Christopher Booker cheerfully drives his tractor into a ditch

I think Christopher Booker may have published his least popular article at the Sunday Telegraph today. 

I suspected as much when I saw the surprisingly small number of comments below his article. 

And then when I saw the top-rated  comment, beginning "Sorry Christopher...", I knew something was seriously amiss.

What had he got so 'wrong'? What had so put off his faithful readership?

Well, here's a clue - his article's headline:

BBC is not always as bad as I often say

Not even we've ever dared post a blog title like that!

And it gets 'worse'...

Here's the whole of this part of Mr Booker's Sunday Telegraph column:

Farming Today's Charlotte Smith is entirely at home with both countryside and farming. 

Despite the constant examples I report of the relentless bias and professional shortcomings of the BBC, I am first to admit that here and there in that horribly flawed and absurdly self-satisfied organisation there are still admirable people, whose good work is much appreciated. 

Years ago, when I often wrote here about the mess being made of British agriculture, I several times had a go at how Farming Today had ceased to be a serious programme, featuring certain female reporters who seemed to know nothing about farming or the countryside. 

A shining exception to this recently has been one of its current presenters, Charlotte Smith, who seems entirely at home with both and (like her counterpart Helen Mark on Open Country) can talk expertly, pleasantly and with common sense to everyone she interviews. 

A fine example was last weekend’s item about the man who, amazingly, still happily runs his family’s 200-acre farm, split up into little parcels all around and even inside Heathrow Airport. 

Like all Smith’s reports, it was superbly professional and a fascinating little gem. 

However loud the clamour may grow for the BBC to be abolished – and its failings are so culturally ingrained that it is hard to see how they could ever otherwise be remedied – we would miss the rare contributors like her who alone make one quite happy to pay the licence fee.

Having a bit of a soft spot for Charlotte Smith too, I was happy to read his lovely tribute to her.

And that last, most 'disappointing' paragraph of all, where Christopher Booker grows wistful about some of the collateral damage that might occur if the licence fee were to be abolished, strikes a strong chord with me too...

...if not, it seems, with that many of his other readers!

A very determined BBC reporter v women farmers

A new blog has been launched today called The Conservative Woman and it has hit the ground running with an amusing piece by Kathy Gyngell about BBC bias - specifically what she sees as Farming Today's attempts at pushing a feminist agenda over the course of the past week:

Saturday’s programme, it turned out, was the culmination of a week-long campaign by the Beeb’s gender warriors to track down the oppressed of the farming industry.  No, they were not seeking out migrant labourers at the mercy of gangmasters or poor peasants drowning on the Somerset levels, but women farmers.  A barrage of emails during the week complaining that the BBC was making a fuss about nothing had not stopped them.

Britain’s women farmers, Farming Today was confident, would be found to be still in the grip of patriarchal oppression and prejudice.  All it needed was to track them down. The only trouble was, having been lined up for interview, that Britain’s female farmers, from the Welsh uplands to the Scottish Highlands, refused to play ball.  They were either bemused or having none of it.

The harder Charlotte Smith, the programme’s presenter and intrepid reporter, tried to make these women’s gender an issue, the more they refused to concede anything.

The interviews Kathy describes sound hilarious, and they reminded me of a piece I wrote last December about an otherwise fascinating episode of On Your Farm:

OK, there was a measure of classic BBC 'ism'-hunting in this programme, as presenter Charlotte Smith tried (and tried) to tempt the female farmers of Higher Melcombe Farm in Dorchester (very Thomas Hardy!) to complain about sexism in the farming industry, though they themselves mostly put the resistance they were getting (from some quarters) more to the youth and initial inexperience of the family's chief farmer, Harriet, than to the fact that she's a woman, but still...

...which all goes to suggest that there are few things in the world more relentless than a biased BBC reporter on a mission!