'From Fact to Propaganda' is back. Rejoice!

Radio 4's From Fact to Fiction, the series where writers create a fictional response to the week's news, is back for another series. 

Regular readers might recall that we reviewed the last series in some detail after it featured a toe-curlingly awful agitprop mini-drama on the migrant crisis from Shami Chakrabarti (now better known as Baroness Chakrabarti of Kennington in the London Borough of Lambeth). 

We found the whole series to be severely biased - so much so that I rather unkindly rechristened it 'From Fact to Propaganda'. 

Of the eight episodes in the last series, 6 'came from the Left', 2 had no obvious agenda, and 0 'came from the Right' - a crisp demonstration of BBC bias in action if ever there was one.

Will this series be as biased?

The first episode this time around was by the same writer who also kicked off the last series: Chris Dolan. (Spooky, eh?)

Last time round it was a rather funny supernatural dramatic fantasy which made the point that there are more important points to worry about than immigration. 

This time round it was a supernatural-tinged short story centred on the bitter generational split apparently existing in our country today.

Both - you'll be pleased to hear - featured passing pops at Donald J. Trump. (Consistent, eh?)

It certainly wasn't Shami-style sledgehammer agitprop, and I do like a good mysterious short story, but it still has to be said that it was pretty obvious where its political sympathies lay and, as a result, I will be marking it as the first 'score on the door' this series and placing it without compunction in the 'came from the Left' column. 

I'm not sure how many episodes are still to come, but it's probably worthwhile tallying things up again and seeing if any Right-leaning voices are given a platform by the BBC this time round. A nice piece of 'balancing' pro-Brexit agitprop from Nigel Farage anyone?

In brief

A quick run through of some of my usual subjects...

I didn't get very far with this week's From Our Own Correspondent. Kate Adie's introduction to the first report, talking of "The desperate and dispossessed...attempting to make the journey from Turkey to Europe", saw me off.

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The Now Show probably doesn't use canned laughter, but I do wonder sometimes. I barely raised a titter this week. The audience sounded as if it was about to collectively wet itself with laughter. It didn't help that Jon Holmes did a bit on the Queen, Brexit and the Sun which relied on jokes about the Queen being German and Prince Philip being Greek. How lazy is that? 

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I forget to round off our survey of political bias on the latest series of Radio 4's From Fact to Fiction (aka From Fact to Propaganda). We left our running tally at 6 episodes for the Left, 1 with no obvious agenda (disputed), and a big fat (undisputed) 0 for the Right. The final episode - a piece about José Mourinho by Mark Lawson - was unpolitical, so the final tally remains as above - except, of course, for the 'with no obvious agenda' category going up to 2. Clear bias.

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One of the things I've spotted before about BBC Breakfast paper reviewers is that they tend to be drawn from an uncontroversial, vaguely centrist pool. The rare strongly-opinionated ones. however, tend to come from the centre-left wing of the political spectrum. Simon Fanshawe - by my reckoning the most regular Breakfast reviewer, is one example, and this morning's reviewer, writer and social justice campaigner Paul Vallely, also falls into that category. He denounced the government over social justice issues and joined the presenters in the latest BBC 'two minute hate' against Donald Trump. Labour's John McDonnell, however, was also held up for criticism. (It's that 'soggy BBC centre-left' again).

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Ted Cruz was the subject of this week's Profile on Radio 4. It was presented by intermittent John Peel-sound-alike Mark Coles. The blurb on the programme's website begins, "Senator Ted Cruz is a hardliner, even by the standards of his native Texas..." The reaction on Twitter was unanimous: Mr Cruz is "even worse than Trump", "totally terrifying", "deeply unpleasant", a "political horror" and "basically the total nutter version of TheDonald". Having listened myself, it's not hard to work out why they reacted like that. Mark Coles will be pleased.

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Talking about the BBC's US election coverage: Charges of overkill and bias (against Trump) were featured on both this week's Newswatch and Feedback, and Jon Sopel was on both defending himself and his colleagues. Oddly both programmes steered clear of the 'Curious Incident of the Candidate in the BBC's coverage', as per Conan Doyle - the candidate being Hillary Clinton, plus all the scandals surrounding her and the startling fact that her candidacy might be at risk because of them:

Inspector Gregory: "Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?"

Holmes: "To the curious incident of the candidate in the BBC's coverage."

Inspector Gregory: "The candidate did nothing in the BBC's coverage."

Holmes: "That was the curious incident."

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It wouldn't be Feedback if Roger Bolton wasn't doing his pro-BBC spin job on the charter renewal. This week saw Radio 4's 'champion of the listener' (beginning at 15:39) cited Tony Hall's response to a government report about the BBC's governance. He then went on to say, "Tony Hall pointed out that if this happened" the corporation's independence could be at threat. The words "pointed out" were Roger Bolton's. He could have said "said", or "argued" or "claimed". But, no, he went for "pointed out", as if something true was being "pointed out".

