In which Craig yaps on about Jake (and BBC comedy) again

Yake Japp's Media Circus (courtesy of Seurat)

Having listened to the first two episodes of Jake Yapp's Media Circus - a newish BBC Radio 4 6.30 comedy - I came to the conclusion that it needs a much sharper script. 

Its satire, for the most part, has all the bite of a toothless Yorkshire terrier. 

Maybe Rod Liddle (or Richard Littlejohn) could help out with the next series?

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Does that sound mean? I didn't mean it to. So here's me being almost nice:

My favourite joke from the first two episodes fell in the 'it's funny cos it's true' category.

It concerned Radio 4's The Listening Project - the BBC's  years long project in partnership with the British Library that might prove to be a remarkable document in a hundred years time but "right now" is "a bit rubbish". "

"I feel they have to broadcast it a bit just to justify doing it," said Jake. And I know how he feels about that.

And then came the line that made me laugh:

Alfred Hitchcock said, "What is drama but life with the dull bits cut out?", and The Listening Project sounds like all the bits that got cut out. 

Doesn't it just!

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This week's episode, however, saw Our Jake popping in a set of novelty false teeth and taking some proper nips at a few heels.

His subject was....wait for it!....newspaper columnists.

Aha! Are you thinking what I think you think I'm thinking?

That it's a Radio 4 comedy show, so it will inevitably be lazy and predictable and just bang on and on about how evil and racist Katie Hopkins is?

Well, I wouldn't blame you for thinking what I think you think I'm thinking because that's precisely what bog-standard Radio 4 comedy would do and do do. They know it's expecting of them, targets-wise, and they dutifully oblige. The studio audience goes along with it and a second series becomes a possibility. It requires no effort and entails little risk. It's straight onto the BBC comedy gravy train - and the BBC comedy gravy train is a darn sight more luxurious than any Northern Rail gravy train. 

Well, as regular readers will know, I expect better from Our Jake. So I hoped for plenty of digs at eminently mockable Guardian/Independent types like Owen, Polly, Gary, Yasmin and Afua, and maybe even - if he were being especially bold - Stewart Lee. (Imagine!)

Well, more fool me! Alas, Jake Yapp has turned into a fully-fledged Radio 4 comedy lickspittle!

(Can lickspittles fledge? I'll have to email Chris Packham about that). 

Yes, he really did make Katie Hopkins the show's main target and come back to attacking her again and again and he even made unequivocal jokes about her being a racist.

And he even slagged off poor old Richard Littlejohn - and how lazy and predictable is that? Even every other living Radio 4 comedian has finally moved on from Richard Littlejohn, so Jake was being somewhat 'retro' there, taking his audience back in time to The News Quiz circa 2006.  

Jake's other targets? Donald Trump, Sarah Champion, Kevin Myers, Michael Gove, Kirstie Allsop. Boris Johnson, Sarah Vine, Boris Johnson, Boris Johnson...and Jeremy Corbyn. 

Ah yes! Big Bad Boris was second only unto Katie in being the central object of Jake's satirical desire. He'd been mean about the EU in his columns and that was a bad thing. (The show was obviously recorded before Letterboxgate.)

The presence of Sarah Champion MP's name on the roll of dishonour there is very intriguing. Her newspaper piece about Pakistani grooming gangs must have struck R Jake as not being a good thing. 

And he even slid into saying that free speech isn't a good thing either, as the likes of Katie Hopkins (and Sarah Champion presumably) have got us where we are today. 

Hmm. I think it's now past the time when I can still reasonably hope that Jake might be different from the rest.

He's obviously not. He's become an identikit BBC Radio 4 comedian, loving Big Brother like the rest of them - and willing to stamp a boot forever on the face of easy targets with the 'best' of them.

Please excuse me while I wipe my eyes and blow my nose. Sniff. I'm so disappointed. Sniff. I hoped for so much more from Jake. He's become a bog-standard, predictable, go-for-the-easy-targets BBC Radio 4 comedian. Sniff. Sniff. Blow.

Paging Dr. Rod Liddle. Emergency surgery to BBC programme's script needed urgently. Please go to 6.30 on Tuesday on Radio 4 as soon as you can. 

Fee-(Glover)-fi-fo-fum, I smell the bias of the BBC

Non-editorialising Fi(ona) Glover

Radio 4's The Listening Project is doing a two-week series of 'Referendum Tales'. 

Listening to the first two episodes and hearing the balance of pro-Brexit to anti-Brexit voices go against pro-Brexit voices, I just knew how things were going to go.

And 'go' they most certainly went.

