Bbc

Thursday

Rod Liddle

Bloated Biased Correct

The BBC was created out of the ether in 1922. Its first director general, Lord Reith, inhabited a cupboard some six feet in length and presided over a staff of four people, operating out of one long room. Reith confessed that he did not actually know what broadcasting was — an affliction which you might say, a little cruelly, has been shared by one or two of his successors over the years. The parsimonious approach was not to last, of course. Ten years on and the corporation was ensconced in the Stalinist art-deco edifice of Broadcasting House; today the BBC employs more than 20,000 people — some of them actually

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

Look at my Fringe

Like everyone performing at the Edinburgh Fringe I’m about to make a lot of mistakes. I’m about to lose a lot of money too. But after ten years covering the festival as a reviewer I’m at least able to predict which errors I can’t avoid blundering into. First, the campaign to attract a crowd will be pointless. This stands to reason. Five or six thousand hopefuls swarm up to Edinburgh each year and they all use the same marketing strategy. Attention-seeking stunts on the Royal Mile. Tiresome afternoons forcing leaflets on unimpressed Americans. Fly-posting after dark, on tiptoe, by torchlight. Desperate texts to friends of friends promising five-for-one discounts. Bravura

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

Let’s pay for the BBC content we use

What follows is a proposal for reducing the BBC licence fee and improving the corporation’s output while saving the British newspaper industry. All that’s involved is a basic understanding of pricing psychology combined with a digital currency for micropayments. Under my proposals, half the licence fee would fund the BBC’s Reithian purpose; the other £60 could be paid direct to the BBC as now or, if you chose, paid to you as a digital currency (6,000 Beebcoins). People could buy additional Beebcoins, which could be spent on BBC or competitor content — including content from newspapers. Notionally the BBC would lose out; in practice they would gain revenue, as they

James Walton

Affairs in squares

On all those comic lists of the world’s shortest books (Great Italian War Heroes, My Hunt for the Real Killers, by O.J. Simpson etc.), the best title I ever came across was Bloomsbury: the Untold Story. Now, though, BBC2’s new drama, Life in Squares, is giving us yet another chance to marvel at how many sexual permutations one small group of people can achieve. But before all that began, Monday’s first episode was at some pains to show us the forces of Victorian stuffiness against which the Bloomsbury group rebelled. In the first scene, a suitor tried to woo Vanessa Stephen with the chat-up line, ‘Only two more days, Miss

Peter Phillips

Orchestral infallibility

Watching the Berlin Philharmonic going into conclave to choose a successor to Simon Rattle — after countless hours of secret discussion they have chosen Kirill Petrenko — reminds one of little less than the election of a pope. In both cases the expectation is the same: the organisations are so iconic that they must continue into the future without a hitch and without question. Whatever sort of job they are doing, or have done, they have become too much a part of normal life to be abolished. Why is it that symphony orchestras of any standing are expected to survive indefinitely, where smaller musical organisations, though they may be just

Thursday

Tony Hall

Diary – 23 July 2015

There’s nothing quite like a First Night — and last Friday we launched the Proms, the most celebrated classical music festival in the world, now in its 120th year. There’s the thrill of walking into the Royal Albert Hall for the first time; taking your seat with thousands of other music fans; the ‘heave ho’ chant from the Prommers; the quiet before the music begins. It’s a vast space, but it can also feel very intimate. So it was perfect for the opening concert with moments of quiet reflection in works by Mozart and Sibelius, as well as great walls of sound in Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast. With almost 300 players

Steerpike Steerpike

Tony Hall: the BBC is like James Bond

As staff at the BBC face cuts and budget tightening following the Government’s plans to reform the Corporation, their director-general Tony Hall has offered his own defence of the licence fee. Writing the diary in this week’s Spectator, he mentions that Tracey Ullman was recently transformed into Dame Judi Dench as ‘M’ in the James Bond films. Hall goes on to suggest that the BBC has some parallels to Bond with both in possession of a ‘very special licence’: ‘When Tracey spent the day as Dame Judi Dench on location last week, so talented are the make-up and prosthetics team that passing members of the public were fooled into thinking she was

