Bbc

A lot of people seem to have confused the fact that Jeremy Clarkson is right wing and amusing (which they believe is at odds with the culture of the BBC) with the fact that he’s shown himself to be a brute (which is why he’s been sacked). The investigation into his attack on Oisin Tymon is pretty unequivocal. It was unprovoked and lasted more than 30 seconds until someone else intervened, and there was a lot of nasty verbal abuse thrown in for good measure. Tymon went to hospital afterwards to get his injuries checked out. Rather magnificently, he didn’t offer any resistance to Clarkson’s assault. The Duke of Cambridge

I still don’t know which way John Humphrys votes and I’ve been a friend of the chap for more than a quarter of a century. Hell, we’ve been on holiday together, twice. I have very few friends in mediaville, but John is certainly one, and the oldest friend within that milieu, at that. But I still couldn’t tell you what way he votes. That fact alone might well signal to you that he tends to the Right; liberals are so unstintingly forthcoming about their fatuous opinions, so ready to declaim and shriek and disparage anyone who might dare gainsay them. But even then I wouldn’t be too sure. It’s probably

Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall documents the rise of Thomas Cromwell, one of history’s most famous anti-heroes. Chronicling Henry VIII’s ill-fated marriage to Anne Boleyn, it is just one of many accounts of life in Tudor times under Henry VIII. However as well known as the story may be, Mr S hears that there are fears it could be lost on Americans when the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of Wolf Hall transfers from the West End to Broadway next month. The New York Post reports that producers have made some changes to the play in an attempt to make it more palatable to American audiences. Due to fears that the Tudor tale would be lost on Americans, the play has been shortened to make

Is privatising BBC3 as bad as Isis’s destruction of Nineveh? That was the wonderfully trolling headline on a Stewart Lee piece in the Guardian over the weekend. He was making the point that even though BBC3 was not to his tastes it should be preserved because the Beeb is ‘the greatest cultural achievement of any 20th-century democracy’ and such diversity was part of its remit: In the wake of the licence freeze, the BBC plans to move the youth channel BBC3 online and halve its budget. As a middle-aged, middle-class man, I hate pretty much everything on BBC3. Snog Marry Avoid is just one of many BBC3 show titles that resist parody. The

My mum once told me about a man she knew who’d come from a poor background and had no luck finding a job. He’d applied for over 400 positions but never got a response, but then he made one change to his CV and the next job he landed straight away. What did he do? He used a friend’s address, a friend who lived in a neighbouring postcode. The point of her story was that perseverance and lateral thinking will win out in the end, but what I took from it was that employers tend to choose people on arbitrary grounds. Postcodes are just one way in which employers use