And now, with half of the ten episodes down, the imbalance against Brexit stands thusly:

8 pro-Brexit voices

18 anti-Brexit voices

That's clearly a hefty imbalance (with much wailing and gnashing of teeth about Brexit to be heard, along with some more reasonable voices)...

...but The Listening Project appears to be intensely relaxed about this bias. Thus, presenter Fi Glover has (twice so far) preemptively waved away any potential accusations of bias by simply asserting:  

(On Wednesday's edition) We don't editorialise our conversations in the Project and in these little shows we aren't aiming for total political balance. Many of those motivated to chat are those not entirely pleased by the Brexit outcome. 

(On Thursday's edition) Now, our job here at The Listening Project is to archive your thoughts and feelings. This is not a political polling resource. So when we asked for your referendum tales we thought we'd probably get more people wanting to talk about their pain rather than their satisfaction at the result. We're hear to listen not to editorialise. 

In other words (as the youngsters say these days): It is as it is. 

Never mind how many voices moan about Brexit racism and Little Englanders and wonder what went through the minds of stupid Leave voters (though the TLP Remainers aren't all that bad), it is as it is.

One problem with such an insouciant attitude is that it appears to conflict with the programme's main purpose - a purpose restated at the very start of this week's five editions of The Listening Project:

We talk a lot about the value of The Listening Project to future generations and we are aware there will come a time when 'events of 2016' is just a topic in some Key Stage 4 projects. So we thought it might be helpful if people could find a Brexit section in our archive where they could hear what we feel about this country's seismic shift.

The 'falling-down' here is that this sample doesn't accurately reflect what "we" as a country think (though it may reflect what Radio 4 listeners - and the BBC - think). 

Pupils studying these interviews decades hence for their Key Stage 4 project are, therefore, unlikely to realise that they are listening to a heavily biased sample of opinions (the word 'biased'  being used here in the statistical sense) and mostly hearing from the minority (losing) side of the referendum vote. The BBC, therefore, risks skewing the perceptions of the future. 

The other problem, of course, is that all of this merely adds to the strong impression - an impression now backed by an overwhelming body of evidence - that Radio 4 is betraying a heavy bias (in the statistical and non-statistical sense) against Brexit across vast swathes of its output, despite its charter-bound obligations towards impartiality.

And (in other news), yes, bears are also renowned for giving the strong impression that they favour unburdening their bowels in certain tree-filled areas.

Recommendations

Sometimes here on “Is the BBC Biased?” Craig and I recommend that readers might like to progress onwards and upwards to BBC Watch for a more in-depth version of a topic we’ve blogged. Let’s call ours ‘the beginner’s version’ whereas Hadar’s is ‘advanced’. 

Sometimes we have to wait a day or two, but today BBC Watch has posted part one of a detailed exposition of Avi Shlaim’s contribution to this programme, and I have to say it was worth waiting for.

I devoted but a single paragraph to prof. Shlaim, but now,  please go to BBC Watch and read the full Monty.

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There was a special live version of “the Listening Project” this morning. Fi Glover trailed it on the Today programme. They did mention the problem of eliminating people who merely wanted to  rant about some pet grievance, and I couldn’t help recalling this. 

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This morning Today featured an item called something like  “What is it like living under Islamic State?”  (in preparation for the future?) 

 The website has selected a particularly  profound quote from the piece. 

'Media is the most important weapon' (At least the BBC has noted this.)

Free Gaza Propaganda (2)

Further to our piece Free Gaza Propaganda, Hadar at BBC Watch has posted her own take on the same story, entitled Mainstreaming extremism on BBC Radio 4. 

If you recall, Radio 4's The Listening Project chose to broadcast a loving conversation between a hardcore anti-Israel activist and his mum. 

Radio 4 chose not to tell its listeners that Adie Mormech is an anti-Israel activist. We at Is the BBC biased? had to discover that for ourselves, thanks to our good friend, Mr Google (an invaluable friend when it comes to checking out who is that the BBC has chosen to broadcast at us). 

We showed that most of Adie's adult life seems to have been given over to anti-Israel activism and that he's far from being the wanderlust-driven innocent he and his mum presented him as being on that edition of The Listening Project - an edition where he took the opportunity provided to him by the BBC to vigorously smear Israel. 

Hadar has now pursued the same path and discovered an astonishing appearance by Adie Mormech on Iran's Press TV (one of several in fact) - a rant where he goes so far as to blame the rise in cancer in Gaza on Israel. 

Hadar draws the following conclusions from this:

But as we see, Adie Mormech’s extremism has been repackaged by the BBC into a whimsical mother and son anecdote and archived by the British Library as part of “a collection of voices capturing a unique portrait of the UK in the second decade of the millennium”.

