Very Radio 4

It sounds as if Radio 4's Tom Sutcliffe was taking the easy option last night:

Women's Rights Network: Last night BBC Front Row did a show about art & morality which drew moral equivalence between Eric Gill (serial rapist of daughters), R Kelly (child abuser), Hitler & J.K. Rowling.

Please register your complaint here:

https://bbc.co.uk/contact/complaints/make-a-complaint/#/Your%20Complaint

Front Row, 24.3.22, Radio 4, Offence

Emily Kate 🏴󠁧󠁢: Not just a passing mention, either. She is a big part of the discussion, sandwiched in-between Gill and R Kelly. The bubble these people live in is beyond belief. 

Emily Kate 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿: "Sutcliffe and his interviewee wringing hands earnestly over the moral darkness of JK Rowling. 😂" 

Emily Kate 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿: One of the most extraordinary things I've ever heard on the BBC - among some stiff competition. A children's writer and philanthropist who simply believes in the facts of biology finds a place in a discussion about morally depraved artists, alongside paedophiles and genocidists.

On Coyotes, BBC Radio 4, the Guardian and the Booker Prize

Listening to Radio 4's book group asking questions to Booker Prize-shortlisted author Diane Cook on last night's Front Row made me cringe. The whole thing sounded socially awkward. The four women chosen to put the questions, alongside presenter John Wilson, weren't professional interviewers for starters. They were just Radio 4's idea of four 'Everywomen' - three English women who sounded exactly like every other person's idea of a typical Radio 4 listener, plus a woman from south India with a dodgy phone connection. (The latter was invited, I kid you not, to reflect 'the world'). So their questions were, understandably, ineptly put. They were literally embarrassing to listen to. 

But isn't that the nature of the beast? What do you ask an author whose book you didn't like? And what if you don't like the heroine she's so subtly invented and who she likes but you don't? And worse, what if you really did like her book? What do you say then that doesn't sound clumsy or banal or hideously sycophantic? 

Asking questions of writers or artists or directors or composers that don't led the amateur questioner into a deep, dark, dirty ditch of their own hapless making is something I suspect many people would find fiendishly hard. I certainly would find it hard, and I'm sure my questions would be just as toe-curling, or stomach-churning, as the ones put by the ladies chosen by Radio 4. 

Hats off then to professional interviewers who get away with it, day after day - especially if they do it with aplomb. 

Even the pros can get it in the neck though. 

The same edition of Front Row featured an interview with Sofia Coppola. She's got a new comedy film out, starring Bill Murray, called On the Rocks. The clip the programme played from it made me laugh. It sounds like a very funny film. But John Wilson's interview with the director didn't go down well with some listeners. 

I read an exchange on Twitter expressing grave disappointment in John for asking too many questions to Sofia that related to her father, Francis Ford. This escalated (as things do on Twitter) into claims that John Wilson had been "patronising and sexist".

But I thought John Wilson asked decent enough questions. Given that the film was about fathers and daughters, and that Sofia Coppola features in a soon-to-be-released revamp of her father's Godfather III, it's surely not that wicked a line of questioning? And if you're getting from the horse's daughter's mouth an insider's take on what could be a truly major movie event - a remake of Godfather III by Francis Ford Coppola including his daughter Sofia Coppola - why wouldn't you ask her about that as well as about her own film? You'd surely be a poor excuse for an interviewer, in my view, if you passed up that opportunity for a golden scoop by simply asking her to go on and on promoting her latest comedy, however fabulously funny it might be.

Going back to the start of the programme (and this post) however, Diane Cook's Booker-nominated debut novel sounds like the kind of novel that would win the Booker Prize - telling a dystopian tale of a planet Earth brought to its knees by human beings. Plus it's apparently a novel with plenty of "harrowing" passages - though there's supposed to be plenty of balancing beauty too. (I'm not sensing many jokes though).

I wouldn't really know what it's like yet, as I've not read it. All I've done is to look up Diane Cook and read a Granta piece by her from 2018 called On Coyotes. 

Granta labels it a 'four minute read' but it took me well over ten minutes because I was relishing every section, every paragraph, every sentence, and many of the turns of phrases and individual words. And I've re-read it too.

It is very much On Coyotes, though it avoids mentioning the indefatigable Wile E. Coyote - which places Diane higher up food chain when it comes to writers avoiding the cheap and the obvious. I for one wouldn't resist the urge. I'm the sort who'd probably even add a picture of Wile E. to the top of any post I did that even barely mentioned coyotes. 

There's absolutely nothing cheap about Diane Cook's writing in this piece though. I don't know which bit to quote, it's so perfect. (What more do you want from a writer?) So I'll just ask you to click the link and read it for yourself, in full. 