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To end on a more positive note though: Dateline London was good this week, especially on Obama's criticism of the UK and France and the EU-Turkish deal over the migrants. The range of contrasting views was to its credit. The programme's resident Eurofanatic, Marc Roche, unsurprisingly grabbed the opportunity to try and persuade us to stay in his beloved EU. Gavin congratulated him on being awarded the Légion d'honneur by the French government. "What on earth have you done to deserve that?", he joked. "Exactly what I will say next", replied the deadpan Marc before launching into a defence of France and the UK against Obama's criticisms. Unlike The Now Show, that made me laugh. 

Ze flashing knobs, ze flashing knobs!!

The man after whom the 'selfie' was named 

In the spirit of Will Self today...

Zut alor!! Wot ze 'eck wos zis veek's From ze Fax to ze Fixion on abart on your BayBayCay Radeeoh Quatre? 

And if you felt any twinge of embarrassment on reading that last sentence then you'll know how I felt listening to Will Self's god-awful Popping Out this evening. My toes are still uncurling themselves.

Radio 4's favourite prolix, opinionated popinjay Will Self wrote it and acted it himself. It was Self, self, self all the way. The only thing he didn't do was sing the theme tune. 

And as one of our English poets (almost) put it, "He do the foreigners in different voices". Embarrassingly. 

The reviews on Twitter are firm but very fair:

Will Self on @BBCRadio4 now, performing an old 'Allo 'Allo script with all the jokes taken out.

That was dire. Was Will Self trying to sound German?

Painful.

Behind it all was an Emma Thompson-style hate letter to the United Kingdom, full of lefty digs. (Nigel Farage was mocked, of course).  

This week's From Fact to Fiction therefore effortless raises our running tally to 6 episodes for the Left, 1 with no obvious agenda (disputed), and a big fat (undisputed) 0 for the Right. 

The pro-left bias continues, seemingly ad infinitum.

A sweetheart episode of 'From Fact to Propaganda'

Regular readers will know that I've got a new hobby-horse: Radio 4's From Fact to Fiction.

Previous posts have shown that the latest series has so far consisted of nothing but left-wing takes on the major news stories of the day - including Shami Chakrabarti's agitprop piece on the migrant crisis - hence my renaming of it as From Fact to Propaganda. 

I feel duty-bound therefore to say that the latest episode, Sweethearts, combined the Google tax story with the sugar daddies story - i.e. two kinds of 'sweetheart deal'.

I saw that and (possibly like you on reading what I've just written) my eyebrows instinctively impersonated Roger Moore (or the Roger Moore of old Spitting Image fame), one of them very slowly raising heavenwards.

It sounded like the perfect recipe for yet another tediously clunky Radio 4 message-driven left-wing drama. 

Oddly enough though, it wasn't. 

Or didn't appear to be.

I honestly don't have a clue what message it was trying to send - if any. It got me thinking about the student sugar daddy phenomenon though.

(I wish I could say that phenomenon had never crossed my mental radar before, but Newsnight did a feature on it a few months back. 

Come to think of it then, why is the sugar daddies story 'big news' at Radio 4 this week? Why was Newsnight so interested in it?)

It came from the pen (or should we now say 'fingers'?) of actress and writer Katherine Jakeways (not to be confused with the captain of Star Trek's Voyager):

So that's 5 for the Left, 1 for who knows what, and 0 for the Right.

From Fact to Propaganda (again)

Talking about Shami...

What has BBC Radio 4 got in store for us this week on From Fact to Fiction, following Shami's pro-migrant piece of agitprop last week?

Given that the three previous episodes, as I showed few days ago, were also full of left-wing messages (on Donald Trump, the migrant crisis and David Bowie!), this seemed to show a strong pro-left bias on the programme's part. So you might expect something to balance that this week? (Well, you might if you didn't already know the BBC too well!)

This week's episode is:

Its author, Dan Rebellato, is jokily advertising it on Twitter:

...and it could well be pretty funny as his website contains the following introduction, which certainly made me laugh:

As if anyone (especially a blogger!) would ever think of going to someone's webiste to 'gather ammunition for a vicious ad hominem attack'!! No, no, no, that never happens!

No, I actually learned from Dan's Twitter feed that he really is an out-and-out lefty. (So there!)

I also learned that he's got something of a Trump obsession. (He's not a fan though).

So, I'm expecting a darkly comical, point-making, anti-austerity From Fact to Fiction from Dan Rebellato...

...making that 5 out of 5 left-biased episodes of From Fact to Propaganda in a row (the entire series so far).

How very BBC Radio 4 of them!

