Bbc

Thursday

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

Kate Chisholm

Caught offside

It’s not surprising that politicians have such an on-off relationship with the broadcast media. One slip. One casual comment. One lapse of memory. Even the immaculate, armour-plated Nicola Sturgeon was caught out by Jane Garvey last Wednesday as the Woman’s Hour presenter congratulated her on her latest elevation. It had just been announced that Scotland’s First Minister was top of the Woman’s Hour ‘power list’ of the top ten women for 2015 (beating Angelina Jolie and Caitlyn Jenner) and Sturgeon was doing a live telephone interview on the Radio 4 programme from her office in Edinburgh. Garvey then lobbed a question, oh so casually, but oh so deliberately, like a

Tuesday

Steerpike

BBC performs U-turn over Wimbledon 2Day

Last night Clare Balding greeted viewers of the BBC’s much lampooned Wimbledon 2Day with the news that they had relocated from the Gatsby private members’ club to a new show venue for the final week of the tournament: ‘We’re at the business end of the tournament and because of that we’ve been posted to the centre of the action here on the edge of centre court, that’s where we are up on that balcony.’ All very well, only Mr S suspects Balding was being somewhat selective with the truth. Did the BBC in fact decide to cease filming in the purpose-built members’ club because of audience criticism? After admitting that they would listen to viewer feedback

Thursday

Nick Cohen

Isil stands for Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant. Does David Cameron not realise this?

It is very easy to make David Cameron and the Scottish National Party look ridiculous. But as every soldier and journalist knows, just because a target is easy doesn’t mean you shouldn’t hit it. The attempt by supposedly respectable politicians to use trickery and outright lies to rebrand Islamic State as a state that has nothing to with Islam is too good to miss. David Cameron kicked off this week when he shouted at the BBC for calling Islamic State ‘Islamic State’. Yesterday at Prime Minister’s Questions he was at it again. Islamic State should not be called ‘Islamic State’ but ‘Isil’. Meanwhile the SNP rounded up Boris Johnson, Caroline

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Why are politicians trying to boss the BBC around?

One of the most striking things about the debate in the Commons this afternoon on Britain and International Security was that rather than debate the complexities of intervening in Syria, a lot of MPs were very keen to talk about the name of the terror group the government might take action against. MP after MP from all sides of the House rose to complain about the BBC’s decision not to call the group ‘Daesh’, and started to hatch a powerful plan to gang up on the broadcaster and use ‘Daesh’ anyway, until the corporation relents. Alex Salmond even went so far as to say that ‘we could actually achieve something

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

You can’t take the Islam out of Islamic State

At last, British politicians have been galvanised into action by the appalling events last weekend in the Tunisian resort of Sousse, in which 38 people were murdered by an Islamist terrorist. Yes, yes, about time, you might be muttering to yourself — but credit where it’s due, please. They may be a little late to the party but at least they have arrived. A convocation of 120 of our MPs, including Boris Johnson, have demanded strong and forthright action. They have written to the BBC demanding that it stop using the term ‘Islamic State’ to describe the organisation responsible for the attack, because it might upset that seemingly diminishing, if

James Walton

The bankers’ darling

This week’s Imagine… Jeff Koons: Diary of a Seducer (BBC1, Tuesday) began with Koons telling a slightly puzzled-looking Alan Yentob that what spinach was to Popeye, so art is to the rest of us: a way of achieving transcendence and appreciating ‘the vastness of life’. As it turned out, though, not all the claims made in the programme were quite so straightforward. Later, for example, Koons argued that ‘the only thing you really have in life is your interests and when you focus on them it takes you to a connecting place where time really kind of bends’. And even that was possibly beaten by the art dealer Jeffrey Deitch’s

Sunday

Damian Thompson

Connie St Louis, the woman who brought down Sir Tim Hunt, faces questions over her CV. Where’s the media coverage?

