Television

They say that death and taxes are the only certain things in this life. I would add BBC bias into that mix. It was probably about 20 years ago that I first went on Newsnight. In those days Jeremy Paxman ruled the roost and taught me an early lesson in live television. Jeremy asked me my view and I gave it. He then turned to the other guest and duffed him up a bit. I made the mistake of smiling briefly, only for Paxman to turn on me and say something along the lines of: ‘I don’t know what you’re grinning about.’ He then proceeded to duff me up a

In the latest series of The White Lotus – a moral fable about the narcissism and toxicity of the privileged class – Parker Posey plays Victoria Ratliff, a Southern matriarch routinely spaced out on the tranquilliser lorazepam. Her daughter Piper asks why she needs it. ‘Certain social situations make me anxious,’ she drawls. When her husband Timothy (Jason Isaacs) gets word that his crooked financial empire is about to crumble, he starts necking Victoria’s pills in secret before swiping the bottle. My ears always prick up at the mention of lorazepam because, like Timothy Ratliff, I have taken it illicitly to manage anxiety. However, I was not stealing it from

An industry poll by the British Film Institute in 2000 to find Britain’s best television programme put Fawlty Towers first and Cathy Come Home second. The latter, Ken Loach’s bleak 1966 play about a woman’s downward descent through unemployment, homelessness and poverty, is about as far from John Cleese’s inimitable farce as can be conceived. Yet both made lasting impressions on viewers of very different kinds. Adolescence’s popularity is down to telling liberal England what it wants to hear, never mind its basis in reality Watched by a quarter of the population at the time, Cathy Come Home took an uncompromising approach to its subject and provoked wide reaction. Passers-by

The number of people arriving here in small boats has increased since Sir Keir Starmer was elected Prime Minister on 4 July last year. The 20,000 figure was passed in December. Perhaps the increase is a consequence of these disparate individuals yearning to live in a country in which Angela Rayner is the Deputy Prime Minister. Or maybe they have noticed that one of the great cabinet posts has been conferred upon David Lammy and they think to themselves – goodness, these guys are taking affirmative action to absurd levels. We can’t go wrong here. Either way, the numbers seem to be up and the Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, continues

How hard is your soft power? According to David Lammy, Britain’s soft power is so strong and underrated that he has decided to set up a ‘soft power council’ to show just how hard we are. Put aside such details as waste and futility for a second. Surely there is something rather embarrassing about boasting about such things? It reminds me of the phrase ‘muscular liberalism’. A person may define the political concept of muscular liberalism. He may even be described by others as a ‘muscular liberal’. But no one should go around declaring themselves to be such a thing, without expecting to be greeted with a chorus of ‘I

Towards the end of last year, the production company Optomen TV contacted Jacob about the possibility of filming a documentary series on what life was like as an MP. The idea was to start shooting in June, since it was assumed the show would build to the natural finale of an autumn general election and its aftermath. A pilot day was filmed in Somerset in March, when the children were home from school and we hosted our annual meet for the Mendip Farmers Hunt. The producers decided the show could work. Then Rishi Sunak fired the starting gun for the election on 22 May, before we’d signed anything. Jacob took the

The last time I took my wife to watch Millwall play a home game, a gentleman a few rows in front of us took grave exception to the behaviour of an opposing player and identified him, very loudly, as the author of The Critique of Pure Reason – repeatedly and with venom. Having vented his spleen, he turned to sit down and caught sight of my wife. An expression of contrition spread across his face and he said to me in a conciliatory tone: ‘I am very sorry for using such language in front of your lovely lady.’ The apology, you will note, was to me, not to my wife.

‘Yous!’ a train cleaner in rubber gloves says as we arrive at Liverpool Lime Street. ‘What are yous doing here?’ He is grinning and holding up the political journalists and delegates dribbling from the Euston train like a leaky hose. Behind me waits Tim Shipman, the consummate chronicler of Conservative political chaos. I once sent Shippers a photograph of me sitting between my brothers Boris and Jo in a row on a cream chintz sofa at Chevening, all holding his hardback Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem. It was 2017. Instead of exchanging books which we had written – as is the family Christmas custom – everyone had given

I felt slightly anxious for Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg when I read he’d agreed to have a reality show made about his family by an American television channel. I imagine most people’s reaction on hearing this was to think: ‘Are you stark raving bonkers?’ But as someone who’s appeared in several reality shows and been followed around by a BBC camera crew for a fly-on-the-wall documentary, I don’t think this was necessarily a mistake. It all depends on how the Rees-Moggs are portrayed, and while I doubt they’ll be able to control that – being given ‘final cut’ on such programmes is a rarity – they should be able to influence

I’ve been reading the cracking, crackling new biography Biddy Baxter: The Woman Who Made Blue Peter by Richard Marson (he’s a friend, but I wouldn’t sell you a pup). There is always fun to be had in the gap between the transmitted, necessarily anodyne, product of children’s TV and the real-life shenanigans backstage, and the story of the often forbidding Biddy serves this up in satisfyingly salty dollops. In the collegiate, committee-ridden atmosphere of TV production, Baxter was a rare tyrant but one who always put the viewer ahead of any other consideration. Making TV is a battle; the reason so much of it is so bad is that the people involved