Showing posts with label Simon Heffer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Simon Heffer. Show all posts

Wednesday, 1 December 2021

Wednesday morning reading


Here's some Wednesday morning reading from the newspapers, beginning with Simon Heffer in the Daily Telegraph:
I strongly believe that by any objective standards the persecution of Michael Vaughan by the BBC and BT, who were both due to carry his broadcast analysis this winter before he was cancelled, has become an outrage. Monty Panesar, in his excellent column for the Telegraph last Saturday, noted the violation of the ancient precept of innocence until proven guilty. I draw the attention of Vaughan’s persecutors to the observations of Panesar, as a man of colour, about his friend’s and former captain’s track record of working with and developing the careers of players from ethnic-minority backgrounds. 
One wonders what Vaughan, having been found guilty without trial by both the BBC and BT, having his livelihood put at risk an d having been consigned to that abysmal rank of society peopled by ‘racists’, must now do to restore his reputation. He has no recollection of having referred to his Asian team-mates as "you lot". And why should he? Either he didn’t say it, or if he did it was a tasteless joke that meant so little to him that he can’t remember it.
The Telegraph also has the headline Déjà view: BBC One’s Christmas Day lineup is exactly the same as last year today, as the 'flagship channel will screen same shows - including EastEnders, Call the Midwife and Mrs Brown's Boys - in exact same order as in 2020'. And talking about déjà vu, here's the Daily Mail today: It's deja view... again! BBC1's Christmas Day schedule is exactly the same as last year's.

Friday, 27 November 2020

The Papers

 

Good morning. Here is the news. Beginning with Jeremy Paxman in The Daily Telegraph:
For so long a world leader, the BBC has grown fat and metropolitan, increasingly scorning the views of the parochial people who are forced to pay for it. When given its head, the BBC can still produce brilliant shows like Strictly Come Dancing but, at an institutional level, it behaves more and more like an embarrassing relative deciding to dance with the kids at a wedding. It’s hard to resist the impression of smug people who think they know better than the rest of us. The consoling glory is that none of us has to tune in any more. 
No-one over the age of 55 who tries to watch BBC television or listen to its radio services will be surprised to learn, from Ofcom’s latest report on the Corporation, that people in their demographic are gradually giving up on it. As one in that age group, my own consumption of what the BBC offers is largely restricted to Radio 3, which shines like the proverbial good deed in a naughty world. 
Elsewhere, Radio 4 appears to have become Victim Radio, with an endless stream of programmes featuring people, usually from minorities, complaining about some injustice, usually inflicted on them by the state. This schedule of gloom is punctuated by profoundly unfunny Leftist comedians (I use that noun in its broadest, often unintentional sense). My wife likes Gardeners’ World, but that is becoming ostentatiously woke and in any case is now off for the winter. Other than that, little else appeals: the world our age group really wants to see on television is best represented on the Talking Pictures channel, whose success, believe me, is not coincidental to the BBC’s decline. 
Incidentally, in the same article, Simon Heffer laments the state of BBC drama and blames it on "the virtue-signalling of overpaid, self-righteous white executives", but BBC News is hardly immune from that. Head of Newsgathering Jonathan Munro, for example, recently said, "We don’t want all our editorial meetings to be dominated by what white people think" - despite some 85% of the UK population being white. He also complained that when he joined the BBC in 2014, every person on his team was a Caucasian male - including him. Their predecessors he'd previously blamed for creating “male, pale and stale” output. As others have pointed out, it's staggering how people like Mr Munro can say this kind of thing yet cleave to their own jobs, as if doublethink allows them to be doubleplusgood while all the rest are part of the problem. He's been in place for six years now. Why doesn't he lead by example and resign?

Anyhow, in The Times today we hear that "an influential group of peers" - The Lords' Communications and Digital Committee - is recommending that Ofcom has its remit expanded to cover the BBC News website and that it should also have a role in monitoring the accuracy and impartiality of social media posts from journalists employed by public service broadcasters. That will keep the ex-BBC folk at Ofcom busy!

Meanwhile, as Charlie noted yesterday, the papers are reporting that TV licence evasion accounts for one in three women's criminal convictions, according to new figures, with women being convicted for non-payment of the licence ten times more than men. There were 84,000 licence fee offences by women, representing 74% of 2019 convictions for this type of offence. One for Newsnight and Woman's Hour?

Saturday, 19 March 2016

Thread about some of my worries etc

Does anyone else worry about the way people like Laura Kuenssberg or Norman Smith are called in on every occasion to interpret all political news? It’s as though they hold themselves superior to the lot of us, (the ignoramuses) speculating on the motives of the likes of Iain Duncan Smith, Boris Johnson or whoever. Do they know what’s inside the head of IDS? Does IDS even know?
As soon as something happens, along comes Laura to tell us what we should think, and it’s getting ridiculous. Analysis is one thing, but imperious interpretation is superfluous to requirements. It's overpowering, really.

*****

I watched Simon Heffer’s speech to a packed Bexit crowd. (H/T comments @ B-BBC) 
Very nice, but what with Iain Duncan Smith, the BBC and arguably George Osborne and David Cameron helping to undermine their own government, if we vote ‘out’ because we want to regain sovereignty and we want to decide our own future, well, the thing that worries me most is - who will the ‘we’ actually be? The Conservative party’s loss might be the Labour party’s gain, and given the current leadership that bothers me greatly.

******

My agenda was that I wanted to like Stewart Lee and dislike Jo Brand. It didn’t work out.
I watched Stewart Lee’s tedious shaggy cat story about Jeremy Corbyn, the cat. 
As soon as he started saying that his diarrhea-afflicted cat was called Jeremy Corbyn, dread descended and hung there like a blanket. A gross ending was imminent. I didn’t even foresee a protracted, interminable raspberry, which the Grimsby Telegraph seemed to find amusing, but the punchline involving the England flag, some shit, the national anthem and someone confusing the cat called Jeremy Corbyn for the ordinary Jeremy Corbyn, couldn’t come soon enough. 
   
How did this script come about? He must have thought: edgy + Jeremy Corbyn + crap -- patriotism--> laborious monologue. He allowed the tail to wag the cat, so to speak; pity you can’t unhear things. 
Was that Chris Morris dishing out advice? He should have advised against. 




On the other hand Jo Brand’s walk thing was alright. I don’t dislike Jo Brand at all. Despite her political views, she can be funny, but that sitcom about the geriatric ward - Getting On, in which she played Nurse Kim Wilde with Vicky Pepperdine as Dr Pippa Moore - was fine. 
Even though he had a small role in Blackadder I could never be persuaded to like Jeremy Harding, if you get my drift, but I think Jo Brand is ok.





*******

Did you read this?    As soon as I saw Rod Liddle’s article on the Spectator I realised I’d already heard this Taiwanese author on Start The Week with Andrew Marr. I thought she sounded odd then, but now I’ve connected her with a video, captured clandestinely on his mobile phone by ‘Tommy Robinson’ I know she’s not only odd, but dim. 



She has written this dire book about what she sees as 'the far right', and what baffles me is that such an ill-conceived project ever got published, let alone plugged (yes it was) on the BBC. 
Just as Hsiao-Hung Pai hasn’t read the Koran, I haven’t read "Angry White People", so at the risk of being berated for my own ignorance, I wonder why anyone would publish such sensationalised drivel in the first place? Judging from the attitude of the author, the answer’s in the question. It’s sensationalist and shallow. Perhaps it ticks the boxes of a publisher that also lists Ilan Pappé and Richard Falk amongst its authors.