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.

War, peace and subjugation

Interesting Start the Week this morning. All Tom Sutcliffe’s guests have authored worthy tomes about religion and war.  

Justin Marozzi’s well received “Baghdad” sounded fascinating, and so did  Christopher Coker’s “Can War be Eliminated?”. But the primary focus of this episode was a book titled: “Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence” written by a woman whom Suttcliffe addressed as “Keiron”. It was only when she gratuitously introduced “Israelis bulldozing Palestinian homes” that I realised that Keiron was in fact Karen - Karen Armstrong, the former nun who ‘wants us all to love Islam’. 

I have to say that Tom Sutcliffe hastily distracted her from the bulldozing, but she did get away with this, towards the end of the programme:

“Look at some of the images of the prophets. Of Jerusalem at The End of Time, with all the... but it’s still, even there.....this is peace for Israel and other people are being subjugated.”

Anti-Israel polemicists have a particular way of saying “Israel”, somehow imbuing the “Is” with venom. I will always think of her as Keeran.

Start the Week thread

This just in from Is the BBC biased?'s sour, right-wing radio reviewer....

This morning's Start the Week started a new season, and got off to a fine, arty start.

It featured posh, profound, populist, progressive British Museum director Neil MacGregor plugging his new Radio 4 series [accompanied by British Museum exhibition] on German history (as seen through its artifacts); Jamaican poet Kei Miller plugging his new book The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion; oh-so-contemporary artist Jeremy Deller plugging his new exhibition in Margate; and happy-to-be-provocative novelist Hilary Mantel plugging her new collection of short stories The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher.

As you may be aware, Hilary Mantel's title story has provoked a good deal of controversy. Lord Bell has called for her to be investigated by the police for imagining the assassination of his friend, Lady Thatcher, and various Conservative MPs have denounced her for her 'bad taste'. The Daily Telegraph refused to publish it. (The Guardian duly stepped in).

Presenter Tom Sutcliffe (of the Guardian) asked her about those charges - just one question, worded in a way that showed he didn't reckon much to them - and she then dismissed them, to general laughter. 

Tom's own take was perhaps also reflected in the preceding question. This asked if, in imagining the assassination of Margaret Thatcher, Hilary was actually giving expression to a "collective fantasy"...to which I felt the need to add the hashtag #notinmynameTom. 

Incidentally, for fans of The Twitter, Tom also retwittered this today:

Can someone explain to the Mantel-haters the difference between truth and fiction, maybe using plastic cows like Father Ted did with Dougal.
— Jonathan Coe (@jcoescrittore) September 22, 2014

Indeed, and I couldn't agree more.

I'm glad Tom believes that too as I've heard a very strong rumour that Rod Liddle's next book is a collection of short stories called The Gruesome Murder of Tom Sutcliffe, whose title story imagines the Round the Britain Quiz/Saturday Review/Start the Week host being graphically 'sliced and diced', to general amusement and acclaim, by Radio 4 listeners who can't stand him and what they see as his elitist metropolitan liberal views. (I've already pre-ordered my copy on Amazon).

Tom also admired something by the artist Jeremy Deller's on YouTube. I forget what. 

Jeremy, you will be glad to hear, has now imagined St. Helier, Jersey being accidentally burned down in 2017 during a protest there by non-Jersey people against the island's tax/tax haven policies. This is not to be taken seriously of course (of course). It's contemporary art, plastic cows. 

The Jamaican poet Kei Miller had some very sharp things to say about contemporary Jamaican society....er....about wicked dead whiteys and what they'd gotten up to in Jamaica. (Actually, when I say "very sharp" I mean 'very predictable, but expressed poetically and with much talk of 'multiplicity''). He had Tom, Hilary & Co. duly bending their white knees and tugging their apologetic forelocks. Elsewhere he was agreeably poetic, sounding profound even when you suspect he wasn't actually saying anything profound at all. 

Poor Neil MacGregor, though he got to go first, got far too little time. 

His programme and exhibition sounds interesting. The discussion about it on this edition of Start the Week, however, has been outclassed by a truly superb interview with Mr MacGregor by Simon Schama in the Financial Times, which you should (I think) be able to read for free. 

Here's a brief flavour of it:

There is a point in the exhibition, he says, from which, in one direction, the visitor will be looking at the beautiful portrait of Goethe by Tischbein – with the great man, a slouch hat on his head, recumbent in the warm light of an Italian landscape, the epitome of humanely learned Germany – while the other direction takes the eye to that Buchenwald inscription. In the Buchenwald essay MacGregor himself raises the awful, essential question of how one kind of Germany turned into the other. But he doesn’t offer an answer: “I don’t understand it myself,” is all he says.

His humility is moving but, all the same, there are ways to try. The Holocaust was made possible precisely because earlier figures who had shaped German culture had dehumanised the Jews and made them objects of murderous hatred. MacGregor wants to present Luther as the father of the German language, and so he was. But what he also fathered, all the more potently for that status, was an obsessive anti-semitism which described the Jews as “full of devil’s feces which they wallow in like swine”. “If they could they would kill us all,” he raved, proposing in On the Jews and their Lies a programme to burn their synagogues and raze their houses, so as to dispose of the “poisonous envenomed worms” that they were.

