Bbc

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

You lost Aled Jones and Catherine Bott, Radio Three — but all is forgiven

It’s hard to stay cross with Radio 3 for long. Just when I thought the network had stretched my loyalty too far by not only allowing Aled Jones to decamp to Classic FM but also saying goodbye to the great Catherine Bott, I had a comeback conversion. I’ll explain how that happened later. First, we should bewail the loss of Bott, who made The Early Music Show her own, with her enthusiasm, her practised authority, her ability to convey insights without being ponderous. She drew us in to share her passion for music and composers we’d never even heard of, let alone felt any desire to hear. Without her the

Monday

Rod Liddle

Brave, non-denominational freedom fighters

Those of you who wonder why the BBC is so politically correct, so craven in its expressions regarding, for example, Islamic terror, may find a partial answer here:  Stephen Whittle Director of Editorial Policy at the BBC Dear Stephen, We have received many complaints over the last 24 hours from British Muslims regarding the use of the phrase ‘Islamic terrorists’ by your news reporters in connection with the struggle for Kashmiri independence. We believe this phrase is totally inappropriate and adds nothing to the story and even distorts what is a long-standing struggle by the Kashmiri people to gain control of their own destiny. We have noticed that your news reports

Tuesday

Douglas Murray

‘When Tommy met Mo’ revealed how far we have to travel before Islamism is uprooted

Last night the BBC screened a documentary called ‘When Tommy met Mo’. It was good television, challenging and thought-provoking in a way that public broadcasting ought to be, is often said to be, but too rarely is. I would urge you to watch it. The programme followed Tommy Robinson during the period in which he was stepping away from the organisation – the English Defence League (EDL) – which he founded. It showed Robinson travelling around the country with a Muslim ‘spokesman’ called Mohammed Ansar. A number of people had criticised the programme, and its premise, in advance and there has already been some tussle over the credit, not least

Steerpike Steerpike

Didn’t the BBC know that Will Straw is a PPC before his dad told them?

Former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw was on today’s Daily Politics, gushing with pride that his son Will is Labour’s prospective parliamentary candidate for the seat of Rossendale and Darwen in Lancashire. Yet it seems that this piece of dynastic info was news to Auntie. Will Straw was on the BBC News Channel this morning, discussing energy prices, and there was no mention of his being a PPC. The presenter simply said, ‘Will Straw is Associate Director of the centre-left think tank the Institute for Public Policy Research.’ Mr S would have forgiven the presenter had he not asked: ‘the Labour Party is talking about a freeze on energy prices for two years. Would you

Saturday

Martin Vander Weyer

Kuenssberg, Pym, Yueh, Davis, Kennedy, Islam or Perry — who will be the BBC’s next business editor?

My Any Other Business item this week on who’s in the frame to succeed Robert Peston as BBC business editor seems to have caused a bit of a stir. The strong rumour is that the appointment must go to a female candidate, and there’s clearly support for the delightful Laura Kuenssberg, who came to fame reporting the 2010 general election for the BBC but has been a lot less visible since she moved to ITV News as business editor in 2011. Does Pesto think she’s given him a run for his money these past couple of years? I suspect he’d say not, and if I were Laura’s career adviser I’d

Thursday

James Delingpole

James Delingpole: Why can’t the BBC be impartial in the climate change debate? 

 ‘Well, you’re arguing facts against opinions. OK, I mean, the fact that the amount of carbon dioxide in the air has rocketed up since the Industrial Revolution, and continues to rocket up, is a fact. Now, it’s so much a fact that even the climate change deniers look away from it and don’t deny it.’ — Professor Steve Jones, Feedback, BBC Radio 4, 18 October Have a look at that last sentence. It represents such a cherishably stupid, rude, fatuous, crabby, bigoted, ignorant, petulant, feeble, fallacious, dishonest and misleading argument that if it turned out the speaker in question was a professor of logic or philosophy you really might want