Notably, whilst the BBC has shown interest in serious reporting of the subject of extremism in the form of British Islamists travelling to fight in Syria, it not only continues to ignore the extremism of organisations such as the International Solidarity Movement, the Free Gaza Movement, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and the BDS campaign, but repeatedly lends its voice to the mainstreaming of those organisations and others with similar extremist ideologies. 

Sue and I are intrigued by how this all came about though.  

The BBC describes The Listening Project in this way: 

The Listening Project is a Radio 4 initiative that offers a snapshot of contemporary Britain in which people across the UK volunteer to have a conversation with someone close to them about a subject they’ve never discussed intimately before. The conversations are being gathered across the UK by teams of producers from local and national radio stations who facilitate each encounter. Every conversation – they’re not BBC interviews, and that’s an important difference – lasts up to an hour, and is then edited to extract the key moment of connection between the participants. Most of the unedited conversations are being archived by the British Library and used to build up a collection of voices capturing a unique portrait of the UK in the second decade of the millennium.

So from this we must assume that hardcore anti-Israel activist, International Solidarity Movement and Free Gaza Movement campaigner, pro-BDS protestor and Gaza support worker Adie Mormech and his mum volunteered for the project and introduced themselves to their local BBC radio station. 

Given that Adie's life is given over to anti-Israel activism, it seems very likely to me that his motives were those of an anti-Israel activist, and that he spotted an opportunity to espouse his anti-Israel propaganda to millions of Radio 4 listeners, and took it - with his mum's help.

Now, Adie and Ruth were supposed to have been having a conversation "about a subject they’ve never discussed intimately before", but they must have had this conversation before - something we can safely assume thanks to the BBC's own archive which holds a written report and two interviews (one with Adie, one with Ruth) from 2009 about his experiences and his mother's reaction to his experiences (the same experiences they described on The Listening Project, with certain embellishments).

Were they pulling the wool over the BBC producers' eyes here? Were the BBC taken for a ride?

If so, why didn't the BBC producers bother to check their own archive? (It's not hard to do. We did it easily enough!) Doing so would have told them that something rum was going on here.

More to the point, did the BBC producers do any checks on Adie Mormech whatsoever, at any stage of the whole process? If not, why not? It's surely remiss of them not to have done so, isn't it? 

If they did know about his hardcore anti-Israel activism all along, did they have no problem with it? Did it not put them off? Did it in fact make them all the more eager to broadcast it? Would they perhaps say, "It doesn't matter because, despite his activism, it was the fact that at the time he 'didn't' tell his mother of the "danger he was in' that interested us"?

There are lots of questions for the BBC here. A complaint to the BBC may be the way to find out a few answers. 

Free Gaza Propaganda

[Did I hear a certain someone talk about "the BBC’s habit of allowing a litany of embellished falsehoods to be repeated on air, unchallenged", recently? Hmm, yes I did, and talking of which....]

Radio 4's The Listening Project is an attempt by the BBC and the British Library "to build a unique picture of our lives today" by "asking people up and down the country to share an intimate conversation with a close friend or relative". 

Biased BBC's Alan had the misfortune to hear one of last Friday's editions of the ongoing series, Adie and Ruth - Adventure in the Blood, in which a mother and son discussed their shared wanderlust and reminisced about how the son was forcibly prevented from sailing into Gaza by those Israeli meanies. (He thought he'd share the pain with the rest of us. Cheers Alan!)

'Intimate' anti-Israel propaganda - that's what we heard.

The Adie in question wasn't the BBC's Kate but an anti-Israel activist called Adie Mormech, and the idea that it was merely wanderlust that led him to Gaza is something of a stretch given that he seems to have devoted the entirety of his adult life to such anti-Israel activism. 

He was part of the Free Gaza Movement and has since been involved in the International Solidarity Movement, working in Gaza as a "human rights advocate" (whilst seeming to be strangely unconcerned about the human right's record of the present government of Gaza - Hamas). 

He's also taken part in anti-Israel protests in Gaza, campaigned for a boycott of Israel and written for Israeli-hating websites such as Mondoweiss. 

Adie seems to have got into the habit of embroidering his story over the years, as a spot of Googling reveals. 

On Radio 4 last week he told us that there were "around eight Israeli gunships surrounding us", and that they were "imprisoned for a week". At the time he said there were "six Israeli warships" and told the BBC that he spent "five nights in an Israel jail". (Given that his original version of events doubtless considerably embroidered the truth, what's a little extra embroidering between anti-Israel activists, eh?)

Adie Mormech's story is not a new one to the BBC, as the link above shows, and they surely knew what an episode of The Listening Project would result in. And yet out went the invite to Adie and Ruth, and out went this edition of the programme, along with its anti-Israel propaganda.