What the Thunderer Said

In praising a new dramatic version of T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland to be broadcast tonight on Radio 3, and Radio 3 drama more generally, the Sunday Times's Patricia Nicol takes a passing shot at Radio 4 drama:

[Radio 3] only has one drama to produce weekly, but it often seems a more invigorating listen than so many of the tediously worthy, issue-led dramas found next door on Radio 4.

“Tediously worthy” and “issue-led” will also do for Radio 4 more generally.

Cod liver oil commissioning

Sunday Times arts columnist Patricia Nicol has written a piece headlined Why changes are needed at Radio 4. 

Despite the headline, she's a huge fan of BBC Radio 4 and doesn't accept many of the criticisms being made of it. Her only real beefs with the channel are with its comedy and drama output. “When did a new comedy format on Radio 4 last make you laugh out loud? Or a drama warm your cockles?”, she asks. 

My favourite line from her column is:

Too much of Radio 4’s drama feels like cod liver oil commissioning, sternly administered to do you good.

From today's papers...

Though regarding BBC Radio 4's afternoon plays as "vital" for our national culture, especially in a time of lockdown, that doyenne of radio critics Gillian Reynolds, writing in The Sunday Times today, admits that "plays that don't preach, accuse or induce guilt" are "hard to find" some days. 

"Radio 4's afternoon drama often sounds as if it's coming from a pulpit", she writes. "Race, class, gender: You will find lectures on them all here."

*******

The Mail on Sunday reports that Jeremy Clarkson has turned down new DG's Tim Davie appeal for him to return to the BBC, accusing the BBC of no longer being interested in broadcasting a variety of views, and freezing out presenters who failed to be politically correct:

Jeremy Clarkson: He [Tim Davie] was saying the other day, 'Oh, come home'. But the truth is, you'd struggle on the BBC now. It's so unbelievably right on. You just couldn't say anything which I make my living from saying.

How intriguing that Tim Davie tried to bring Jeremy Clarkson back to the BBC though! At least someone at the BBC doesn't want to freeze him out.

*******

The Martin Bashir affair is getting a lot of coverage in the papers this weekend. Accusations of a cover-up by the BBC over how Mr Bashir obtained his interview with Princess Diana are deepening. Lords Hall and Birt have been now dragged into it. It's still a remarkable thing that Martin Bashir was brought back in from the cold again by the BBC in 2016 and made, of all things, the corporation's Religion editor. 

Camus, the Plague, and the BBC

 

In his latest Spectator piece Rod Liddle, as is his way, sums up what many of us feel about the BBC so well that he pretty much renders further comment from us superfluous. 

And his way with words remains a thing of wonder, e.g. "The distance the BBC travels each day from the values of its core audience will soon be measurable only in astronomical units." 

(At the moment I can only dream of being at least 3.9 parsecs away from Newsnight's Lewis Goodall - a man whose unbearable smugness would embarrass Douglas Adams's Zaphod Beeblebrox).

Even Rod sounded somewhat staggered though by Radio 4's latest, 'woke' dramatisation of Albert Camus's masterpiece The  Plague. 

As he describes it, for no comprehensible reason other than 'wokeness', the main character in the novel - a man - was turned into a woman, and placed in a lesbian relationship with her "wife". The setting, however, remained late 1940s Algeria with "its Arab population" (mentioned in the broadcast) - not a time or a place exactly known for its acceptance of openly lesbian couples or same-self marriages (or - by the by - for its 160,000-strong Jewish population which, having survived Vichy France's collusion with the Nazis over the Holocaust, was then getting driven out following the formation of the state of Israel. As you probably know, there are now no Jews in Algeria).

It's not that a story about lesbian relationships in 1940s plague-stricken Algeria mightn't have made for an interesting original drama, Rod argued, but that this trivialising piggy-backing on Camus has nothing to do with Camus and is simply silly.

Rod quotes the head of BBC audio drama, Alison Hindell, sticking up for the changes on Feedback and saying that they provided "contemporary resonance". 

