The Brixton uprising

The sound of yet more small axes being ground at the BBC...

It looks as if the 'woke' BBC has rebranded the 1981 Brixton riot as "the Brixton uprising":

[Click to enlarge and read, especially if you're eyesight's as bad as mine]

In fairness, that decade, and the decade before it, were marked by other uprisings in the UK - especially by those branded by their fascist oppressors as "football hooligans". 

Millwall supporters, to quote just one famous example, were responsible for a large-scale popular uprising in Luton in 1985 during the quarter-final of the FA Cup. They stormed the Winter Palace end apparently. 

"To blame the fledgling is unjust./It toilets when and where it must"

At least there's been some relief today. 

After what seems to have been an eternity, Radio 4's 4.30pm Sunday poetry spot has finally paused from being endlessly 'woke' and brought back splendid, short-breathed Roger McGough and Poetry Please. 

Today's guest was poet laureate Simon Armitage, of whom I'm a fan. He chatted to Roger and chose his pick of listeners' choices. 

And they were great picks too, though the programme began with part of a medieval poem translated by Simon himself called The Owl and the Nightingale, "full of medieval toilet humour" according to Roger - as we heard.

Roger was right that it's "lovely stuff". Here's The Owl defending his reputation to an equally argumentative Nightingale:

I undertake essential tasks

Where people live, performing acts

That folk find helpful, doing good

Where humans house their stock of food. 

I prey on vermin, dusk to dawn, 

Both in the church and in the barn. 

It is my pleasure in Christ's house

To hunt down every filthy mouse.

No rodent will live safely there

While I patrol it from the air.

Alternatively, I might choose

Some different dwelling for my roost.

Great trees stand in the wood, and there

The sturdy boughs are never bare,

But overgrown by ivy vines,

Whose leafy tendrils intertwine, 

Whose verdant tones are never lost

Through any winter - snow or frost. 

My stronghold in those trunks and arms,

In summer cool, in winter warm,

Is always green and always bright

When yours has disappeared from sight.

The extract's closing couplet ran as follows: "To blame the fledgling is unjust./It toilets when and where it must" - which is certainly true.

AE Housman, William Wordsworth, Thomas Hardy, Shakespeare and Wilfred Owen followed, along with a trio of modern female poets, Alison Brackenbury, Lorna Goodison and Shivanee Ramlochan.

!

Marianna Spring, from the BBC's Selfie Dissemination Unit, certainly likes her exclamation marks! 

It's a toss-up as to which appear more in her tweets, photos of herself or exclamation marks!

Not that I'm innocent on that front. I learned from Sue that too many exclamation marks are a bit much (like laughing at your own jokes, as F. Scott Fitzgerald once remarked). I have been trying to limit my use of them ever since, not always successfully!

The best time to use them, of course, is when you're marking an exclamation - eg, "Lawkabiddy! That's a biased report!" - though they are certainly useful for suggesting that you're feeling perky today as well.

LAWKABIDDY, if you're wondering, was an 18th century exclamation of surprise or astonishment. I recommend it to Marianna. She should start all her tweets with it.

What you may have missed...

This morning's Sunday programme on Radio 4 was typical. 

It began, as it so often does these days, by reporting criticism of PM Modi's BJP government in India. Mr Modi's ears must often burn on Sunday mornings. 

Then there were two people who converted to religion during lockdown - one, inevitably, to Islam. 

And then there was the usual guest from main presenter Ed Stourton's liberal Catholic magazine The Tablet talking breathlessly about Pope Francis. 

An interview discussing a campaign petitioning for a 14-year old Christian girl being persecuted in Pakistan to be granted asylum by Boris Johnson - "Asylum is the only answer" - came next, tiptoeing around the issue of those responsible for her persecution - Muslims.  

There was also an approving feature on the sanctuary movement - churches that help migrants in the US. Both presenter and reporter stuck to the word "migrant", avoiding the words "illegal" and "immigrant".