I then went, on my new guiding principle of moving beyond my usual reading rounds, to a Guardian review of Diane Cook's novel and found a Guardian reviewer with the oddly Guardianesque name Hephzibah Anderson writing:

At the novel’s start, they [heroines Bea, "a sometime interior designer", and Agnes, her young daughter] have been in the Wilderness for three years and its harrowing opening scene tells you all you need to know about the extreme toll it’s taken: alone, Bea crouches with her stillborn baby, covering her with wilted leaves and sagebrush branches. For all its horror, it’s an understated moment – there is no keening lament, just cricket song and the soft tread of coyotes. 

"And the soft tread of coyotes". Ah, OK. I'll have to quote the beginning of that Granta piece in full after all:

Across the lake in Montmorency County, Michigan, we heard the rhythmic bark of some animal. So rhythmic and so prolonged that we turned to the sound to try and make sense of it.

‘Was that a dog?’ my friend asked.

It was a bark to be sure. But.

‘It seemed too fast to be a dog,’ I said. The barks had such little space between them that I thought perhaps it could be an owl barking, thinking of the saw-whet’s escalating toots and how fast they get, a bit like a bouncing ball settling down to the table.

We were just about to conjecture some more when down the shore we heard a great cacophony.

For a split second, I thought it was the loons looning out their warning call: a ghostly yodel which a few days earlier I’d almost mistaken for the bugle of an elk. We were, after all, very near the elk capital of Michigan. Just as I was about to whisper loon, I heard the unmistakable eerie yips of the coyotes answering back to what must have been a family member.

And now read on, It gets even better...

Dark Times

Here's presenter Kirsty Lang on this Tuesday's Front Row: 

Because we live in dark times, don't we, as you say, global warming, war in the Middle East, Brexit, Trump, I mean, Arifa, does writing comedy feel frivolous do you think?

"Brexit" and "Trump" may feel like 'dark times' to those who feel negatively about them but, of course, many other people feel positively about them, and surely a BBC presenter shouldn't be describing either as 'dark times'?

A Brexit Collection update

Regular readers may recall an earlier post on BBC Radio 4's Brexit Collection.

Radio 4's Brexit Collection is a gathering-together of Brexit-related programmes, presumably intended to act as a showcase for the station.

All the items were listed and described in that post and, taken in the round, offered such an overwhelmingly negative take on Brexit that I ended by writing:

My ruling? The exhibits exhibited here by the Defence are the most damning gathering of exhibits I've ever seen. The BBC has gifted the Prosecution. The verdict is beyond reasonable doubt: The BBC is guilty of bias. Case closed.

If you've reviewed them too (and are being fair-minded) I really don't think you could possibly disagree with that (if I say so myself). The overall level of overall bias (against Brexit) was absolutely astonishing.

Six more exhibits have since been added to the Collection (some of which we've already written about here at ITBB):

Emma Jane Kirby's Brexit Street reports for PM

David Aaronovitch's The Briefing Room: Why Did People Vote Leave?

Front Row's The Cultural Response to Brexit special

Anne McElvoy's How We Voted Brexit

Gus O'Donnell's Brexit: The Leavocrats

Gary Younge's East Europeans in Brexitland

All - except for (Remain-supporting) Anne McElvoy's fine and completely fair documentary - had an anti-Brexit bias.

Regular readers will know all about Brexit Street and its ongoing painting of untypical Leave voters as racist morons (one of the most skewed and wrong-headed pieces of BBC reporting in a long time).

They may also recall The Leavocrats as being an openly personal and very one-sided piece from a strong Remain supporter. 

Another strong Remain supporter, Gary Younge of the Guardian, got two half-hour programmes to focus on claims of post-Brexit racism, without providing much in the way of actual direct evidence. (David Keighley and Ken MacIntosh both slammed this colossal smear on Leave supporters over at The Conservative Woman.)

A further strong Remain supporter, David Aaronovitch of The Times, was more subtle on his two-part The Briefing Room (a companion episode looked at Remain voters), though his expert guests inclined towards Remain and towards a thesis which, controversially, connected Leave voters with people who wanted hanging and flogging (yes, both!). The Remain supporters got more time and much less 'scrutiny'.

And, finally, Front Row's discussion wasn't without a couple of Brexit-friendly (left-wing) guests (for balance!), but had a panel heavily loaded against Brexit....the worst, I'm ashamed to say, being Morecambe's very own Wayne Hemingway, who pretty much called for riots to keep us in the EU....and, not unusually for the BBC, an audience that was even more loaded against Brexit. It pretty much amounted to one big sigh about Brexit.

So, all in all, that's another avalanche of anti-Brexit-biased BBC broadcasting to swell the already vast snowy plain of anti-Brexit bias found in BBC Radio 4's Brexit Collection. 

Except for those two A Point of Views from Roger Scruton and John Gray, the whole thing provides clear proof that the BBC has a severe post-Brexit bias on the subject of Brexit, against Brexit.