Shami, the BBC Playwright

So, did anyone listen to Shami Chakrabarti's miniature radio play Over Here, Over There on tonight's From Fact to Fiction on Radio 4?

(What do you mean you didn't? Shame on you!)

Here's how the Radio 4 website trailed it:

From Fact to Fiction is an award-winning series in which writers create a fictional response to the week's news. 

In a week that saw politicians debate the conditions in migrant camps and the treatment of Asylum Seekers in UK , Shami Chakrabarti takes us to an imagined future. 

It is 2041. A mother and son argue about his plan to leave the country without permission. She is a settled refugee in her adopted state; the place of his birth. He is a radical; angry at his life of injustice and caught up in his plans to flee, yet he knows very little about his mother's own tale of escape.

I'd describe it as a typical piece of fairly clunky Radio 4 agitprop. It could easily have been slotted into Afternoon Drama on Radio 4 - had it been three times as long (God forbid!) 

It featured Hayley from Corrie as the refugee mother, so it was acted with aplomb - except for her emphatic delivery of the closing line, the final twist of the story (with shades of Planet of the Apes).

I have to say I saw that twist coming a mile off though and, because Hayley from Corrie's delivery of the 'shock punchline' was so emphatic, I laughed out loud. (It gave one left-wing Twitterer a shiver down her spine though (poor woman)).

Many a less-than-subtle point was made throughout - including all the expected ones. Painted migrant doors, wristbands, valuables being confiscated at borders, politicians using words like "swarm". You name it, it was in there. 

And our hearts were tugged and our brows were beaten.

And the take-home message was that we need to be much, much nicer to migrants, including those in Calais: Just imagine if it was you!

Invigorated by all this delightful, one-sided, left-wing preaching on the migrant crisis - and prompted by a comment on an earlier thread (thank you!) - I then treated myself to all three of the other episodes from this series of From Fact to Propaganda. 

Were they cut from much the same cloth, or not? Well...

The first one, by Chris Dolan, was quite funny and well-overacted, but its redemptive tale of a man from Allenby adrift and dying in the Solway Firth as a result of the 2015/16 floods in Cumbria (with only an initially sarcastic Scottish banshee for company) contained such passages as: 

Man: "But refugees out on the open seas, nowhere to go..."
Banshee: "Now you're talking!"
Man: ..."THIS is nothing, in comparison".

and built towards this life-changing climax:

Man: I've had it up to here with floods and drones and greed and people not giving a monkeys. I'll get my wages docked for these mince pies but the bosses and the bankers and politicians will get another bloody bonus. And millionaires and entertainers getting gongs while nurses' wages are capped; care workers, midwives. We're up to our necks in dodgy Chinese and Saudi deals while madmen go beheading innocents and the beaches are littered with the bodies of the desperate and all anyone can talk about is freaking immigration ratios!
Banshee: You're alive again!

It also contained a dig at the SNP and Donald Trump...

...so, yes, that one was cut from the same cloth as Shami's 'play for today'...

...and Donald Trump and his attitude towards Muslims was, you probably won't be surprised to hear, the subject of last week's episode. written by BBC regular Hardeep Singh Kohli. 

It was called 'Top Trumps'. Its heroine was a likeable Muslim woman who's engaged to a Scottish man who shares ancestry with The Donald - and has Mexican ancestry to boot. Boom boom! The baddie, acting for Trump, who demands no Muslims at the airport in Scotland where he's about to arrive, eventually gets transformed too. Her son, James, has changed his name to Jamal. (Oh yes!) And the whole experience with the likeable Muslim woman makes the bad Trump lady change from the kind of American who says "You've got to be extreme to tackle extremism" to the sort who wants to have a drink with her new friend, the likeable Muslim woman.....

...I think you've probably got the picture! 

Ah yes, the sophisticated, in-yer-face whiff of Radio 4-style 'humorous' agitprop in the evening!

The remaining episode, 'Changes' had a mum, dad, son and daughter discussing David Bowie. 

The son wanted his dad to tell them a radical moment. The dad's radical moment involved him putting on mascara after listening to Ashes to Ashes. Men threatened to beat him up, but he got a girlfriend out of it.  

Also, Dad said:

Don't you think he did something for tolerance? World leaders of the Anglican faith are arguing about whether gay people should be ordained right now! Didn't he contribute to that being possible? He was important to people.

This episode, by Graham White, did, however, offer through the character of the daughter a different take - that David Bowie was really just a pop star who was after fame and money; in other words, that all this BBC-type stuff about Bowie is mere projection. It was, however, strongly hinted that she had 'gender identity' or 'sexual preference' issues of her but wouldn't talk about them. Then we heard Starman.

So, yes, it was typical Radio 4 drama all the way here.

Knowing that I can now happily never listen to it again!