Bbc

Thursday

James Walton

BBC1’s Esio Trot: like Fawlty Towers played at quarter speed

As a New Year’s Day treat for all the family, Esio Trot (BBC1) seemed to be taking no chances. It was based on a book by Roald Dahl, had a script by Richard Curtis and his Vicar of Dibley co-writer Paul Mayhew-Archer, and starred Judi Dench and Dustin Hoffman. So. The appeal of the original story to Richard Curtis isn’t difficult to fathom. Not only is it one of Dahl’s late works with, according to his biographer Jeremy Treglown, ‘a new kindly tone’, but it also features a male protagonist who’s both lovelorn and tongue-tied. From the balcony of his London flat, Mr Hoppy (Hoffman) could gaze down on the

Wednesday

Rod Liddle

The Today programme is already ‘diverse’ – despite what Lenny Henry thinks

Did you enjoy the BBC Today programme this morning, guest edited by the, uh, comedian Lenny Henry and featuring interviewees and journos who were exclusively from ethnic minority backgrounds? I meant to, but some weird narcosis kept me in bed and stopped me turning the radio on. So I can’t judge the content. There have been the usual and predictable complaints that choosing presenters and guests exclusively for their skin colour is itself racist. Well, yes. But that battle was lost a long time ago. The irony of course is that Today – certainly when I was editor and probably even more so now, I would guess – had a

Wednesday

Norman Lebrecht

The new CEO of the Arts Council has been announced – Guardianistas won’t be happy

It is difficult to describe with equanimity the culture shock that has been administered to Arts Council England, the 69 year-old benefits office for the creative industries. Invented by Maynard Keynes to nurture the grass shoots of an English renaissance with a few quid here and there – £25,000 for Covent Garden, £2,000 for the LSO – ACE has burgeoned into a mighty quango that distributes £1.9 billion of public cash and £1.1 billion of lottery money over three years. It feeds not only the performing arts but museums, galleries, monuments, public libraries, poetry and pottery. It is a nanny state in miniature which, over the past generation, has become

Thursday

James Delingpole

How to win MasterChef – and why salmon is the fish of the devil

If ever my near-neighbour William Sitwell is killed in a bizarre shooting accident and I end up taking his place as one of the guest critics on MasterChef: the Professionals (not likely, I admit, but you never know), here are some tips for competitors who wish to avoid a stinking review. 1. Don’t serve me salmon. Salmon is the fish of the devil, which is why Satan coloured it that particularly vile shade of pink. It is evil because it is almost certainly farmed and therefore pumped full of antibiotics to destroy all the parasites with which it would otherwise be pullulating. If it’s not farmed, well, it still tastes

Sunday

Sebastian Payne

Ukip hires BBC’s Paul ‘Gobby’ Lambert as new Director of Communications

Ukip has announced that BBC political producer Paul Lambert will be the party’s new Director of Communications. Ukip has offered the job to various prominent figures but it has not been filled full-time since Patrick O’Flynn, another media defector, was elected as an MEP in May. Lambert is one of the most well-known journalists in Westminster, usually found outside Downing Street heckling ministers with awkward questions, hence his nickname of Gobby. Bringing in an experienced Westminster journalist like Lambert is another sign that Ukip are attempting to beef up and professionalise their media operation. It’s unlikely Lambert would allow ill-conveived events like the Ukip Carnival to take place. In a statement, Lambert said he believes ‘Ukip is today the place

Friday

Isabel Hardman

Should politicians grumble about awkward stories?

A lot of political types are very cross with the ‘biased media’ today. Ukip is currently the most aerated because some journalists ‘fabricated’ (which is today synonymous with ‘transcribed’) some remarks Nigel Farage made about whether or not restaurants are right to tell women to put napkins over themselves when breastfeeding. Number 10 is very angry with the BBC’s Norman Smith because he talked about the Road to Wigan Pier which is not an OK way of describing the public spending cuts still to come (but the IFS describing them as ‘grotesque’ and ‘colossal’ apparently is). Labour has been annoyed for months that journalists keep pointing out mistakes that Ed Miliband makes. Unusually,

Thursday

Damian Thompson

Sex, lies and El Sistema

The two trendiest words in classical music are ‘El Sistema’. That’s the name for the high-intensity programme of instrumental coaching that turned kids from the slums of Venezuela into the thrilling Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra (SBYO), conducted by hot young maestro Gustavo Dudamel before he was poached by the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Or so the legend goes. When the SBYO was booked for the Proms in 2011, the concert sold out in three hours. Sir Simon Rattle, no less, declared El Sistema to be ‘the most important thing happening to classical music anywhere in the world’. Audiences wept at the sight of former street urchins producing a tumultuous, triumphant —