Tuesday

Steerpike

A mysterious Patten emerging

Lord Patten, the Chairman of the BBC Trust, rarely looks thrilled when being scrutinised, but he was particularly grumpy in front of the Culture Media and Sport Select Committee today. He said sullenly that Rob Wilson, the tenacious Tory MP, has written to the BBC some 64 times in the past year with Savile-related questions. Wilson is famed in Westminster for his Watsonian commitment to letter-writing and truth-seeking, so Patten’s jibe fell flat. Meanwhile, Patten was unable to answer questions regarding the continuing mystery over why key evidence about ex-BBC Director General Mark Thompson was excluded from Nick Pollard’s £3 million review of the BBC’s handling of the Savile affair. (Readers

Tuesday

Rod Liddle

Radio is more representative of middle England than TV

Greetings from the 2013 Radio Festival, in Salford. I’m here to take part in a debate about whether or not radio reflects the opinions and concerns of a broad enough tranche of the public. It certainly does a better job of this than TV; Radio Five (especially Nicky Campbell) and some of the local stations seem to reflect the views of middle England pretty well. Still, on Radio Four, you get the bien pensant toss rammed down your throat, almost without variation, which is a shame. There are problems enfranchising the silent majority, though: they tend to be silent. This is most obviously evident on BBC1 Question Time, for example,

Saturday

Melanie McDonagh

The BBC’s bias on abortion in Northern Ireland is breathtaking

The establishment has a target in its sights; you can always tell from the tone of the Today programme. In this case, it’s Northern Ireland’s abortion law. The occasion is the genuinely tragic case of Sarah Ewart, who travelled to Britain this week in order to abort a foetus with the most severe case of spina bifida, which meant it didn’t have a head. She didn’t want to carry the pregnancy to term and Northern Ireland’s abortion laws at present don’t allow for abortions where the foetus does not actually threaten the life of the mother. Not unlike the intention behind the 1967 abortion law here, then, which is meant

Friday

Douglas Murray

Edward Snowden and the Guardian have started a debate…in the Kremlin and Beijing

I was on the Daily Politics earlier, discussing the Guardian / Snowden leaks and debating against a representative from the campaign group ‘Liberty’. The ‘Liberty’ representative kept saying what a lot of apologists for the actions of the Guardian (now including Vince Cable) have been saying – that Snowden and the Guardian should in some way be respected because they have started ‘a debate’. They appear incapable of realising that while such leaks may be simply fascinating to them, they are infinitely more fascinating to the Kremlin, Chinese Communist Party, al-Shabaab et al. One other thought. Does anyone know why, if a journalist or editor can be arrested and tried

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

Sometimes Radio 3 tries to be too clever by half

Why are we still listening to the radio in 2013, to an outdated technology that has hardly changed in manufacture or output since it first appeared in the 1920s? How come TV did not wipe it out, as CDs wiped out the cassette and DVDs put paid to video? My guess is that it’s because sound was more important to us when we first came into the world and our eyes were still too blurry to take in much of what was going on. Our ears, though, were straightaway alert. Listening now, making connections through sound, keeps us in touch with that first consciousness, that initial awareness. It takes us

Wednesday

James Forsyth

Greg Barker: BBC gives too much coverage to climate change sceptics

If you asked most people about the BBC, few people would describe it as a hotbed of scepticism about global warming. But the coverage that the BBC gives to those who have doubts about the orthodoxy on the subject is too much for Barker. He, as the Press Association reports, told the Science and Technology Committee, ‘In the case of the BBC they have a very clear statutory responsibility. It’s in the original charter to inform. I think we need the BBC to look very hard, particularly at whether or not they are getting the balance right. I don’t think they are.’ Barker did say, ‘I’m not trying to ban

Tuesday

Steerpike

Tony Hall hosts BBC version of Friends Reunited

Mr Steerpike was sitting in the auditorium at New Broadcasting House, waiting for Tony Hall to unveil his plans for the BBC. Lord Hall was expected to announce further cuts to the corporation’s vast bureaucracy, as part of an efficiency drive necessitated by the decision to freeze the licence fee until 2017. Mr S was, therefore, amused to overhear the following conversation between two BBC employees as they took their seats: ‘Hello Rodney.’ ‘Hello Charles.’ ‘Haven’t seen you for twenty years!’ ‘No. What have you been up to?’ Mr S wondered how many other members of the corporation were taking part in this version of Friends Reunited.