To mark the break, a hundred years ago, of the Church of Wales from the Church of England, a discussion followed between Wales Humanists, who want more secularisation in Wales, and a Welsh bishop who wants liberalisation, diversity and inclusivity. Very Sunday!

And, to end, there was a heartwarming feature about an NHS doctor and nurse switching on the Christmas lights at Durham Cathedral.

Are you tempted to listen?

No hug for Liam

Liam Fay has become an excellent Sunday Times TV critic. Like his daily equivalent Hugo Rifkind though, I don't think he enjoyed the first episode of The Vicar of Dibley in Lockdown, describing it as a "prissy monologue":

Glib tidings are dispensed in wearying abundance by The Vicar of Dibley in Lockdown, a painfully unfunny series of seasonal sermons from Dawn French’s once revered altar ego. Everything about the venture smacks of piety and schmaltz, the very qualities the original sitcom endeavoured to lampoon...The BBC has billed the Dibley resurrection as “the warm comedy hug we’ve all missed”. It’s become an article of broadcasting faith that it’s more important for comedy to be cosy than funny. However, no matter how it’s couched or camouflaged, a lame joke from a professional gagster is not a cuddle; it’s more like a slap in the face. 

Have They Got Bias For Us

In what must surely be the least surprising report into BBC bias ever produced, the Campaign for Common Sense analysed comedy programmes on BBC One, BBC Two and Radio 4 throughout November and found - across 364 slots - and found that 74% of the slots were occupied by comedians “with publicly pronounced Left-leaning, anti-Brexit or ‘woke’ views.”

So that's 74% of 141 comedians, with only two comedians - Geoff Norcott (of course) and Gyles Brandreth - holding openly expressed pro-Brexit or Conservative sympathies. 

Even DG Tim Davie has acknowledged that BBC comedy has a problem in this respect, so a letter outlining the findings from the CCS's director Mark Lehain won't be News For Him.. 

The Telegraph quotes Sir Robbie Gibb responding to the study:

This report starkly reveals just how much the BBC has to change to be truly in touch with the people who pay its licence fee. 

Comedy is not the exclusive preserve of the left and the BBC has a duty to reflect in its programmes the wide diversity of opinions held in this country, not just those with anti-Brexit or woke views.

But the real punchline here is the statement from "a BBC spokesperson". Its glib, dismissive tone couldn't be more BBC:

We don’t analyse our comedy by comparing numbers. We judge it on it being funny, how popular it is and whether it reflects a range of different voices and views.

The BBC always says "We don’t analyse our comedy by comparing numbers" to any quantitative study that comes their way - unless it's research that comes from, say, Cardiff University and tells the BBC what they want to hear! 

And "We judge it on it being funny, how popular it is and whether it reflects a range of different voices and views" is particularly galling as the study proves that the BBC's judgement is faulty and that BBC comedy barely even begins to reflect a range of different voices and views.

Well done to the Campaign for Common Sense for trying to prove the obvious, but the BBC have had a couple of decades of honing their responses to the kind of two-sentence brush-off quoted above and they were never going to get a respectful hearing from the BBC. 

***********

And then there's Nish Kumar....

As Charlie notes on the open thread, the Telegraph article recalls the following:

On a past episode of BBC Two’s The Mash Report, Nish Kumar referred to the BBC’s impartiality guidelines as a requirement to provide “a platform for widely-discredited views because the licence fee dictates we should pander to weirdos”.