*******

And it's a bias that evidently isn't fading with time....

The latest Radio 4 Brexit special (not yet included in the Brexit Collection) came via this week's In Business - the first post-Brexit edition of the programme to tackle the issue of Brexit.

And what angle did they choose?:

And, yes, it was largely negative about the Brexit vote and the possible consequences of Brexit.

Quite where the idea of 'BBC impartiality' can be found in the vast majority of this I'm at a complete loss to say.

Complaining to the BBC can work (given persistance and a blue moon)

A rare result for Hadar and BBC Watch (from the BBC's Corrections and Clarifications page):

"...a mixed, culturally-diverse place, very cosmopolitan..."

Ah, the BBC and its 'messages'...

Last night's Front Row on Radio 4 previewed The Last Kingdom, the BBC's new epic drama/attempt to cash in on the success of Game of Thrones. It concerns the Vikings' invasion of Anglo-Saxon England. BBC historian Dr Janina Ramirez talked to Kirsty Lang about it.

According to Dr Ramirez, it looks as if it might 'express' a familiar BBC point:

And there's some very important questions being asked about identity - something we still need to ask ourselves today. It's a truism that we trace English heritage back to the Anglo-Saxons but that in fact...it was a mixed, culturally-diverse place, very cosmopolitan, and this series, I think expresses that very well.

I bet it does.

*****

Away from bias,

Front Row also talked haiku.

New finds, old poet.

Two hundred haiku

by eighteenth century great

Yosa Buson found.

Show's guest compared it

to discovering lost Keats' 

notebook, miracle.

Guest, wise as water,

Translated one found Buson

For us. Petals fell.

"The torn paper um-

brella has just become a 

ghoul with moonlit eyes".

Tip for Halloween:

Must tear paper umbrella,

scare trick or treaters. 

Thinking Slow

Was it Confucius, the Lord Buddha or from Norwich, it's the bishop of the week, Swashbucklingly Reverend Lord Bishop Graham James (of 'Thought for the Day' fame) who first said 'Slow down, stop and think'? 

Whoever it was, I treated myself to an international bestseller a couple of years ago by a Nobel Prize for Economics winner, Daniel Kahneman, called 'Thinking, Fast and Slow'. I've taken the 'Thinking Slow' path with it, having only read the first couple of pages of its introduction, but, being an optimist, I hope to finish it before I die.  

Blogging, however, is typically fast-moving - so fast-moving as to seem ephemeral at times. 

One of the most interesting sites on the blogosphere, Harry's Place, builds in ephemeracy (is there such a word?) by making all of its comments vanish into a black hole after a week. (I nearly did that by accident while changing hosting system a few week's ago). And Harry's Place receives hordes of insightful comments every day which deserve to be preserved forever. 

Sometimes, however, a blogger should stand back and think slowly. 

Of course, in so doing, that blogger might find that, on reflection, that his head is merely occupied by a monkey lazily scratching itself (just like Homer Simpson's).

For example, listening to this morning's Today, what stood out for me was Hugh Grant, invited on to talk about RIPA (and hacking), calling Tom Newton-Dunn of The Sun 'Tom Newton' and then getting into a right old pickle, thanks to ol' Justin Webb, over The Sun's role in something hacking related. It was a complete car-crash interview from which Hugh was only rescued by Humph, who got him to stay on to talk about fan mail and then laughed uproariously at one of his humorous anecdotes. 

And then there was a Front Row discussion (in place of Start the Week) debating whether the arts should be publicly financed or not, full of the usual metropolitan suspects (despite being from Hull) - including the infinitely pretentious Ekow Eshun and some BBC types. It also included a couple of lamb-to-the-slaughter dissenters - a contrarian Spiked writer and Philip Booth from the IEA (naturally repeatedly labelled "free market" by the presenter - the only such political label used in the programme). 

What stood out was the IEA guy, Philip Booth, causing general hilarity by his (genuinely hilarious) cock-up over the gigantic cock on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square. 

Having heard mention of it earlier in the discussion, he began launching into a denunciation of it as publicly-funded "porn" only to be stopped in his tracks by his fellow panelists pointing out that it depicted a giant, blue cockerel. 

He tried to go on to talk about a pornographic piece of religious blasphemy at a museum whose name he couldn't quite remember (which didn't help either), but the audience's hilarity and the presenter's desire to bring him up short put a very quick stop to that. 

In the end Philip, with good humour, said this episode would probably go down in history...

...as indeed it probably will, with Radio 4 show after Radio 4 show repeating it ad infinitum and Radio 4 show after Radio 4 wiseguy making puns about some right-winger or other making a complete cock of himself...

....which is a shame as Philip was talking a good deal of sense otherwise.  

Now, you see, that's what happens when I slow down, stop and think. My brain cheerfully scratches itself.