Rod strongly doubted that, suspecting its pointless "contemporary resonance" barely extended beyond London dinners parties hosted by and attended by BBC production teams. 

Apparently, according to Rod, Ms Hindell rejects such charges of London/metropolitan-elite-centric groupthink by saying...drum roll...that the BBC will be running A Season of Nigerian Literature soon. Therefore, a season of Nigerian literature proves that the BBC isn't part of BBC, London-based groupthink. 

QED. 

Now, I'm just reading Rod here and enjoying him and nodding my head and raising my eyebrows and pursing my lips at the appropriate moments, but I didn't hear that Alison Hindell Feedback interview myself. Did she really show herself up like that? I think I ought to do her the courtesy of at least checking first...

Well, she certainly did play the "contemporary resonance" defence: "It helped the play feel feel like it was in The Now"...

...but she also raised a "practical" advantage to changing the sex of Dr. Bernard Rieux from a man to a woman: that otherwise the cast would have been all-male and that "voice differentiation and distinguishability" helps "the ear of the audience to follow the story". 

That's reasonable. It spoils listening to radio dramas if you can't tell who's speaking because the voices are too similar, though, that said, (a) I can imagine it being far from impossible to differentiate the voices of an all-male cast and (b) I don't think it really answers the question of why it had to be the main character rather than some of the minor, more plausibly changeable characters, who got changed.  

(Feedback's Roger Bolton stuck entirely to the change of sex question, not the ahistorical-seeming same-sex in Algeria issue).

Her other defence of why it was "a perfectly legitimate choice" to change the sex of the main character was literally this: 

There are a lot of women doctors in the world today. 

Interestingly, she said that this was the first time Camus's estate has given its blessing to a radio adaptation - which certainly sounds very much like a French artistic estate doing something French artistic estates rarely do, and (if you accept Camus's estate as speaking for the long-dead Albert) somewhat undercuts the charge that the play goes entirely against the spirt of Camus.

And she argued - quite accurately - that this kind of mucking around with original texts (changing the sex of main characters, using ethnic voices - here a Jamaican voice instead of a French-Algerian voice, etc) is now commonplace on the stage and in radio adaptations, reinterpreting things to fit "the social mores and expectations of the world the we live in today". (The world she lives in, some might say). 

Still, the playwright who adapted The Plague for Radio 4, Neil Bartlett, is no novice. He's a man with a long back history, so they didn't just grab him off a far-left street protest. It was a theatrical work first, and featured a female actress as the male main character -  the same Jamaican-born actress (Sara Powell) as on Radio 4....

....ah, I'm seeing, casting-wise, light-bulb-going-on, just why Neil would probably be just the man for the BBC at the moment!

Obviously, using one radio adaptation to represent the abyss into which 'woke' BBC drama has fallen doesn't amount to a clinching argument. It's a mere swallow in the wind. But it's a telling swallow nonetheless.

On Rod's point that Ms Hindell rejected charges of London/metropolitan-elite-centric groupthink by saying...drum roll...that the BBC will be running A Season of Nigerian Literature soon...

...well, in fairness to her, that did come about because of Feedback presenter Roger Bolton - a long-time BBC left-winger - raising the 'London/metropolitan-elite-centric groupthink' by asking her, of all things, whether Radio 4 audiences are far too South East England-focused and...guess what?...yes, not what people in the North or Cornwall or in seaside resorts like Morecambe might think, but what BAME listeners might think of that. 

Listening to the Radio 4 play itself, my main disappointment was on how pedestrian it was. Camus's The Plague struck me as a profound masterpiece when I first read it thirty years ago. This just struck me as a plodding radio play with intrusive music. 'Why was it so clunking and banal?' was my main question. 

Sunday morning

T'was the Sunday before Christmas when all through the blog not a creature was stirring, not even a frog. But I'm up and about nonetheless and reading the Sunday papers online, primed to pull out all the best BBC-related bits and stuff them into your Christmas stocking, ready for when you wake up...