Counting

The Telegraph's online headline at the moment reads Boris Johnson branded 'English nationalist' by former Tory chairman. The former Tory chairman in question is former BBC chairman Lord Patten and the story concerns those Royal Navy ships protecting our fishing grounds. The Telegraph, though leading with criticism of the government, features voices from both sides. Its paragraphs run as follows:

2 Critical

3 Supportive

1 Critical

5 Factual

8 Critical

4 Supportive 

Total Supportive: 7

Total Critical: 11

The BBC's equivalent report, now leading the BBC News website, has the headline Brexit: No-deal Navy threat 'irresponsible', says Tobias Ellwood and is noticeably less balanced. Its paragraphs run as follows:

2 Critical

4 Factual

7 Critical

2 Supportive

Total Supportive: 2

Total Critical: 9

Controversial (again)

I see the BBC's Helen Catt, in a report being put out on the News Channel this afternoon, is attaching the word "controversial" to the sentence "Four Royal Navy ships are on standby to protect British fishing waters". 

As someone said on Twitter about this, “controversial” now seems to be code for “we don’t agree with it and we want to incline you towards that view too”.

Update: Meanwhile over at Sky News...

Andrew Neil: British media going slightly bonkers over deployment a few ships to patrol thousands of miles of fishing waters. Sky News talks breathlessly of “armed” Royal Navy vessels. Obviously bollox. I mean why would any Navy be armed?

Jeremy speaks

The Trump administration took the USA out of President Obama's nuclear deal with Iran. 

The US withdrawal was backed by Israel, Saudi Arabia and other Arab states but opposed by the EU, the UK, and the BBC's Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen. 

Here's the latter, on today's From Our Own Correspondent, expressing his view on the matter again: 

Donald Trump had an even bigger impact on policy towards Iran. The Obama administration, along with other permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany, stopped what I believed was a steady slide to war by making an agreement with Iran about its nuclear activities. It wasn't perfect deal - show me one that is - but it was a chance for a new beginning.  

His FOOC piece was also notable for focusing on what matters to Jeremy Bowen - the Palestinians - while missing out the remarkable peace deals between Israel and Arab countries. And President Trump's dogged reluctance to entangle the US in Middle Eastern wars, unlike all his recent predecessors (also unmentioned), adds an ironic twist to his concluding advice (prayer?) for Joe Biden: "Perhaps the most constructive move Joe Biden can make after his inauguration is to concentrate more on diplomacy, less on drones and the other dogs of war."

A never-ending story

Sky News's home editor Jason Farrell has an investigation today about the mainly-Pakistani-origin paedophile grooming gangs continuing to sexually abuse children in northern England. It's a story I suspect his equivalent at the BBC, Mark Easton, will continue to steer well clear of.

No laughing matter

The BBC officially responded to complaints about the upcoming pro-Black Lives Matter sermon on BBC One's The Vicar of Dibley in Lockdown by saying: 

In The Vicar of Dibley in Lockdown, Geraldine shares with her congregation her take on some of the key stories of 2020, including clapping for the NHS, the Black Lives Matter movement, lockdown, and school exams being cancelled. She is a much-loved and well-established comic character and will be seen processing the year’s events in her familiar outspoken and high-spirited way. 

Meanwhile, Hugo Rifkind in The Times has watched the first 9-minute episode of the series and he really isn't selling it to me:

Ten minutes of The Vicar of Dibley eked not one laugh out of me whatsoever. It was like every joke you’ve thought of for yourself during those interminable lockdown Zoom chats, done back at you with a brittle smile....It was like it came from a parallel reality, as if written by people who had come across the concept of “jokes” in a book, but hadn’t experienced one themselves. 

Maybe Richard Curtis should get back together with his old Blackadder co-writer Ben Elton. As Upstart Crow shows Ben still knows what a joke is and can write funny ones.

Gardening is racist

Ethnobotanist James Wong does well out of the BBC. They gave him his big presenting break with a BBC Two show called Grow Your Own Drugs (very BBC!). And he's accepted the invitation to present several other programmes for the corporation. And he appears on Countryfile and is a regular panellist on Gardeners' Question Time. 

He likes to play to a certain gallery though. His name recently cropped up in several papers mocking BBC DG's Tim Davie's calls for BBC presenters to behave and not compromise BBC impartiality on social media. 