David Blackburn

Tony Hall’s digital vision for the future of the BBC

listen to ‘Tony Hall on the future of the BBC’ on Audioboo Tony Hall, the Director General of the BBC, has just laid out his vision for the next 10 years of the BBC. He opened humbly, arguing that the culture of the BBC had to change in the wake of the Savile and pay-off scandals. The corporation had to serve the licence fee payer to justify the extraordinary privilege of public funding. The BBC must remember that it is publicly owned, he said. Warming to his theme, Hall said that managers had to remember that theirs was a ‘creative job, an enabling job and an inspiring job’, and that

Friday

Rod Liddle

Alastair Campbell, moral arbiter? Pull the other one.

Has there been a more emetic sight than Alastair Campbell touring the radio and TV studios lecturing the world on moral probity? I can’t think of one, offhand. The BBC, an institution he once tried to destroy, if you recall, is more than happy to shove him on air whensoever he feels like it. I assume that this is because, like Campbell, they are intent on turning the Daily Mail-Miliband farrago into a post-Leveson issue about the nature of journalism. As some of us said at the time of Leveson, the metro-liberal left does not really give a toss about intrusion into the lives of drug-addled slebs. It wishes instead

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Vultures are circling Britain’s free press. Again.

My first job in journalism was with the Glasgow Herald, which then had a bar built in to the complex. I was taken under the wing of the legendary James Freeman, who taught me the ways of the jungle. ‘You see that journalists always drink in groups of three?’ he told me in the bar one lunchtime. ‘That’s so, when one goes to the toilet, the other two can slag him off.’ And it’s true: my profession is notoriously bitchy. I was reminded of this when switching on the BBC news to find, yet again, that the transgressions of the Daily Mail and its spat with Ed Miliband is deemed

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

Autumn shake-up in Radios 2 and 3 scheduling

This time round in the autumn shake-up of the schedules it’s Radios 2 and 3 who are on the frontline of change. They have had to face ‘tough decisions’ and to address ‘the financial challenges due to the licence-fee freeze’. Radio 3 has lost most of its ‘live’ Saturday-night transmissions from the Metropolitan Opera in New York, on the grounds that they cost too much to set up. It’s also given the chop to one of my favourite weekend programmes, World Routes, because of the ‘high costs’ of sending its presenter Dr Lucy Duran to far-flung places round the globe in search of unusual music. But this was never travel

James Delingpole James Delingpole

‘Atlantis’ shows our civilisation is doomed

This week saw the final episode of possibly the greatest television series ever. Breaking Bad wasn’t made by the BBC, of course. Nor, so far as I know, did it make any attempt to buy the broadcast rights. That’s because, obviously, the Beeb has far more important, special things to spend your compulsory licence fee on, in keeping with the Reithian tradition. Stuff like Atlantis (BBC1, Saturday). Atlantis was designed to fill the Saturday evening family entertainment slot that has previously been occupied by Merlin. And I do mean ‘designed’. It’s so crudely manufactured it makes One Direction look like Led Zeppelin. It’s as ersatz as a cup of acorn

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Rod Liddle: Ever since I criticised a leftist icon, the Beeb hasn’t stopped calling me

Ring, ring goes the telephone every minute God sends. Sometimes I pick it up and say hello, sometimes I don’t. I know who is calling, anyway. It is one or another media representative from the bien-pensant absolutist liberal left, and they are all in a dither about a man called Ralph Miliband, of whom they had probably never heard until a few hours ago, and whom they have most certainly not read. Their sense of excitement, these youngish callers from a multiplicity of BBC news stations and, of course, Channel 4 News, is palpable; it fizzes and crackles down the line, their outrage and their delight at possibly finding someone

Wednesday

Douglas Murray

Samuel Huntington’s ‘Clash of Civilizations’ is still upsetting the complacent

It is twenty years since Samuel Huntington’s essay ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’ was first published in Foreign Affairs. On Monday night I took part in a discussion on BBC Radio 3’s Nightwaves about the article (and the resulting book) which turned oddly nasty. I have always been a qualified admirer of Huntington’s most famous work (‘qualified’ because like most people who have read the book I admire its range and grasp while disagreeing with certain of its conclusions). But broadly admire it or not, it appears to be a difficult work to discuss. This is largely because it suffers the double-bind of being misunderstood by people who have not read it. Nine