First, Julie Birchill, writing in The Sunday Telegraph, isn't full of Christmas cheer about the BBC, writing "This was the year that the right-on echo-chamber completed its grisly castration of Radio 4 comedy – now all virtue-signalling mutual gratification with fewer laughs than the Christmas Day episode of EastEnders". She adds:

The standard of Radio 4 drama is positively subterranean, more often than not tracing the journey of an autistic asylum seeker contemplating a mastectomy while coping with being a single parent to a dyslexic non-binary child in danger of being taken into care and being bullied online. A recent Archers storyline had resident Lovely Gay Couple hiring a Bulgarian fruit-picker to incubate a baby for them only to have Brexit (hiss, boo, behind you!) wreck their rainbow-hued happiness. There is a strong feminist case against surrogacy and an equally rigorous socialist argument against keeping down working-class wages by hiring cheap foreign labour – but Auntie knows best, and debate is hate speech, and he is she, and self-defence is aggression. Oh, to have Orwell alive and back working at a BBC that appears to have taken 1984 as a How to Doublespeak manual!

Meanwhile, Decca Aitkenhead's interview with Dominic West in The Sunday Times finds the actor casting doubt on the BBC's claims about the "unconventionally diverse" casting for its flagship BBC adaptation of Les Misérables: 

The good news is that the BBC has dispensed with the songs and opted for a straightforward drama, written by the wonderful Andrew Davies. The dialogue sounds contemporary, and the casting is unconventionally diverse, with Valjean’s nemesis played by David Oyelowo. “In Paris in those days there was a large number of people from foreign climes, so the BBC is claiming the casting is historically accurate,” West says. “To be honest, I’m not sure. My guess is it’s not strictly historically accurate, but it gives a flavour of what we understand now, in that everyone talks in a modern British way and it resonates with what an immigrant class looks like.”

Incidentally, the "wonderful Andrew Davies", as per The Mail on Sunday, talks of another aspect of BBC social engineering, saying that BBC bosses veto any "droopy, soppy" girls he wants to pen, and that he's not allowed to make his women anything but feisty: 

I started writing lead characters for women who disconcerted men quite early on in my career. Now it's compulsory because drama networks are run by strong women who like to see themselves reflected. I often find myself pleading, 'Can't I write a really droopy, soppy girl?' And they say, 'No, she's got to be strong and independent.' 

And the same paper features further criticism of the BBC's new Poirot adaptation under the headline 'BBC’s new Poirot story ‘is turned into anti-Brexit propaganda’ by writers who have built on racial tensions that ‘barely feature’ in the novel. The article features a quote from Agatha Christie biographer Laura Thompson:

‘The ABC Murders is a stunning book and is incredibly atmospheric. Why does anyone feel the need to do more to it? Some of the changes sound awful. It’s like everyone who is a Brexiteer has to be shown the error of their ways.’ 

Back to The Sunday Times though, where the doyenne of radio reviewers, Gillian Reynolds, thinking of a Christmas present for Evan Davis, hits the snail on the shell when describing Evan as sounding "possibly too relaxed" on PM these days. No "possibly" about it, I'd say. It's as if he's already in his dressing gown and wearing his favourite slippers:

You will recall that, after Mair quit PM, there was a decent interval while BBC contracts sorted out what it could afford to pay his replacement, Newsnight decided whether it wanted to keep him, and he carefully considered the bliss of never again having to express admiration for the dress sense of Emily Maitlis. Now he has had a couple of months in the new Radio 4 job, Davis sounds relaxed. Possibly too relaxed. So he’s going to get a giant pack of impatience tablets, as used by John Pienaar and Emma Barnett, guaranteed to get an answer even out of Theresa May. 

Ah, now for some bacon and eggs...

