Gareth Roberts

Gareth Roberts

Gareth Roberts is a TV scriptwriter and novelist who has worked on Doctor Who and Coronation Street

Radio 2 has misjudged its audience

BBC Radio 2 is one of the many modern cultural enterprises which seems to have as its primary aim alienating the people who love it. The shabbily executed departure of Ken Bruce from his long-established and still wildly popular mid-morning show feels like a final door being slammed shut. Bruce is to be replaced by

The decline and fall of Matt Hancock

When Covid first hit the headlines in early 2020, I remember asking myself a question: who’s the health secretary again? And then I remembered: Oh God. Matt Hancock is, you may have noticed, back in the news. The disgraced ex-health secretary doesn’t ever seem to be out of it for very long. But even prior

The Tories should be planting some bombs for Labour

The recent self-defenestration of Nicola Sturgeon led to a rash of columns listing her dazzling lack of actual achievements, many of which added the caveat that she was the consummate, in fact the most successful, politician of her generation. These statements seemed somewhat contradictory at first glance. But then the reader remembered – oh, yeah,

Is ‘woke’ dead?

If you don’t live online, you may have missed the controversy over Hogwarts Legacy, the latest computer game to have been spun out of the multi-billion Harry Potter franchise. A small but amazingly vocal band of activists launched a vicious campaign against the game because of its connection to ‘transphobe’ J.K. Rowling. Then the game came out

JK Rowling will stand the test of time

I have a problem with magic. Even as a small child with a big imagination, I found magic very hard to swallow. If a character in a story teleported using a technological aid, that was fine. If a character vanished in a magical puff of smoke after an incantation, I was having none of it. 

Britain is the sick man of Europe – again

Liz Truss’s recent written confession is remarkable for its childlike air. It reminded me of my buck-passing wheedling whenever I was caught doing something naughty aged about eleven; ‘No, I didn’t know what I was doing – but neither did the Treasury, yeah what about the Treasury, eh, mum?’ I can remember when the British

Sam Smith and the embarrassing terribleness of LGBTQIA+ culture

Pop music – and specifically pop music stardom – has an incredible power to transform people into things they are not. The pop sphere enjoyed by my generation as teens transmogrified Morrissey into a sex symbol, Neil Tennant into an intellectual and Simon Le Bon into a surrealist poet.  More recently, pop’s alchemical potency has

We don’t need a ‘diverse’ coronation

Refugees and the NHS, we are told, will be at the heart of King Charles’s ‘diverse’ coronation in May. You’d think that a thousand-year-old institution tasked with steering clear of controversy might seek to avoid such hot potatoes. But there is nothing unexpected about this royal foray into politics. LGBTQ+ groups will perform at ‘a

The great Tory delusion

Spare us from feeble, timid Tories. At times, the party’s MPs are so afraid of what the Guardian or their daft teenage kids might say they forget they are supposed to be conservative. Take the party’s laggard attitude to months of protests; or the total disaster of the Channel migrant boats crisis; or mimsying about

What Howards’ Way taught me about Margaret Thatcher

Splice the mainbrace! Howards’ Way, the BBC’s Sunday night sailing and sex 80s soap, is back, courtesy of UKTV Play, with the whole first series now available to stream free with ads. Nearly 40 years on, I’ve found myself caught in its swell all over again. The combination of corporate chicanery (Fry and Laurie’s ‘Damn

An ode to Mrs Brown’s Boys

‘A mother hen watching all her chicks, a sassy old lady full of tricks’. Mrs Brown’s Boys recently returned to BBC One for yet more festive specials. Astonishingly the last actual full series of non-seasonal episodes was transmitted ten years ago, though a new one is imminent. This Christmas’s were, reassuringly, exactly the same as

Twixmas and the truth about why people liked lockdown

We don’t have a standardised name for the little clutch of strange days between Christmas and New Year. There is an aesthetic to Boxing Day – hearty walks, reheated leftovers, scraps of wrapping paper – but from then till New Years Eve we enter an in between time. I’ve heard several informal and colloquial references

What Christianity teaches us about the transgender wars

It’s Christmas – again. For old timers like me, the familiarity of this time of year can blunt the strangeness of what we celebrate: the birth of Christ. The basic moral Christian precepts that Jesus embodied are also easy to take for granted. Do as you would be done by, love your neighbour, think of

Why is Elton John so pompous?

‘All my life,’ Elton John told the Twittersphere last Friday afternoon, ‘I’ve tried to use music to bring people together. Yet it saddens me to see how misinformation is now being used to divide our world. I’ve decided to no longer use Twitter, given their recent change in policy which will allow misinformation to flourish

King Charles should ignore Ngozi Fulani

If a visitor to my house suggested they had been abused and verbally attacked when they came to tea, I probably wouldn’t be in a particular hurry to invite them round again for nibbles. If that person had subsequently caused a very public stink and embarrassed and humiliated a valued family friend of extremely long

Matt Hancock showed how Conservatives can win

It’s somehow appropriate that Matt Hancock finished third in the 2022 series of I’m A Celebrity … Get Me Out Of Here! Third is a word that fits him neatly. Third choice. Third wheel. Third rate. Third is the ‘and you did great, too!’ of victories. The day before, Hancock had donned the brass hot pants of ‘the Bronze

How did contemporary culture become so dismal?

Watching the Christmas John Lewis ad, over and over, I’m struck by how much British life has changed – and not for the better. We’ve all become so tastefully downbeat, introspectively sentimental and utterly lacking in brightness.   In the early 1980s, the big TV advertisement of the Christmas season was for Woolworths. I should

Who is Boy George to look down on Matt Hancock?

Matt Hancock’s ongoing humiliation in the I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! jungle is bad news for lots of people, not least his long-suffering family and his mortally embarrassed children. His constituents in West Suffolk, who can watch their right honourable representative eat kangaroo penis (but probably not expect a reply to their

Eco-loonyism is an upper-middle-class rite of passage

Greta Thunberg, the Shirley Temple of the apocalypse, let the cat out of the bag last week. She told the audience at her book launch that her environmental focus is merely part of her bigger secret plan to overthrow society. Apparently there’s a lot of ‘colonialism, imperialism, oppression and genocide by the so-called global North’ that has to be stopped. Gosh. Some have