Luther’s anti-semitism is not in this show. But its illuminations are no less deep for being less relentlessly grim. The Iron Cross, often taken to be the emblem of Prussian militarism, was, he reminds us, invented in a moment of reformist egalitarianism, following the traumatic defeat and humiliation by Napoleon in 1806. Its consequence was to trigger a period of reform. The Cross was iron, not of a precious metal, because it was the first decoration that could be awarded to all ranks. Sanctioned by King Friedrich Wilhelm III, it became the symbol of a new, comradely patriotism.

Rod Liddle v Tom Sutcliffe

My goodness, wasn't Start the Week fun today! 

Rod Liddle really got under the skin of presenter Tom Sutcliffe. 

In fairness, Tom Sutcliffe asked for it. He'd gone after Rod for "racism" almost from the word go for daring to say, in print and on air - and on the BBC no less - precisely the kind of things people like us tend to believe, alongside huge swatches of the British populus - things that aren't racist. 

Rod was completely unfazed by all this, and gave Tom Sutcliffe a cheerful roasting. 

Tom didn't sound to be enjoying it one bit though. His voice kept getting higher in pitch as he tried to assert himself and control his anger [not entirely successfully]. 

He also tried pretty hard to use his power as a BBC presenter to stamp on Rod Liddle's uncomfortable opinions, encouraging two of the other guests - a left-leaning community activist and a pro-multiculturalism threatre director who talked of the "7/7 boys and the Boston Marathon kids"- to say the right things [even asking them leading questions at times].

Rod Liddle was having none of it though.

Tom clearly isn't used to handling views like those expressed/reported by Rod. After all, those sort of views don't get much of an airing on Saturday Review. 

It would do BBC Radio 4 some good to have Rod Liddle and Tom Sutcliffe share the job of presenting Start the Week on a regular basis. It would be a step towards freeing the station from its well-earned reputation as a bastion of bien pensant thinking.

Update: Rod has written his own response to Tom Sutcliffe - one that will make a lot of sense if you listened to Start the Week today....

...[and which I've slightly tidied up, as Rod [good man!] clearly wrote it either in haste or in drink]...:

I had a horrible dream last night that I’ve never had before. In the dream, I knew I had to get up early and couldn’t get to sleep. Every time I checked the clock it got closer to 0600 and I got more and more panicked and frantic. But it was a dream. Most odd.

The reason I had to get up early was to talk about my book Selfish Whining Monkeys on the BBC Radio Four Start The Week. 

The presenter, Tom Sutcliffe, made a point which is often made: that me, and people like me:

"You complain that a whole bunch of serious issues within society are not allowed to be discussed and yet you talk about them every week, Rod.”

Well yes, but at the risk of being called a racist and a bigot.

So I can do it, but it’s very difficult for people in positions of political power, people who rely upon being tolerated by the liberal media elite, to do it – because that’s likely to be the end of their careers.

I couldn’t give a monkey’s if some irrelevant middle class blackclad drug-addled hag, male or female, from the Groucho Club thinks I’m beyond the pale for suggesting that the present rates of immigration have not been wholly beneficial to the poorest sections of society, even if they have been economically beneficial to the black-clad hags etc.

I think it would be for the best if you judged for yourselves if I am unspeakably ghastly, a sort of Anders Breivik of print, by buying the book. But I suppose that’s a very self-serving argument.

Thank you for the days

Pretentious, Moi? 

They say everyone's a critic but, in spite of that alleged fact, vanishingly few of us ever get an invite from the BBC to vent our critical feelings on any of the corporation's arts review programmes. 

That blindingly obvious thought crossed my mind whilst listening to tonight's Saturday Review on Radio 4, and I intend to get partial revenge on them for that upsetting fact here in this very blog-post.

Now, I haven't listened to Saturday Review for years, so this was an encounter with a friend/work colleague/ex I haven't seen for years.

I used to be a regular listener though, and I've always liked Tom Sutcliffe.

I also used to be a devout watcher of The Review Show/Newsnight Review on BBC Two. 

I watched it from the days when Mark Lawson usually had the 3 Ps - Allison Pearson, Tony Parsons and Tom 'It's Simply Appallin' Paulin - on the panel. John Carey, Germaine Greer and others gradually became regulars too. I could bear them all [and the left-wing bias], however infuriating they could sometimes be (especially Tom Paulin)...

...at least until Ekow Eshun became a regular...

....Oh dear, Ekow Eshun!...

His utter pretentiousness, dumbness-dressed-up-as-high-intellectualism, and way of yakking over everyone else if they chanced to disagree with any of his pronouncements-from-on-high was so irritating that he began spoiling The Review Show for me - and the mere mention of his name at the start of the programme would make me rush for the 'off switch'. What was once an unmissable programme for me because a highly missable one as a result. 

Well, that's the story I've told myself for some time about why I stopped watching it.

