Bbc

Monday

Steerpike

A point of order, Your Royal Highness

The Duke of Cambridge joined forces with Prince Harry this morning to open Tedworth House Recovery Centre, the military hospital run by Help for Heroes. All power to the duke’s elbow, but one line jarred. William, rather tellingly, told the assembled top brass and troops that ‘even journalists’ had helped to promote the organisation and fund-raise for this vital facility. He went on to crack a joke at the expense of the tabloids. The duke’s disdain for the media is well documented, and justifiable in some cases. But Help for Heroes has had huge assistance from those same tabloids at which William was sneering from the podium. Fundraising, publicity, coverage

Thursday

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 16 May 2013

The BBC loves nothing better than a narrative in which Tory anti-European eccentrics split their party, and a bewildered public votes Labour. It is certainly the case that some of the Tory sceptics are half-crazed by dislike of David Cameron. But the reason the subject keeps coming up is because it matters, and it remains unresolved. The Tory rebels understand this in straightforward electoral terms: the rise of Ukip threatens their seats, so they must do something about it. What is maddening is not so much Mr Cameron’s actual policy on Europe, but his patent longing to avoid the subject. His refusal to ‘bang on’ about Europe has brought about

Monday

Douglas Murray

CND cannot rewrite its own history

Last week I recorded an edition of Hardtalk for the BBC which has gone out today.  It is a discussion with Kate Hudson, the General Secretary of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), on the future of nuclear weaponry. The discussion is available on iplayer here. A couple of observations. Firstly, I seem to have been responsible for a rare ‘corpsing’ during a Hardtalk recording. Kate Hudson took a comment by me about the ‘decades’ CND had been fighting a losing battle as an ungallant remark on her age. It was not meant as such, but did lead to a temporary break-down in discussions, for which apologies. On a more

Saturday

Rod Liddle

The Wright Way

Continuing the domestic bliss/ tv theme, one programme I have not watched so far is The Wright Way. This is a situation comedy about somebody called Wright, as you might have imagined. It is written by the 1980s comedian Ben Elton. The show has already received a slagging from a couple of critics, largely for not being funny. I have yet to read a good review. It is on BBC One – and this, I think, is the point. Who else, other than the BBC, would commission a show from Ben Elton? Just as who would put Jeremy Hardy and Sandi Toksvig on air? Nobody, I suspect. I don’t dislike

Tuesday

Rod Liddle

The LSE’s anger about BBC Panorama sounds synthetic and sententious

If I were to make a list of the things I thought the BBC should be doing, then a report from inside North Korea would come right at the top. Obviously, I would rather it were not the fairly ludicrous John Sweeney charged with delivering the report, but hell, you can’t have everything. I’m not sure that the film told us very much we didn’t know, and of course there was Sweeney’s portentous and self-important delivery to contend with. But still, it held the interest and it was an enterprise surely worth undertaking. The BBC has been savaged, as per usual, by the Daily Mail (among a few others) for

Friday

Melanie McDonagh

For 79p a download you can outrage the Establishment!

During the period when Ireland  had its own sort of censorship, a version of the Vatican’s Index of Forbidden Books, there was an ugly rush by publishers and writers to get their books onto it. The novelist Flann O’Brien used to complain that the chances of literary success for a book that hadn’t been banned were very slim. The lesson seems not to have been learned by some of Lady Thatcher’s friends, the ones who are urging the BBC not to broadcast ‘Ding Dong the Witch is Dead’ if it gets to the top of the charts. For some reason it’s been doing awfully well since her death. Headlines in

Thursday

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 11 April 2013

It is strange how we are never ready for events which are, in principle, certain. The media have prepared for Margaret Thatcher’s death for years, and yet there was a rushed, improvised quality to much of the coverage when she actually did die. We have a curious habit of all saying the same thing, and feeling comforted by that, when really it is our job to say as many different things as possible. The BBC, which Mrs Thatcher, and even more Denis, detested, has been straining itself to be fair, but fairly bursting with frustration in the attempt. The way for it to express its subliminal opposition to her is