Passing thought

The lovely Jane Kelly makes me smile. Here she is just now, tweeting:‏

On BBC Radio 4 Extra now there's Daljit Nagra archive on Isaac Rosenberg, WW1 poet. Wilfred Owen tomorrow. On BBC Radio 4 you can have a play about how terrible the police are to young black men. Those were the days, when you could get a policeman.

The Brexit Collection (another update)

Regular readers will know all about Exhibit A when it comes to proving post-referendum BBC anti-Brexit bias: Radio 4's The Brexit Collection. 

(We here at ITBB set the ball rolling about it and News-watch then turned the ball into a Brimstone missile. Now MPs and peers are using it to make the BBC answer our concerted charges of anti-Brexit bias). 

The collection has now been updated and, frankly, it's only made it appear even worse for the BBC. 

They've added Fi Glover's self-admittedly Remain-biased The Listening Project for starters, which is bad enough.

But, even worse, they've also added a particularly excruciating example of Radio 4 dramatic agitprop - an afternoon play called Leaving wherein the lead character, a Polish widow, is spat at by racist children and feels she has to leave the country as a result of post-Brexit 'hate'.

(I listened to it today and felt like leaving the country myself as a result, if only to avoid hearing such a mind-meltingly unsubtle BBC radio drama ever again).

The playwright is on Twitter and comes across as a Brexit-hating, Corbyn-supporting far-left activist holding all the opinions you'd expect such a person to hold).

That BBC Radio 4 would rate such a heavily loaded piece as being worthy to appear in its 'crown jewels' Brexit Collection is sadly unsurprising.

The other new edition - Ed Stourton's Analysis: Brexit and Northern Ireland - wasn't anywhere near as egregiously biased:

However...

Ed gave us a spread of voices throughout, though the balance wasn't strict and tilted significantly in the usual direction. (I made it 3 for Brexit and 6 against Brexit - and a lot more airtime for the Remain backers). 

Plus the chosen 'expert' (Prof. Brendan O'Leary) was obviously very firmly (and passionately) in the Remain camp. 

And the closing section (the last seven minutes) was so heavy on the negatives that it rather undid the reassuring effect of the more balanced early parts of the programme. 

And the framing figure of the cheery, non-partisan 'Londonderry/Derry tour guide' sounded a sharp note of short-term worry at the end.

So, this Analysis also merits its place in the stark-staringly-madly-anti-Brexit-biased Brexit Collection.

A Dialogue between the Soul and the Heart

By popular demand...

The Radio 4 drama Recent Events at Collington House (Part 1 here; Part 2 here) prompted a metaphysical dialogue between the heart and the soul, here at ITBB. 

Here, channeling that marvellous Metaphysical poet Andrew Marvell, is a taste of that inner debate:

Heart: I dutifully listened to the final episode of that Radio 4 drama, which was like a collection of all the recent 'issues' pasted together, but with an unusual outcome - the Muslims defeated the secular headmistress. A message of hopelessness I suppose.

Soul: I was surprised at how emotionally involved I got with it. I went red in the face at times. Plus, it went to places that the BBC rarely goes to. It showed how a Trojan Horse-style plot (of the kind which occurred in the West Midlands) might actually work, beginning with personal demands from a single governor that his child should not be taught music because "Music is haram" and progressing through an ever-increasing number of further sharia-inducing demands to a smear campaign against the sitting headmistress (and non-Muslim members of staff), to dogged grievance-mongering, a relentless infiltration of the board of governors and finally a takeover - a takeover which all the nice, well-meaning, PC, multicultural, equality-loving, (BBC-like) members of staff/governors are nigh on powerless to prevent. It certainly was a message of hopelessness - which, at the moment, seems something of a realistic position.

Heart: The only thing I'd point out is that to me it seemed, in terms of drama, it was pretty crass. The good thing was that it ended up on a kind of note of hopelessness and resignation, but it was as if the writer had gathered together a hatfull of headlines and strung them together with little additional creative or literary input:

• The headmistress hounded out by Muslim parents and governors. Tick.
• The friendless outsider non-Muslim boy with a worried single mum, radicalised by another pupil. Tick.
• The radicalised clever Muslim pupil. Tick.
• The frail chairman, supportive but about to stand down. Tick.
• The gratuitous divorce in the background, sapping the headmistress's strength. Tick.
• The graffiti on the wall. The debate about freedom of speech. The Charlie Hebdo/picture of the prophet. Tock.