[Another part of my rationalisation for that is that Kirsty Wark's increasing role in presenting the programme probably didn't help much either.]

That may be a false memory on my part though as I've got no comparable explanation for why I stopped listening to Saturday Review. 

Was it because I became fed up of the same old crowd of nay-saying, pompous, left-liberal people appearing on it, week in and week out? 

Or was it that it coincided with a rise in right-wing political feeling on my part? A feeling that coincided exactly with my increasing alarm about BBC bias? Was it that I became so engrossed with the issue of BBC bias - especially after finding the Biased BBC blog and then starting blogging about BBC bias myself - that my viewing/listening horizons shrank drastically? Hence, goodbye Saturday Review?

Probably the latter.

Anyhow. And whatever.

I, therefore, missed the fact that Newsnight Review dropped Kirsty and got that nice bee-keeping Martha instead, and even embraced right-wingers - yes, yer actual right-wingers on a BBC arts review programme!!!!!! well, one right-winger anyhow - in the shape of James Delingpole, before being banished to BBC Four and finally dropped for good. 

I rather regret having stopped watching it. I'd have liked to have seen Dellers holding his own amidst the usual kind of Review critic.

So, in that spirit, and tempted by seeing that they were going to review a musical about The Kinks (I like The Kinks), I tuned in to tonight's Saturday Review on Radio 4...

...only to find that Ekow Eshun was on the panel.

[I was going to post about this earlier but I went into shock and have only just come round, thanks to the miraculous properties of smelling salts.] 

Oh, the Fates were cursing me!

There he was again, Ekow Eshun, talking pretentious twaddle, rabbiting over everyone who disagreed with him, being illogically negative...

Anyone can be illogically negative. I've been illogically negative about Ekow Eshun here perhaps.

...Oh dear, Ekow Eshun!...

And there was a left-liberal American on the panel too [Meg Rosoff], just as there always used to be.

Still, at least the other guest, Northern Irish novelist Lucy Caldwell, was more genuine-sounding, open-minded and life-affirming. And Tom Sutcliffe was as good as ever.

For what it's worth, Lucy liked the Kinks musical, Tom thought it got better as it went along, Meg wished it had been more political and Ekow talked total bollocks about it.

Ah, happy days, I'm finally back in the wonderful world of BBC arts review programmes!

The Babylonian Noah, experts, science, Vermeer and a play about blindness and the cosmos

Talking of flooding (as we were), it's bouquet time again...as I warmly recommend this morning's Start the Week. 

It re-interviewed Dr Irving Finkel of the British Museum (fresh from his appearance on Ed Stourton's Sunday) about that remarkable Babylonian tablet from c1750 BC, which startlingly prefigured the Bible story of Noah's Ark and the Flood  by about a thousand years. Dr Finkel is a very interesting and enthusiastic expert, and it was fascinating stuff. 

I was also taken by sociology professor Harry Collins of Cardiff University. He was on to defend people like Dr Finkel - experts. 

Harry isn't a jargon-spouting sociologist, thank goodness; indeed, he was so genial and conversational that he could easily be a blogger - were he not quite so wary of internet opinion-spouters (like me). 

I'm not unsympathetic to his defence of experts either. 

I'm far too discreet to go into personal family matters, but I know that the word 'expert' can be a dirty word for some people (very close to home) - which is absurd and slightly alarming. 

Simply put, people who spend years of their life thinking, researching and discovering new things surely know more about those things than we do - whether we like to think so or not. 

Plus, science really is difficult and, yes, most non-scientists (like me) who blab about complicated scientific matters really do have much less of a clue (however confident they may sound) than bone fide scientists. 

Ah, but, I hear you say...climate science. 

Prof Collins mentioned that. He also mentioned fraud in science, and human nature. 

He didn't connect either of those to the climate science controversy which rages across the internet (and beyond) though. Quite the opposite. For him those internet users who rage against the climate science 'consensus' are precisely the wrong-headed people he has in mind. You may disagree.

I'm quite 'wrong-headed' about climate science myself, but I think Harry's general point stands nonetheless.

Incidentally, presenter Tom Sutcliffe (who I continue to think of as either 'Tom Sutcliffe of The Guardian', or 'Tom Service') had a dig at Eric Pickles for sneering at experts along the way. Is that a case of BBC bias or Guardian bias? (Or are they one and the same thing?)

Also present was Professor Colin Blakemore talking about our senses, the link between the arts and science, and a documentary film called Tim's Vermeer (a Penn & Teller production in which Prof Blakemore has been involved), where an inventor, Tim Jenison, duplicates the apparent techniques of Vermeer, using small mirrors - which is another take on David Hockney's idea that the precision of some of the great painters came from their use of things like camera obscura. (I've always found that plausible). 

The final guest - from the arts world - was Hattie Naylor, a playwright. She embodies Prof Blakesmore vision of an arts-science fusion. Her latest play Sound&Fury’s Going Dark is being shown at the Science Museum, tackling blindness and cosmology. If I lived three hundred or more miles closer to London, and if I was sort of person who goes to see plays, I might, just might, have gone to see this. Though probably not.