat for David Bowie fans. Francis Whately, the producer behind several of the BBC’s Bowie films, including The Last Five Years, has patched together old recordings and new interviews with Bowie’s lovers and friends to examine his life in West Berlin between 1976 and 1978. It was a fraught, make-or-break time. Out of pocket, addicted and depressed, Bowie had grown ‘very, very worried’ for his life. It isn’t entirely clear why he chose Berlin as a place for recovery, other than that it was unstarry, cheap and a good distance from LA, where his troubles had spiralled. Unfortunately, it was also ‘the smack

In my next life I intend to have my brain removed in order to become a telly executive. You know: ‘where ignorance is bliss/ ’Tis folly to be wise’ (Thomas Gray, OE). Such ignorance is a state which, happily enough, Rory Stewart, OE and a fully tooled-up Mob from rent-a-thinker (what one of those executives, without a hint of irony or faint praise, once called ‘television intellectuals’) are just now kicking around in the hope that they may rehabilitate it and release it from its sty of obloquy. Rory is a very keen type – what used to be called an all-rounder – and, despite his protestations otherwise, he is

Most of my favourite TV shows seem to involve gangsters in one way or another: The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Top Boy, The Offer (that brilliant series on Paramount+ about the making of The Godfather), series two of The White Lotus, Suburra, Gomorrah; even, you could argue, Game of Thrones (cod-medieval fantasy gangsters with dragons) and Succession (gangsters who don’t need to use guns). It’s the first thing in ages where I’ve been salivating to watch the next episode Perhaps there’s something lightly psychopathic about being so allured by a genre which celebrates relentless, brutal killing, where the forces of law and order and civilisation are the enemy, and where the

Ask the man in the street to quote a line from one of Salman Rushdie’s novels, and he might struggle. Ask him whether he’s heard the phrase, ‘Naughty but nice’, specifically in the context of cream cakes, and you will probably make his day. It was Salman Rushdie who came up with that slogan in his early career as an adman. Remember the ‘irresistibubble’ tag for Aero chocolate bars? He was responsible for that, too. ‘I feel at bottom that I’m still that boy from Bombay and everything else has been piled on top of that’ If there’s any embarrassment on Rushdie’s part (and why should there be?) that some