And he's really going for it today. 

Here's how his later Twitter foray began, naturally with a Guardian person teeing things up: 

Ed Wall, Guardian: Gardens are denied their political agency because they too often reveal uncomfortable politics of individual ownership, spatial inequity and unsustainable practices. There needs to be more honest conversations about gardens.

James Wong: Absolutely U.K. gardening culture has racism baked into its DNA. It’s so integral that when you point out it’s existence, people assume you are against gardening, not racism. Epitomised, for example, by the fetishisation (and wild misuse) of words like ‘heritage’ and ‘native’.

What to make of this?

Well, (a) I'm not for censoring people, and I want the BBC to represent all views in some sort of rough proportion to the actual views of the population - something the BBC fails at very badly. 

(b) James's views aren't under-represented, but massively over-represented by the BBC. 

And (c) I don't think that saying silly, extreme, divisive things should necessarily bar you from being a regular BBC guest presenter.

But (d) it's the one-sidedness of it all that's the problem. 

James Wong's career will keep on flowering and blossoming at the BBC, despite his daft, extreme views, while others will be suffocated, and wither and die. 

(David Bellamy was an early, very clear example of that). 

In fact, it's a dead cert that James Wong's career will keep on flowering and blossoming at the BBC, despite his extreme, silly views, precisely because they appeal to the BBC's many box-tickers. 

Like a court jester, he's a licenced fool who gardens. But should his biting of the hand that feeds him be given free rein?

Drollery

The outbreak of peace in the Middle East continues with Morocco and Israel making peace under the auspices of the Trump administration, and how does the BBC's Anthony Zurcher respond? 

With a negative sarcastic tweet on a related matter:

The Donald tweets:

Morocco recognized the United States in 1777. It is thus fitting we recognize their sovereignty over the Western Sahara.

The Zurch tweets back at him:

Morocco recognized US independence from Britain in 1777. The US recognizes that Western Sahara is not independent from Morocco in 2020.

Anthony Zurcher's Twitter feed is full of such sarcastic jibes, always in one direction. 

Goodness knows what he going to do when Joe and Kamala take over next month. I'm assuming he'll be entirely serious and joke-free about them while releasing his urges towards Twitter-pleasing drollery by keeping on being sarcastic about Donald Trump till the Last Trump sounds. 

Ut - Re - Mi - Fa - So - La - Si...

As unrelated to questions of BBC bias as a blogpost can be, here's a fine thread today from Friendless Churches that I found interesting:

The Sound of Music has led generations of children astray. 

Do is not a deer. Re is not a drop of golden sun. And Mi has nothing to do with me, and everything to do with an 8th-century poem to St John the Baptist. 

About 1,300 years ago, the monk and historian, Paulus Diaconus, lost his voice. During his illness, he composed a poem and dedicated it to St John the Baptist. 

It went: 

Ut queant laxīs

resonāre fibrīs

Mīra gestōrum

famulī tuōrum,

Solve pollūtī

labiī reātum,

Sāncte Iōhannēs

This translates as, So that your servants may, with loosened voices, resound the wonders of your deeds, clean the guilt from our stained lips, O Saint John. 

In the 11th century, Benedictine monk, Guido of Arezzo took Paulus’s poem and set it to a sweet climbing melody. 

To remember the notes, he took the opening syllable of each line: Ut - Re - Mi - Fa - So - La - Si... and used them to name the notes of the C-Major scale. 

Guido D’Arezzo’s Micrologus – a musical treatise – became one of the most popular texts on music in the Middle Ages. In it, he included the seven musical notes: ut-re-mi-fa-so-la-si. 

But, I hear you cry, the notes don’t have ut and si! 

… that’s because in the 17th century, Giovanni Battista Doni changed ut to do, and in the 19th century Sarah Glover changed si to ti, as they were easier to sing. 