Thursday

Steerpike

Mark Thompson’s BBC past haunts

Steerpike is back in this week’s magazine. As ever, here is your preview: ‘One of Lord Hall’s predecessors, Mark Thompson, is toiling away as chief executive of the New York Times. But he’s devised a brilliant wheeze to give his old chums at Broadcasting House a bit of extra work. Later this month his newspaper will co-host a Social Media Summit at the Times Center in New York. Thompson promises an ‘exciting line-up’ including world-class media luminaries like Matthew Eltringham, ‘Head of Web Site and Events at the BBC Academy College of Journalism’, and Dmitry Shishkin, ‘Digital Development Editor at BBC Global News’. These sages will discuss ‘journalism’s current use

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The workers united will never be defeated…

There’s a BBC website where you can find out what class you are, according to new criteria drawn up by some bloke at the LSE and a babe from Manchester University. There are apparently seven new classes – which I suppose is designed to replace the old registrar General’s Scale – ranging from ‘Elite’ to something called ‘Precariat’, this latter comprising people with pit bull terriers but no money to feed them. It is a chimera, in my opinion. There are two classes in this country. There is the ruling class, which is privately educated and has inherited wealth and agreeable contacts and which comprises between 60 to 80 per

Wednesday

Fraser Nelson

Why the confusion between debt and deficit?

Polls show that, depending on how you ask the question, just between 8pc and 12pc of us realize that debt is rising. It’s not hard to work out why: first, politicians – even the Prime Minister – says that debt is falling. They say they get it confused with ‘deficit’. But this morning, I tweeted that blame lies with the BBC and its failure to mention this basic point when reporting on the public finance. Its narrative tends to be one of fast, deep cuts. It tends to use language that no one understands, and not just conflating ‘debt/gdp ratio’ with ‘debt’. Most normal people don’t know what ‘deficit’ means,

Sunday

Fraser Nelson

The BBC and religion

It is to David Lammy’s credit that he hasn’t deleted what my Spectator colleague, Hugo Rifkind, describes as his new all-time favourite tweet. For those who haven’t come across it yet, this is how the Tottenham MP responded to the BBC’s coverage of the papal election where it mentioned “white smoke”: This tweet from the BBC is crass and unnecessary. Do we really need silly innuendo about the race of the next Pope? twitter.com/DavidLammy/sta… — David Lammy (@DavidLammy) March 12, 2013 There were more solid grounds for criticising the BBC that day: the corporation again showed its problems understanding religion. It managed to find a translator for the Vatican election

Thursday

James Delingpole

Bluestone 42: Dad’s Army it isn’t

The thing that always used to bother me about M*A*S*H as a child was the lack of combat. You’d see the realistic film of choppers at the beginning and, obviously, the plotline would quite often include casualties coming in from recent scenes of action. But the exciting stuff always seemed to happen offstage, a bit like in Shakespeare where some character strides on and tells you what a terrible battle there’s just been and you’re going, ‘Wait a second. Did we just skip past the most exciting bit?’ This clearly isn’t going to be a problem, though, with BBC3’s new sitcom about a bomb disposal unit in Afghanistan, Bluestone 42

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 28 February 2013

Healing the world Sir: We most warmly commend the courage of Professor Meirion Thomas (‘The next NHS scandal’, 23 February) in lifting the lid on the appalling abuse of the NHS by foreign visitors. It has been going on for years but has been covered up by the culture of fear that has pervaded that organisation. We stand ready to support the professor in parliament if that should prove necessary. Regrettably, the present position is even worse than he described. The relevant quango (the Primary Care Commissioning group) issued instructions last July that GPs must accept an application for registration from any foreign visitor who is here for more than

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Spending isn’t the answer. But how do we explain that?