That's just for a start. At least we were spared a happy outcome, which was indeed a surprise. It clunked.

Soul: Yes, it did clunk. The bit where Mr Nurani did his "I love the Prophet Mohammed more than my mum, dad and kids" speech was nicked straight out of the papers, as was pretty much all of the rest of the plot. Still, it got me hot under the collar about Mr Shah & Co. (the Islamist plotters inside the Trojan horse) and made lots of points that aren't usually made on the BBC, which is something.

Heart: I thought the whole thing was nicked out of the papers, and that's why it couldn't really be described as 'good'. Only in its vaguely realistic ending was it in a way good.

Gallimaufry for a Sunday evening

gallimaufry
noun - a confused jumble or medley of things.
"a glorious gallimaufry of childhood perceptions"
mid 16th century: from archaic French galimafrée 'unappetizing dish', perhaps from Old French galer 'have fun' + Picard mafrer 'eat copious quantities'. (Not to be confused with Gallifrey, fictional home planet of Alastair 'Shuttity-up' Campbell).  

We had a curious work's Christmas party last night. For some strange reason they chose to put on a barbecue for us. In December. At night. On a car park.

That's the "unappetizing dish" bit.

Still, I "had fun" and "ate drank copious quantities". Perhaps as a result of that, this post might possibly read like "a confused jumble or medley of things", and it might (Gawd forbid!) take most of the day to write.

****

This morning's Broadcasting House featured a very funny four-minute 'introduction' to BBC Radio 4 (by comedian Jake Yapp) for the benefit of those contestants on BBC One's Pointless who failed to get a single right answer in a round devoted to BBC Radio 4 - something which must have really galled the folk at BBC radio 4. (Mustn't laugh!)

listen to ‘Radio 4 in 4’ on audioBoom

Now, if you don't laugh at The Archers bit then there's no hope for you!

The result is a bit sharper than might have been expected, nicely skewering Woman's Hour's queasy swerving between (and betwixt) radical feminism and discussions about shoes, and then the self-same programme's dull, worthy, right-on choice of books:

Jane Garvey: Here's a reading from a memoir of someone who grew up being gay in a working class town with a father who didn't understand but finally came to a state of acceptance:

Narrator: I hear the door slam downstairs. It's my dad. I turn up my Erasure tape.

And Jake is no less acute on the dull, worthy, right-on Afternoon Dramas that ruin many a weekday afternoon Radio 4 schedule:

Neil Nunes: Now it's time on Radio 4 for some drama. Set in present day Kabul, 'The Swans have Burst' tells the story of a young woman's struggle to reconcile the modern world and her traditional values.

(Sound of a muezzin's call to prayer)....

Young Afghan woman: When I was a little girl the stallholders in the market called me 'fatki', which means 'unbelievable cliche'.

Neil Nunes: 'The Swans have Burst', written by Tristran Fraser-Dunlop. If you're still with us, well done.

****

Both Sue and I almost got round to writing about an Afternoon Drama a couple of months ago but, for various reasons, let the matter go (at the time). Time to make amends for that:

It was a play called The City of Tomorrow, written by the poet Glyn Maxwell. It was meant as a hommage to Under Milk Wood but sounded more like a hommage to Ken Loach. 

It started with a politically radical child being rudely patronised by an oafish Tory MP at a school speech day and ended with a pair of pantomime, UKIP-type baddies asking an elderly lady to sign a petition against allowing "people ‘not like us’" into the area. The elderly lady, remembering a Jewish refugee girl from her childhood, noisily ripped up the petition, and (for me) the word 'agitprop' instantly sprang to mind. As did the phrase 'Radio 4 drama'.