... And that’s why you’re reciting poem to St John the Baptist every time you sing this musical scale. 

More

In related news, Dawn French is back for some Christmas Vicar of Dibley specials, and guess what?

Here's a bit of reaction:

Margot Parker: Dawn French's Vicar Of Dibley character will deliver a BLM sermon. No thank you! 

Bruce Lawson: What better way for them to defuse the situation than use a popular programme to promote a racist political organisation that wants to smash capitalism and abolish the police, prisons and borders.

Laurence Fox: A sermon from the high altar of the church of moral superiority, the BBC. This virtuous false enlightenment allows them to ignore the charter to educate the great unwashed.

Dominic Farrell: I don’t want this type of politics ruining our Christmas. As a family, we will not be watching this. Ridiculous!

Morecambe Bay, with snow on the Lakeland hills this morning

 

Talking the knee

Millwall fans were back at The Den for the first time yesterday and booed as players took the knee, with some shouting "Get up!"

Many people understand why they booed:

Paul Embery: Millwall fans didn’t boo because they are racist. They have taken many black players to their hearts over the years. They booed because what began as a single act of solidarity has, as usual, turned into a protracted moral lecture. That is what irritates people. Understand it.  

Paul Embery: Hold on. Many people across society are uncomfortable about this act of submission which seems to have done more to divide than unite black and white. Football fans boo when players do things on the pitch which they don’t like. This is no different. Lay off Millwall fans.  

Ben Cobley: Never been a fan of Millwall fans. Undoubtedly a racist element there - always has been. However, ahem, they have a point. Booing racialist ideology and grifting is a fair thing to do.  

Liam O'Neil: Have to add my congratulations and full respect to Millwall FC Fans for their valiant anti-woke protest. Thank you for leading the way, I hope we see many more join in at every stadium in the country.  

Laura Perrins: Take the knee to support Marxist BLM if you want. But do not expect the fans, who buy their tickets to watch football, to go along with your cowardice and virtue signalling garbage.

Maajid Nawaz: I don’t care that Millwall fans booed taking the knee. What can often appear inexplicable usually has a simple explanation: We are sick & tired of virtue signalling corporate minstrel shows, as they cooperate with the likes of the genocidal regime in China.

Other people don't understand why they booed. 

Here's how the incident was reporting live on BBC One's Final Score by Ben Mundy:

Ben Mundy, BBC: We'll get to Wayne Rooney in a second and to matters on the pitch, but it is matters off the pitch dominating thing here at The Den this afternoon, the ugly side to having supporters back in stadium, booing as the players took the knee prior to kick off. It comes after Millwall released a statement yesterday on behalf of the players saying they will continue to do it because the gesture means they can showcase their support for the fight against discrimination. There are only 2,000 fans here. It wasn't all of them. But clearly something needs to be addressed.

And here's Final Score presenter Eilidh Barbour:

Eilidh Barbour, BBC: Well, Dion, it's so disappointing to hear and it is again an example that education needs to continue and this is something that still exists in the football game.

The media's response is also drawing comment: 

Julia Hartley-Brewer: "Quite shocking" is how a presenter on Sky News just described Millwall fans booing players taking the knee yesterday. It wasn't shocking at all. Not to anyone living in the real world. It was entirely predictable. Fans don't want divisive woke politics at football matches.  

Patrick O'Flynn:  Almost 80% of Tory voters (the party that won the general election) think BLM has raised racial tensions. So how can BBC/Sky/ITV outlets only cover the booing of footballers taking the knee in condemnatory fashion, as if it were proof of Far Right bigotry?  

James Bartholomew: The BBC 4 propaganda channel reported the boos of football fans at the kneeling to BLM only incidentally to reporting condemnation of the boos. It made no attempt to quote anyone explaining or justifying the boos. Now the same on Radio 5 Live but more so with one of the presenters saying he hopes the Football Association will "stamp it out". The BBC lives in a parallel universe where nobody acknowledges BLM as divisive. 