Ismene Brown

Sacred Monsters, Sadler’s Wells: Sylvie Guillem and Akram Kham’s captivating final boogie

I’m dashing between dance theatres at the moment and there’s just so much to tell you about. I could linger on Sacred Monsters, the captivating conversation-piece at Sadler’s Wells for Sylvie Guillem and Akram Khan — conversational being the word, for these genius dancers also talk to us, which is rather like Garbo laughing. Guillem’s voice is a delightful discovery: it’s a soprano timbre, bubbling Frenchly with dropped aitches and baroque flexibility. She tells us cute stories about Charlie Brown’s sister ‘Sall-ee’ and her wish always to be ‘émerveillée’in life, while Khan confides his anxiety about balding. The 70 minutes go by like a jam session for two specialists of

James Walton

BBC1’s Remember Me: the curious case of the killer Yorkshire taps

BBC1’s authentically spooky three-part ghost story Remember Me hasn’t yet revealed what’s really going on in that gloomy Yorkshire town. Nonetheless, the second episode did clear up one mystery. We now know how Michael Palin managed to find room in his schedule for what the advance publicity described as his first leading dramatic TV role since 1991’s G.B.H. — by leaving most of the work to the other actors. His name may have appeared first in Sunday’s opening credits, but the man himself didn’t show up until the 54th minute of 58. When he is around, Palin plays Tom Parfitt, a slightly improbable eightysomething tormented by visions of a mysterious

Friday

Andrew Taylor

Forget genre: P.D. James wrote novels that are worth reading and re-reading

P.D. James was the Queen Mother of crime fiction. Her career as a writer stretched over half a century, and her death at the age of 94 deprives the country of an author who was cherished in person as well as for her books. She was probably best known for her crisply-written and elegantly plotted series about the poet-policeman Adam Dalgliesh. Among other things, however, she was also an occasional contributor to the Spectator, which sometimes showed an unexpected side to her. An early diary piece recalls her attempt to learn to drive in Dublin in the 1980s. The caretaker at her block of flats took one look at her

Thursday

Jeremy Paxman

Jeremy Paxman’s diary: Why must Songs of Praise chase advertiser-friendly viewers?

The most unfashionable show on television, Songs of Praise, has had a makeover. The BBC had apparently discovered that the average viewer of the show was in their mid-seventies. Quelle surprise: in the trade it is known as ‘The Resurrection Show’, because so many participants shuffle off their mortal coil before transmission. The new version was introduced by a bubbly presenter with hair dyed a fetching shade of cerise, slightly talking down to us. It ended with a cheery roomful of Salvationists and a brass band. I rather liked it, even if I had switched on wondering why publicly funded religious broadcasters were chasing the advertisers’ target demographic. Actually, I

Kate Chisholm

Was this Christian pioneer of radio evangelism a fraud?

She was the sequinned star of the airwaves back in the 1920s, the first preacher to realise the potential of the wireless, long before Billy Graham and co. But who now has heard of Aimee Semple McPherson, the radio evangelist? Born in 1890 and raised on a farm in Canada, she was converted as a teenager by a Pentecostal preacher whom she married and joined on his missionary travels. When he died she took up preaching herself, moving to Hollywood and becoming enormously popular as a great healer of the sick and saviour of souls, dressed up for the part in a long white figure-hugging gown adorned with a huge

Wednesday

Ed West

I have more respect for Labour politicians who defend their record on immigration than those who pander

Wonderful: Labour has a new slogan on immigration, which appears to be the Conservatives’ old slogan from 2005, the one that Labour said was racist. I have far more respect for any Labour politician who actually defends their record on mass immigration – only a fifth of which was from Europe, incidentally, although that gets at least four-fifths of the coverage – than those who goes along with the current fashion. Someone who said that diversity made us more tolerant and kinder and was culturally-enriching; and that the economic benefits, although they are more helpful to the rich than the poor, are worth the downsides. That mass immigration was a Left-wing thing

The Spectator

Yes, Bob Geldof, Africans know it’s Christmas. Do you know it’s time to pack Band Aid in?