James Walton

Institutional feminism

Some revelations, it seems, are capable of being endlessly repeated while still remaining revelations. Think of all the books, articles and TV programmes over the years which have ‘revealed’ that the Victorians weren’t, after all, mad sexual repressives who had a fit of the vapours at the sight of an uncovered table-leg; or that the 1950s were a lot more fun than the drab conformist decade of popular imagination. Or that Rudyard Kipling was by no means a straightforward imperialist. (Feel free to add examples of your own.) And yet, no matter how many times these things are pointed out, it’s always with a proud flourish — as if what’s

Wednesday

Steerpike

Laura Kuenssberg is appointed as the BBC’s new political editor

After weeks of speculation over who will be the BBC’s next political editor, a senior BBC employee today announced on Twitter that Laura Kuenssberg is to be Nick Robinson’s successor. However, just moments later the tweet was hastily deleted. Happily, the Mail’s John Stevens managed to screen grab it before it disappeared: The tweet that mysteriously vanished pic.twitter.com/FJnyHRq9uI — John Stevens (@johnestevens) July 22, 2015 While the BBC are declining to comment at this time on whether Laura, who is currently Newsnight‘s chief correspondent, is the new political editor, others have been quick to offer their congratulations: https://twitter.com/alstewitn/status/623864313917362176 Congrats to @bbclaurak (if reported tweet is true) on taking over from @bbcnickrobinson as @BBCNews political

Tuesday

Friday

Steerpike

Jeremy Vine finds his exit poll prediction is no laughing matter

Nick Robinson recently revealed Jeremy Vine’s off-air reaction to the exit poll on election night. ‘So Scotland will go independent and the BBC will be shut down,’ the Radio 2 presenter quipped on hearing the poll predict a Tory majority. While Vine’s predictions are yet to come good in full, he did correctly foresee that the Tories would crack down on the BBC, with reports emerging yesterday that the government could decide to close Radio 1 or Radio 2. Despite John Whittingdale stating that there are no current plans to close the station down, Vine took to Twitter to voice his opposition: Searching for the paragraph which says how much @BBCRadio2’s fifteen million listeners

Thursday

Melvyn Bragg

Diary – 16 July 2015

I witnessed what was almost a violent fight to the death on Hampstead Heath the other morning. Broad flawless sunlight, the serenity of one of London’s greatest lungs and then, from the little pond opposite the mixed bathing pond, screams. A swan, its neck arched like a bow, yellow beak wide open, was shielding four cygnets from the splashy persistence of a determined mongrel. The swan struck, the mongrel dodged the blow. The swan swivelled and followed the attacker into the shallows, but the dog still ducked and taunted the swan. A frantic owner ran along the bank fruitlessly calling out the dog’s name. Someone — me I’m afraid —

Steerpike Steerpike

First James Naughtie, now John Humphrys slips up over Jeremy Hunt

When James Naughtie steps down from the Today programme this autumn, his Jeremy Hunt gaffe will stand out as one of his more memorable moments. The Scottish presenter accidentally introduced him by the wrong surname in 2010: ‘First up after the news, we’re going to be talking to Jeremy C–t.’ The health secretary continues to cause problems for the staff of Radio 4. This morning, Naughtie’s colleague John Humphrys also got Hunt’s name wrong. Reading the news bulletin at 7am, Humphrys said the ‘health secretary James Hunt’ is setting out plans for NHS consultants to work at weekends. While the slip wasn’t an expletive this time around, given that the BBC are currently

James Walton

Serial thriller

For keen students of China, this week’s television provided yet more proof that Deng Xiaoping’s decision to open the country to the West has had consequences that he’s unlikely to have foreseen. He probably couldn’t have predicted, for example, that one day a former Bond girl would travel the country finding almost everything ‘thrilling’. Or that a bloke who made his name in a British makeover show would proudly explain to a group of Chinese journalists that ‘I’ve got the sunglasses, I’ve got the big hair — all [sic] of these things are what you’d expect from a celebrity.’ The Bond girl in question was Joanna Lumley, who began Joanna

