As Sunday morning sees paper review after paper review across the BBC, here's ITBB's own selection from the Sunday papers.
First, this from The Sunday Times in an article headlined, 'Toe the line or the tartan trolls will get you in Sturgeon’s state':
Others, including the writer JK Rowling and the BBC journalists Nick Robinson and James Cook, have been relentlessly abused online by SNP supporters.
One BBC Scotland journalist said: “The online abuse is one thing but the party’s behaviour is another. The SNP seems to complain about every single story, no matter how innocuous it is. I get the sense they want to bog us down and make us reluctant to ask hard questions. Who wants to be constantly dealing with complaints?”
Then there's this from The Spectator where Fraser Nelson argues that the BBC needs to have the Eurovision Song Contest taken away from it because, as the man who used to run the BBC's coverage of it says, "The corporation is useless at entertainment...and no longer has anyone in its hierarchy who understands it":
Britain is a stickler for tradition and each May we now observe a relatively new one: we bomb in the Eurovision Song Contest. The protocol now is well-established. Our entry is chosen by a BBC bureaucrat who appears to loathe the whole contest.....
The BBC is not the first to try to ask an anonymous bureaucrat to choose a song that is expected to be popular with the masses. This happened every year with Intervision, the Soviet equivalent of Eurovision, which ended in abysmal failure. The difference between the formats epitomised why the West won: ours was colourful, humorous, raucous, and even in the 1950s produced some of the most memorable popular tunes. While Soviet entrants were told to show ‘socialist dignity’, Eurovision was producing songs designed to be sung on the way back home from the pub (Exhibit A: ‘Volare’, Italy’s 1958 entry). Tito’s Yugoslavia banned radio stations from playing music that was ‘capitalist’ or ‘kitsch’.
The BBC evinces the same bureaucratic snobbery and lack of comprehension.
AA Gill, writing in The Sunday Times, doesn't seem to be a fan of BBC One's Shark either:
Lots of people have mentioned Shark to me, mostly old ladies. They say it’s really wonderful: a BBC nature series that sets out to rehabilitate sharks. This, for some inexplicably pixelated reason, also reminded me of the Labour party. It’s very good, post-Attenborough, Bristol nature programming that measured the scientific against the naturalistic and had just the right amount of fact to awe. And it was well worth someone’s licence fee money — not mine, of course. I don’t want to pay for programmes about nonces or sharks behaving like Chuka Umunna.
Writing more generally about the BBC, he also says:
The BBC is like the Labour party. I know, it’s always been like the Labour party, but right now it’s losing its audience, its way and its confidence, and it doesn’t know whether to go back to its core, Reithian roots or push on and try to be more like modern cable TV. It’s transfixed by the contradiction, and we all wish it well, really we do, but I also wish they made it easier to believe that they knew what was in our best interest.
I can't say I'm with Adrian though in wishing that the BBC would make it easier for us to believe that they knew what was in our best interest, as we've had far too much of that kind of thing already, thank you very much!