In this week’s Spectator, out tomorrow, our leading article looks at the Band Aid 30 single and why it’s time for Bob Geldof to pack Band Aid in. Pickup a copy tomorrow or subscribe from just £1 here.  Anyone listening to the BBC this week could be forgiven for thinking that the musician Bob ­Geldof had just emerged from Africa, like a ­latter-day Dr Livingstone, the first westerner with news of a deadly new virus. He and his makeshift band of celebrities have adopted Ebola, their song blazing from the radio while Geldof himself has been in every studio exhorting people, with his usual stream of expletives, to buy it. Unless you have

Monday

Elle Jay Smith

Newsnight’s arts coverage has descended into a string of fawning advertorials

Newsnight‘s decision to interview misogynist comedian Daniel ‘Dapper Laughs’ O’Reilly has been slammed as a cynical ratings grab, a descent even from the depths plumbed by devoting 15 minutes to Russell Brand’s latest booky-wook. The criticism is misplaced, however. In both interviews, the respective hosts, Emily Maitlis and Evan Davis, dissected their subjects’ work and challenged their arguments. It’s in Newsnight‘s coverage of high culture, not popular culture, where the rot has set in, with a proliferation of glossy advertorials that have no journalistic purpose. In the past six weeks, Newsnight has presented us with the following: an interview with Howard Hodgkin to coincide with his exhibition at the Alan

Thursday

Harry Mount

The National Trust is spoiling beautiful places in the name of people who’ll never visit them

Broadhaven Beach in Pembrokeshire was once a sublime combination of the works of nature and man. The broad, deep, sandy bay is flanked by towering limestone cliffs. Two hundred years ago, a stream leading to the sea was dammed by Lord Cawdor, the then owner, to form the Bosherston Lily Ponds. Enter the National Trust, owners of the estate since 1976. Now the spot where the lakes meet the sea is marked with a bright purple National Trust sign, saying, Return to the start, a new path you’ll take Its rocky in places, don’t fall in the lake. Perhaps it’s better in the Welsh translation, also featured on the purple

Kate Chisholm

The voices of Indian PoWs captured in the first world war

At six o’clock on 31 May 1916, an Indian soldier who had been captured on the Western Front alongside British troops and held in a German PoW camp stepped up to the microphone and began to speak. Not in Hindi or Urdu, Telugu or Marathi but in perfectly clipped English. He tells his audience, a group of German ethnologists, the biblical story of the Prodigal Son. That his voice still survives for us to listen to, clear and crisp through the creak and crackle of time, is an extraordinarily emotive link not just back to the Great War but to the days of Empire. In The Ghostly Voices of World

James Delingpole James Delingpole

We know that war is hell. But it doesn’t ever make us stop doing it

There’s a plausible theory — recently rehearsed in the BBC’s excellent two-part documentary The Lion’s Last Roar? — that our war in Afghanistan was largely the creation of the Army, which sorely needed a renewed sense of military purpose after the debacle in Iraq. As a taxpayer, this appals me. As the parent of a boy approaching conscription age it horrifies me. But as an Englishman, it doesn’t half make me proud that we’ll still do anything — up to and including embroiling ourselves in a futile conflict — rather than admit we’re finished as a fighting nation. Though we joke about having beaten Germany twice at their national sport

Thursday

James Walton

James Walton uncovers the sound of Nashville – money

Twenty minutes into BBC4’s The Heart of Country (Friday), there was a clip of Chet Atkins, country music’s star producer of the 1960s, being asked to define ‘the Nashville sound’. Atkins reached into his pocket, pulled out some coins and rattled them in his hands. ‘That’s the Nashville sound,’ he said with a slightly rueful smile. ‘Money.’ By this stage, mind you, the revelation of Nashville’s commercialism didn’t come as an enormous surprise. After all, WSM, the radio station that started the whole thing with its live shows from the Grand Ole Opry, was the broadcasting arm of the National Life and Accident Insurance Company. It also took a stern

Kate Chisholm

Many more Germans were displaced in 1945 than Indians during partition

What Radio 3 needs is a musical version of Neil MacGregor. The director of the British Museum and now a stalwart of Radio 4 is an intellectual powerhouse but his talks on radio are so clear, so crisp, so deceptively easy to follow that he draws you in and makes you feel that you too can understand the world in the way he does, with his enormously broad vision and his deep understanding of the way things connect. His latest series, Germany: Memories of a Nation, has for five weeks now been giving us these wonderful bite-sized insights into the history of that still-young country, taking a particular object and