The acting took me back to my own school days. I came 30/30 in my Drama exam. I was playing a frightened elderly man hearing someone mysterious approaching his room. I had only one line - "Who's there? Who's there? Who is it?" - and had been working diligently on my 'elderly man voice', all croaky and quavery, in advance, ready for my big performance. Marlon Brando-style, I'd even been using my gran's walking stick to get into character. Unfortunately, on the big day, I went blank and completely forgot my line. Hence 30/30.

I'm re-living that traumatic experience for you now because both Sue and I observed that the elderly lady in this radio play would have made my childhood 'elderly man voice' (had I actually delivered it) sound like acting worthy of Laurence Olivier. And, on top of that, there was a schoolgirl character with a staggeringly unconvincing working class accent ("'ere, oo the 'ell speaks like tharhht, Westside, innit?")

Phew, glad to have got that off my chest at last!

****

Back to BH's mockery of Radio 4, and this not-inaccurate take on John Humphrys:

Twenty eight minutes to nine. Time for me to get all cantankerous and belligerent and try to 'point score' with someone over an issue I don't fully understand, and that I'll probably start moralising over as well. (Angrily) I don't understand why young people are looking at pornography in the first place! 

Now, that is what he's like, isn't it?

****

And then there's Jake's take on Radio 4 comedy:

Neil Nunes: This is Radio 4, the home of radio comedy, simply because we're the only people who have the budget for it. Perhaps we shouldn't sound so smug. Time now for 'The Oxbridge Chronicles':

Audience: Hurrrrayyy!!!!

Hugh Punt (speaking quickly): Hello, we're a cavalcade of young, white men who speak reasonably fast and deliver a script that's been so laboured over it might as well have been...CARVED OUT OF MARBLE!...with a vocal delivery that has the subtlety of a snooker ball smashing into a row of teeth, giving the audience nice, easy cues for...WHEN TO LAUGH! All that effort and expense, all that fretting, totally wringing out any instinctive comedic flair leaving you with a contrived morass of puns and tired observations. Doesn't matter though cos all our mates are...IN THE AUDIENCE!

Audience: Hurrrrayyy!!!!

He forgot to mention though that many of the 'tired observations' concern politics - relentlessly left-wing politics - and largely consist of bashing UKIP, the Conservatives, social conservatives, opponents of mass immigration and, of course, oh my God, the Daily Mail!

****

Oh dear, I've allowed myself to get waylaid by a rare Harry and Paul-like bit of BBC self-mockery there so, as Billy Bragg favourite used to sing (maybe), 'Back to life, back to reality'...and something more serious...

Andrew Marr's paper review this morning over on BBC One began, as ever, with Andy's own run-through of the newspaper front pages, ending with the Mail on Sunday's front page attack on the BBC for choosing to broadcast a highly controversial short story by Hillary Mantelpiece as part of its Book at Bedtime - the one which fantasises about assassinating the late Margaret Thatcher.

Lord Tebbit is understandably angry about the BBC's decision, calling it "sick". Nadine Dorries is, perhaps, more opportunistically angry about it too (though you probably shouldn't read people's souls so quickly perhaps and maybe she's genuine too). 

Andrew Marr, as is his way, was somewhat dismissive, describing it as the Mail being "cross" with the BBC and adding "We probably won't be talking about that at great length" before moving on to his guests and, indeed, never mentioning it again. Had he been as keen on Mrs T as me he might not have been so 'intensely relaxed' about it. 

I have to say that I've got a conflicted knee-jerk response to this. 

My instant knee-jerk reaction - as it was when I first heard about the short story existence - was one of disgust. Hilary Mantel betrayed very bad taste in writing the story in the first place and the BBC is hardly betraying much less bad taste in choosing the broadcast the piece barely a year after the lady's death. 