Who needs Michael Portillo?

With or without a Bradshaw's and Covid restrictions permitting, travel to the city of Lancaster on the West Coast main line. 

After a brief, inevitable detour to Morecambe and back, take the correct train from Lancaster Station and, after a very Brief Encounter with Binkie Huckerback and Dame Celia Molestrangler at Carnforth Station, you'll soon find yourself clattering along the bird-rich edge of Morecambe Bay. 

You'll see a nature reserve as you pass but you probably won't hear the booming bitterns of Leighton Moss (which Chris Packham & Co. used to haunt on the BBC's Watches. They struggled with the bitterns too). 

You'll then move inland and pass through the greenery of Silverdale. That's where the apparent highlight of BBC One's widely-panned Christmas Day schedule this year - the late Victoria Wood - lived in an out-of-the-way traffic-unfriendly lane leading down to a popular cove. From her house you can look across empty fields (possibly containing cows and sheep when people aren't looking) towards the enchanting church at the heart of the village, many minutes walk away down a dangerous road. (The BBC's Mark Easton would doubtless want houses built on those fields for incomers).

You'll then cross the fabulous viaduct at Arnside (a small town with art galleries, great pubs, and hideous parking problems). The views are spectacular. Arnside is hugged at various distances by hills in all directions, some receding towards eternity, and quicksand-filled cul-de-sacs much visited by BBC types eager to show themselves bravely sinking into the sands in their wellies for public information purposes (and ratings). 

Beauty abounds, and you're soon chuntering on and passing through the retirees' paradise of Grange-over-Sands, still clinging to the shoreline of Morecambe Bay. 

Grange itself clings to ever-climbing hills, possibly to the inconvenience of some of its less-prepared retirees. The only way is up there after you get off the train. That's why I believe a visit there must have inspired a 1980s Number One hit by Yazz, though I'll leave it to the all-knowing Ms Spring and Mr Wendling of the BBC to confirm that. 

On and on you go, on trains of varying quality (depending on the company running the service), till you reach my favourite moment of the journey and the next great bridge: the breathtaking crossing towards Stan Laurel's Ulverston. The image at the top of this post is a Twitter photo of the bay at Ulverston as the sun did something. Turn one way and you're looking over the magic of Morecambe Bay again. Turn another and you're looking down a valley that will eventually take to you to Coniston, its lake and its Old Man. 

It's long been a stupifyingly overpriced journey, but it's a belter. Pushing the boat out, I've done it three times in 50 years. (It's usually been a car journey instead). 

And then, with the train moving inland and the scenery suddenly turning dull, you grind on towards Dalton-in-Furness. 

Dalton-in-Furness, a slice of early Coronation Street clinging to the bottom of a steep hill, is best known for its wildlife park where a female keeper was killed by a rare, endangered tiger and where a rare, endangered rhino escaped, ran amok and was shot and killed. I once got caught there in a thunderstorm and found myself worrying for a tropical snake when the power went off. I surprised myself by being so anxious about its wellbeing and by standing watch over it. It was, of course, behind glass at the time. The park's still going, now finally under new owners. Dalton's not a very 'BBC' place.

And then a weary few minutes more carry you on to Barrow-in-Furness.

I see Barrow-in-Furness most days, over the sea from Morecambe (weather-permitting). 

I was brought up to regard it as an absolute dump, and visits in my younger years didn't dispel that impression. In my bookish late teens I was horrified to find only a WH Smith and a charity shop selling Christian books. But it's improved. Those who like shopping can now go there (coronavirus-permitting) and find things to buy and places to eat. 

Don't forget that Barrow is the now-forsaken home town of Dave Myers of the BBC's Hairy Bikers. His pretentious new Salvador Dali-like moustache, possibly even more than his abandonment of Barrow to move somewhere posh down south, has seen his popularity plummet hereabouts. (From hero to zero, and a zero who's trying to be Zorro.) Dave Myers would be persona non grata among the Furness end of my family if only they could stop criticising him. 