Kate Chisholm

Tax return

Make no mistake: the Proms, whose 2015 season was launched last night, would not, could not, exist without the BBC, or the licence fee. Just under half the cost of putting on such an ambitious nightly series of concerts throughout the summer, drawing on orchestras from across the globe, commissioning new work, pulling together programmes that mix popular and safe with little-known and challenging, comes from the sale of tickets, the rest is subsidised by taxpayers. To social-justice campaigners this might seem like an outrage. Why should such an ‘elitist’ series of classical-music concerts, 92 this year, attended by some 300,000 members of the public (a considerable proportion of whom

Wednesday

Nick Cohen

Keep the cops away from the radical clerics, be they Christian or Muslim

If you want to see our grievance-ridden, huckster-driven future, looks to Northern Ireland, which has always been a world leader in the fevered politics of religious victimhood and aggression. Just as the Tories and much of the politically-correct liberal centre think they can force us to be nice by allowing the cops to arrest those who ‘spread hate but do not break laws’ (in George Osborne’s sinister words) so Northern Ireland has all kinds of restrictions of ‘hate speech’ to police its rich and diverse tradition of religious bigotry. I suppose it was inevitable that they would catch 78-year-old Pastor James McConnell of the Whitewell Metropolitan Tabernacle in North Belfast.

Tuesday

Steerpike

Revealed: the documentary the BBC doesn’t want you to see

Nate Silver has a lot to answer for. Yes, he called the US general election correctly – but he then led the fashionable view that opinion polling technology is now so advanced as to be able to predict what people are feeling to a high degree of accuracy. So confident was Silver in his computers that he thought he could, from the other side of an ocean, predict the UK general election with ‘90 per cent confidence.‘ The BBC lapped this up, and filmed a Panorama with the hubristic title “Who will win the election?”. Richard Bacon joined Silver as he visited the UK ‘to try and forecast the outcome of the

Saturday

Fraser Nelson

Amanda Platell is wrong: only Ch4 would have had the guts to screen Benefits Street

My Saturday morning would not be complete without Amanda Platell’s delicious put-downs in the Daily Mail, usually aimed at people who richly deserve them. But today she identifies a target that doesn’t. Her piece, “White Dee, and how the Left lost the war on welfare,” argues that Ch4 made Benefits Street to “provide a powerful argument for the deserving poor” but ended up awakening a nation to the abuses of welfare. She’s wrong: Ch4 knew what it was doing. And only Ch4 would have had the guts to do it. Benefits St was indeed a landmark in the debate; she’s right about that. But wrong to suggest that it somehow backfired on Ch4. Its

Friday

Steerpike

Place your bets! Bookies reveal favourites to be next BBC political editor

Yesterday Nick Robinson confirmed reports that he is leaving his role as the BBC’s political editor to join the Today programme. Now the race is on to find a worthy successor. Helpfully Ladbrokes have released a rather intriguing list of favourites for the job. Robinson’s deputy political editor James Landale is the favourite for the role at 5/2. David Cameron’s revelation to Landale that he wouldn’t ‘serve a third term’ if re-elected became one of the big stories of the elections. While this ought to win him favour upstairs, Landale has two problems: (a) he is not a woman (b) he is an Old Etonian. It’s thought that — in the interests of

Thursday

Peter Phillips

Première league

This year the Proms are to stage 21 world premières and 11 European, UK or London premières. It is good to see the corporation continuing its mission to encourage new music, though some think they overdo it. I heard one of our leading keyboard players say that when he was asked to première a piece recently, he replied that he would rather dernière it. Clearly the BBC takes a more hopeful view. The most eye-catching new work in the series, leaving Whitacre out of it for now, will surely be the Fourth Symphony of our latest musical knight, Sir James MacMillan. MacMillan has described the piece as ‘abstract’ and ‘infused