But, my knee then jerked back in the opposite direction. When it first came out I thought that, however disgusting I might find it, if a writer wants to express her disgusting fantasies about killing my favourite (recently-deceased) prime minister, well, that's her own affair - Voltaire and all that. Bad taste isn't necessarily a bad thing in a writer, and we on the Right shouldn't be as censorious as some on the Left are about such things, especially when it's a work of fiction.

However, given that the book of short stories in question contains lots of stories, it remained a very real option for the BBC, knowing the controversy surrounding this book, to have either (a) chosen to broadcast another of the collection's stories in place of this one or (b) held off for another year or so (to show respect to Baroness Thatcher's family) and then broadcast it. The BBC decided to do neither of those things and is ploughing ahead, just over one year on from the former PM's funeral, with its broadcast.

On balance, my knee is still firmly jerking against the BBC here.

****

Returning to Broadcasting House, that programme's paper review also discussed the Hilary Mantel story, and both of Paddy O'Connell's paper reviewers defended the BBC's decision to broadcast the Mrs Thatcher assassination story on Book at Bedtime. 

Those guests were regular BBC presenter Anne McElvoy and flautist James Galway - though the famous, ever-chuckling flautist didn't sound overly on top of many of the stories, seamingly preferring to play his flute and try to charm the socks off everyone with his ever-present chuckling.

I must give credit to Paddy here for doing the decent thing and playing devil's advocate. When Mr Galway said that it's up to people if they decide to listen to this, Paddy shot back with the point that, no, it's the BBC's decision to broadcast it that's the point and that many object to that decision.

****

Hopping back, like a squiffy kangaroo, to the Andrew Marr Show, its paper review featured former Labour postman Alan Johnson and the increasingly ubiquitous Spectator columnist Isabel Hardman.

I say "increasingly ubiquitous", but I don't mean that in a cross way, merely descriptively. Personally, I'd like to see Isabel on every BBC current affairs discussion programme, every day, 24/7.

In fact, even though it ruins my instinctively over-neat sense of where my next picture in this post ought to be placed, I'm going to post an extra-large picture of Isabel here now, on the grounds that Is the BBC biased? shouldn't miss out on her ubiquity - and wouldn't want to (but please don't tell the missus):

Isabel is a Conservative supporter, Alan a Labour supporter. Neither are UKIP supporters. And nor, I think, is Andrew Marr. 

UKIP has had a bad press today. From the BBC to Sky and ITV, and across the spectrum of pro-Tory and pro-Labour newspapers, the latest outburst of 'free speech' from a UKIP candidate (albeit a 'latest outburst' that goes back a couple of years or so now), has seen the party rounded baited again by the massed ranks of the MSM pack, along with the strange, lingering story of Roger Bird and the bird he appears to have rogered. 

Andy Marr introduced this section of the press review with the words...

It has to be said that UKIP are shooting themselves in the foot. Page after page, paper after paper. And you've chosen a great story there from the Sunday Times, Isabel. 

...and Isabel and Alan Johnson duly sniggered at/besmirched UKIP.

But, I'd say - in contrast to Andy - that it "has to be said that UKIP are being shot at by the MSM. Page after page, paper after paper, BBC programme after BBC programme".

****

Hunger. That's been the BBC theme of the week. The spectre of famine seems to be stalking the land. So, therefore, it's a good thing that Michael Buerk is back from the jungle:

Dawn, and as the sun breaks through the piercing chill of night on the car park outside Craig's Christmas do, it lights up a Biblical famine.

And this morning's Broadcasting House featured the story of a woman who is having to starve herself because she's a single mum with two children, one of whom has a serious medical condition. And, later in the day, the Food Programme, in an episode called Feeding Britain, also focused on hunger in the UK. 

I joke here but the story of the woman on BH was clearly a genuine one and it raised a lot of serious questions. The BBC's Paul Lewis then number-crunched her predicament and found that she is missing out on certain benefits she's actually entitled to but didn't know about. 

My thought here is that the benefits system (obviously) should help people who genuinely need help and are doing the best they can - and especially those who are claiming less than they are entitled to - and if the BBC helps her get her life back on track, then good on them. 