One of the things I love about being a classical liberal is that I’m always on the right side of every argument. I’m pro: freedom, jobs, self-determination, cheap energy, higher living standards, academic excellence, property rights, an even better future, Michael Gove MP, wine, women, song. (So long as the song is not by Maroon 5 or Bruno Mars.) And I’m anti: arbitrary authority, nanny-statism, money-printing, tyranny, despair, almost all war, poverty, prohibition, disease, squalor, uncleaned-up dog poo, meddling busybodies, crap capital projects based on massive lies (that means you HS2!), corrupt officials, civil war, totalitarianism, hyperinflation, injustice, Tim Yeo MP. Yet you’d scarcely guess this to read some of

Kate Chisholm

Nick Robinson’s Battle for the Airwaves

Deep within the BBC’s inquiry into the Newsnight and Jimmy Savile affair is a comment by Jeremy Paxman so inflammatory as to demand its own investigation (lasting months and costing squillions). The trouble, he said, with BBC News is that it has become dominated by ‘radio people’. This was not, it seems, intended as a compliment. It’s as if, in Paxman’s view, the whole dreadful, dreary, demeaning muddle was the fault of those ‘radio people’, because according to Paxman they ‘belong to a different kind of culture’. You might think it’s of little importance that Paxman thinks himself cast from a different mould to, say, John Humphrys or Eddie Mair.

Friday

Isabel Hardman

Censor’s black pencil hovers over BBC’s Jimmy Savile review transcripts

The BBC has released its (redacted) transcripts and other evidence from the Pollard Review, which examined the decision to drop Newsnight’s Jimmy Savile investigation. There are thousands of pages of evidence, which you can read here, some with large sections which have fallen foul to the censor’s black pencil, even though Jeremy Paxman in particular had made clear that he wanted his interview transcript published in full. We’ll bring you further details of the key transcripts throughout the afternoon, but one of the interesting observations from Paxman’s transcript is this on the effect of pared-down resources on Newsnight: ‘Newsnight, particularly in view of the – of the huge resource cuts

Monday

Douglas Murray

The BBC’s great public service: Cancelling the Today programme

Is it true that the Today programme did not go out this morning?  If so the strikers have done a great public service. Giving the country a day off the Today programme is one of the kindest things anybody could do, in any economic climate.  I hope the generosity continues. I stopped listening years ago after I acknowledged that the programme only succeeded in getting every day off to the worst possible start.  Since I stopped listening my life has improved immeasurably It is not just the inevitable left-wing bias of the programme or the left establishment view of what is or is not news.  It is the fact that

Thursday

Emily Rhodes

Writing of walking

At 3pm this afternoon Radio 4’s Ramblings with Clare Balding will broadcast a programme about The Walking Book Club, to which Emily Rhodes belongs. ‘I love walking in London,’ said Mrs Dalloway. ‘Really it’s better than walking in the country.’ As a keen reader, writer and walker, I am always intrigued when an author writes a walk into their work of fiction. Clarissa Dalloway’s walk from Westminster to Bond Street at the beginning of Mrs Dalloway is one of Virginia Woolf’s most astonishing authorial feats. Woolf notes the outside world – ‘shop-keepers were fidgeting in their windows with their paste and diamonds … June had drawn out every leaf on

Thursday

Isabel Hardman

Shapps aide delivers next blow in BBC cuts row

Eric Pickles has been at war with the BBC over the way it reports council cuts for a while now. But today the battle took on a new front following the corporation’s reporting of a report on council tax benefit cuts. This morning the Beeb picked up on a report from the Resolution Foundation which warned council tax bills for the poorest families could rise by as much as £600. The way the story, which you can read online here, was reported has angered Jake Berry, PPS to Grant Shapps, sufficiently to fire off an angry letter to BBC director of News Helen Boaden. The letter, which I’ve seen this

Sunday

Rod Liddle

Will Self, writer in residence at BBC Radio 4

I see that Will Self is being lined up as a “writer in residence” at BBC Radio Four. I think this is very good news. Self is an excellent writer and while obviously of the left, is not doctrinaire or predictable in his views. He has wit, he is well-read and very clever. Good luck to him. I commissioned Will to do an essay every week for the Today programme back when I was editor (1998-2003). They were invariably funny, provocative and beautifully expressed; he takes such a pleasure in using our language. But I alternated Will with Freddy Forsyth, who I fancied was a similarly iconoclastic voice, but from