And Barrow has plenty of industrial history. 

I count it a particularly fine discovery today to learn of a living, Barrow-born artist called John Duffin. He does paintings of all sorts of places, including many in London. But it's his Barrow paintings that I want to recommend above all. 

These are beautiful, don't you think?

Darkness and Light

As per Arthur T's comment on the Open Thread, darkness and light from the BBC News website's home page:

In which I get out of bed and take offence at Huw Edwards

78 year-old physicist Sir Michael Pepper has incurred the wrath of grumpy BBC newsreader Huw Edwards. Paying tribute, via The Times, to his late colleague Sir John Meurig Thomas, Sir Michael wrote the following: 

The ostentatiously Welsh Huw got out of bed this morning, on the wrong side no doubt, and tweeted: 

I don't think Sir Michael Pepper meant that Sir John Meurig Thomas used Welsh in his daily life "simply" to thwart others. (That's fake news, and from a BBC newsreader!). 

And I'd say that if Sir John did what Sir Michael described regularly it shouldn't be held as a slur on the Welsh nation for him to "simply" recount that that's exactly what Sir John did or to say why he did it. 

Of course though, silly me, taking offence doesn't need adequate reasons these days, especially on Twitter. It's enough just to take it, send out a snippy tweet and bask in the 'likes' from people with Welsh flags in their Twitter bios. 

What a world!

Friday chat

Here's a discussion of the kind I've not had at work today, but it's interesting for featuring Prof Matthew Goodwin and The Economist editor/BBC presenter Anne McElvoy talking about Tim Davie's 'very BBC'-sounding diversity plans and how they start to fall short of what's really needed (as does this conversation):

Press Gazette: BBC director-general Tim Davie says boosting workforce diversity is "mission critical" and that there will be a "rewiring of the core" at the BBC. "Bold" targets are 50/50 gender split, 20% BAME and 12% disabled representation. 

Professor Matthew Goodwin: No mention of education or class? 34% of BBC leaders who shape coverage of news & current affairs were privately educated, 60% have parents with degrees & 69% have parents who belonged to the higher managerial & professional elite.

Anne McElvoy: The education point is a bit harder as it needs highly qualified journalists. But amazed by the complacency about a huge skew towards privately educated in news-current affairs. Think I’m right in saying BBC Radio 4's Today for one doesn’t have a single presenter who wasn’t!

Professor Matthew Goodwin: Dear me that needs to change! And on education sure but could draw from much wider pool i.e. not Oxbridge. Might be a decent reply to the Brexit moment. 

Anne McElvoy: Yes up to a point but I think there’s also a double standard in which we want to encourage a high level of aspiration from state schools – and then start complaining about too much Oxbridge/Russell Group. Course I am biased on this being state school and the dreaded Oxbridge. 

Saturday update: The conversation flows on:

Professor Matthew Goodwin: I thought it was a joke but having just done the research for my book it turns out it's true. Every single presenter on Radio 4 Today is privately-educated and Oxbridge/LSE. Only the announcer, Zeb Soanes, is not.  

Anne McElvoy: No I wasn’t joking.  

Professor Matthew Goodwin: I'm quite staggered, actually. I mean I thought post-Brexit and 2010s there might have been more reflection about the need to shake-up the conversation.

Slowly breaking news

Finishing work in the last hour, I clicked into my social media feeds to learn that the left-wing Mayor of Liverpool, Joe Anderson, has been arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to commit bribery and witness intimidation. 

As you do, I then clicked onto the BBC News website and found nothing about it. 

"That's odd", I thought. So I clicked on the Sky News website and found they were leading with it under the headline "Mayor of Liverpool Joe Anderson arrested on suspicion of bribery and witness intimidation, Sky News understands". 