Connie St Louis, director of City University’s Science Journalism MA, is the woman who brought Sir Tim Hunt’s career crashing down in flames by tweeting out allegedly sexist remarks that the Nobel Prize winner made at a conference in Seoul. There’s been one hell of a row about what he actually said, but now fresh questions have arisen – and they involve Ms St Louis, not Sir Tim. Investigative reporter Guy Adams, writing in yesterday’s Mail, has taken a long, hard look at her CV – and is puzzled by claims he found on City’s website that ‘she presents and produces a range of programmes for BBC Radio 4 and BBC World Service

Thursday

Taki

High life | 25 June 2015

Last Wednesday, 24 June, Pugs held a luncheon in honour of our first member to depart for the Elysian Fields, or that large CinemaScope screen up above, Sir Christopher Lee, age 93. Pugs club is now down to 19 members, the ceiling being 21. Our president for life, Nick Scott — I was actually the first chief, but was overthrown in a bloodless, as well as a vote-less, coup by Nick — gave a wonderful address, and we broke our custom concerning the presence of ladies. Our guest of honour was Lady Lee, Christopher’s widow. Now there’s nothing more that a poor little Greek boy can add to Sir Christopher’s

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Look back in anger | 25 June 2015

‘Cringe!’ said Boy, after I’d exposed him to a few seconds of last week’s special nostalgia edition of TFI Friday. And he did have a point. From its once almost-daring name to its zany title graphics to its whatever-happened-to guest list (Shaun Ryder, Blur, Ewan McGregor), Chris Evans’s irredeemably Nineties game show now looks so dated and impossibly remote you might as well be looking at an early episode of Face to Face with John Freeman, or The Black and White Minstrel Show or Muffin the Mule. Gosh, time is cruel. But it was great at the time, right? No, it wasn’t, actually. I watched this one-off revival mainly to

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The questions you don’t ask at the BBC

There was a remarkable scene in one BBC Today programme morning meeting in about 1995, as all the producers gathered together to discuss what stories would be on the following day’s show. The big story was the European Union; the splits occasioned by the EU within the Tory party and the battle, on the part of racist neanderthal xenophobes, to keep us out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism, from which we had ignominiously exited three years before. The meeting cackled and hooted at the likes of Bill Cash and his assorted fascists on the Eurosceptic right. ‘They think the Germans are determined to dominate Europe!’ and ‘They’re just racists!’ and

Tuesday

Steerpike

Rachel Johnson lifts the lid on Newsnight

Rachel Johnson has never been shy of using her Notting Hill neighbours as a source of ‘inspiration’ for her series of chick-lit Notting Hell books. Her latest book Fresh Hell is no exception. It follows a character rallying against a major basement conversion in a storyline not dissimilar to Johnson’s own efforts to oppose her neighbour’s plans for such underground developments. However, another plotline in the book has caught Mr S’s eye. The novel follows Notting Hill journalist Mimi going on Newsnight – the current affairs programme which Johnson has appeared on in the past – to name and shame her basement digging neighbour. In the book, Newsnight is edited by a man called Josh Kurtz, whose name bears some resemblance to

Thursday

James Walton

Bad robots

You’d think scientists might have realised by now that creating a race of super-robots is about as wise as opening a dinosaur park. Yet in Channel 4’s new sci-fi series Humans (Sunday), the manufacturers of the extremely lifelike cyber-servants known as ‘synths’ were weirdly confident that nothing could go wrong. Nor did it cross their minds that the synths — programmed only to do whatever their owners told them — could possibly develop their own thoughts and emotions… Still, if its premise is almost heroically unoriginal, Humans does look as if it’ll be giving the social, scientific and philosophical implications of advanced artificial intelligence an impressively thorough airing. And, because

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Is suicide bombing now a Yorkshire tradition?

Where would you rather live, Dewsbury or Bradford? I ask because it seems that there are probably some good property deals to be had in this particular corner of West Yorkshire right now, as a consequence of half the population decamping to Syria in order to blow themselves up. I mean, property was pretty cheap already — in Savile Town, Dewsbury, right in the heart of the Muslim ghetto, you can buy a nice grey stone cottage for not much more than fifty grand. Two beds, back yard, only a stone’s throw from the local sharia court and that vast mosque run by those jovial extremists Tablighi Jamaat. But it’ll be