Similarly, though the Food Programme added a rather left-leaning coating to the matter, it was good to hear about imaginative, helpful, non-tax-payer-funded concerns working to help those who need help. 

The whole 'hunger'/food banks issue is one that stirs up passionate feelings and sharply contrasted opinions. Some people think that food banks signify the existence of a genuine problem of hunger in this country. Other think that there's no hunger crisis and that most people are going to food banks only because food banks (and their free food) now exist. 

Personally, I can't make head nor tails of the statistics here but if food banks, relying on people's generosity and in salvaging waste food from supermarkets, help meet a real need (however large or small that need really is) then good on them. 

Is the BBC just Tory-bashing though? Would it be carrying on about hunger, in exactly the same circumstances, if a Labour government was in power?

It's latish on a Sunday evening and I just can't answer that kind of question. (Is that the kind of cop-out politicians could try on John Humphrys?) My instincts would say 'yes' to the first and 'no' to the second, but, on the evidence before me, I just can't say that for certain.

****

Focusing again on matters of bias (and ignoring any superfluous photos of Isabel Hardman), I've read comments today that the BBC has been downplaying/actively counteracting (in defense of Labour) Labour's part in the rendition/torture/CIA/Democrats/Republicans story.

I have to say, listening to both the Andrew Marr Show and Broadcasting House, that both Andrew Marr and Paddy O'Connell didn't shy away from questioning their guests about whether Labour people - Tony Blair, Jack Straw, Hazel Blears, etc - should, potentially, be placed 'in the dock' over this matter.

That doesn't demonstrate pro-Labour bias then, but it might suggest anti-US, anti-War on Terror bias, #biasfromtheLeft. 

****

And  that, for what it's worth, is pretty much all I've got to say. Everything else I've heard today (which isn't much) has struck me as good BBC stuff - including Roger Scruton's excellent (non-political) A Point of View on Kitsch in the arts and Mark Tully's Something Understood on world-weariness (whoops, as I type and hope to add a link down goes the BBC website, so you'll have to find that for yourself).

Things may get somewhat quieter here at Is the BBC biased? in the coming couple of weeks. Both Sue and I have lots of family matters to deal with (in the nicest possible way), so please bear with us if things occasionally go quiet.

Cue dots.

...

Jerusalem Stone, and BBC-built Straw Houses

The Palestine Solidarity Campaign, you may recall, were full of praise for the BBC for broadcasting an anti-Israeli play, The Brick, in their Afternoon Drama spot. 

Artfully (in both senses of the word), Israel was never mentioned by name though - a point owed to David Guy at Five Minutes for Israel - which makes it all the more insidious. 

Please take five minutes to read David's post about it, The BBC drops a brick. It shows the drama to have been built of straw and completely blows it down on grounds of self-contradiction, implausibility and dramatic ineptitude. 

Although integral to his post, the following paragraph also makes an informative aside - and is the sort of thing that makes the blogosphere so valuable:

Municipal laws in Jerusalem require that all buildings be faced with local Jerusalem stone.The ordinance dates back to the British Mandate and the governorship of Sir Ronald Storrs and was part of a master plan for the city drawn up in 1918 by Sir William McLean, then city engineer of Alexandria. So an Egyptian plan; put into effect by the British; continued by the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and still in force today. A regulation which IMHO has greatly contributed to the beauty and uniqueness of Jerusalem as a city.

@BBCRadio4 Thank you

Cardiff Palestine Solidarity Campaign are pleased with BBC Radio 4 this afternoon:

CardiffPSC ‏@CardiffPSC25m

@BBCRadio4 Thank you for the afternoon drama The Brick set in #Jerusalem about the ease with which #Palestinian history has been obliterated

The object of their gratitude is Afternoon Drama: The Brick, "a compelling portrait of Palestinian life by Selma Dabbagh...a British Palestinian writer based in London".