I popped his name into Google and found newspapers like The Daily Mail and The Sun and The Guardian reporting the story. 

Surprisingly, even Joe Anderson's Wikipedia entry had this, posted at 17:26: 

In December 2020, Anderson is one of five men arrested as part of an investigation into building and development contracts in Liverpool.

I decided to write this post at 17:44. Clicking again on the BBC News website at 17:51, the BBC are still not reporting the story. So I checked the ITV News website and it's ITV's second story.

Aren't the BBC slow? Even this blog has the story quicker than them!

Update 18:08: I click and re-clicked every minute. It appeared on the BBC News website's home page at 18:07, apparently 8 minutes after being first published. Even at 18:07 it's very short.

Third Half (sic) of November Open Thread

Good evening. Tonight at ten. A new open thread, just in case the comments aren't working for you on old posts but still work on the latest one (as, very oddly, seems to be the case for some of us). 

Update: Problem now fixed. 

Thank you for your comments.

The night is passed and the day is at hand. Let us therefore cast off the works of darkness and put on the armour of light. Let us walk honestly, as in the day.

    

Story time...

The first Sunday in Advent, for Christians, is when a candle is lit for a world wound in woe.

The first Sunday in Advent - the one on BBC Radio 4 today - give us a world wound in woe and woke, and no candle whatsoever.

Racism, transgender issues, the foreign aid budget, etc, were all present and correct.

In fact, the programme approached self-parody this week: It gave us 40 mins of the usual dreary, worthy, 'liberal' handwringing before ending with a very jolly chap singing Ding, Dong, Merrily On High! 

The programme climaxed in a show trial. 

A socially conservative Christian organisation was in the dock. (Not that anyone from the organisation was actually present. It was tried and convicted in absentia.)

What had that socially conservative Christian organisation done wrong? Well, it had put out a video which misgendered someone.

The unhappily misgendered trans man was duly interviewed by Sunday. 

He kindly granted that socially conservative voices shouldn't be silenced, but...

The "but" was, of course, that in this case - and all such cases like it - such people should be silenced. Or else. 

And then came a nice, waffling Anglican bishop. The poor man was hauled in and placed in the dock in lieu of the condemned-but-absent Christian organisation. 

The Bishop of Coventry, bless him, was completely incomprehensible. (Rowan Atkinson couldn't have made him up.) He bowed and curtsied to the unfortunate misgendered chap but said little else that made sense, and presenter William Crawley got frustrated with him.  

William's a true pro though. He stuck to Sunday's guns and pushed the bishop to condemn the head of the socially conservative Christian charity - a lady who also sits on the Church of England's General Synod. William's line of questioning was: Why is she still on the General Synod? Shouldn't disciplinary action be taken against her?

The bishop waffled and said nothing that anyone other than God could possibly understand. 

 

Blog favourite Jane Kelly of The Salisbury Review/The Conservative Woman sums it all up:

Sunday was truly outrageous today, suggesting any criticism of transgendered men should be silence in case it 'gives offence.'

It won the programme plaudits from a few Twitter folk though.

Meanwhile, this week's Sunday also contained yet another plug for a book written or co-written by someone from the left-leaning Catholic magazine The Tablet, of which Sunday's main presenter Ed Stourton remains a trustee. 

I've counted four such book plugs for senior Tablet folk, past and present, in the past couple of months. 

We've been here before. 

Still, at least the Advent edition of Sunday Worship that followed featured one of my favourite choral pieces - Ubi Caritas by the French composer Maurice Duruflé. Unfortunately, the reader talked all over it. So, to make up for that, here's the full thing - uninterrupted:

A missing detail

I'm seeing lots of underwhelmed, sceptical, even derisive comments on my social media feels about Priti Patel's deal with her French counterpart Gerald Darmanin to double the number of officers patrolling French beaches and to increase drone and radar surveillance in a declared attempt to stop illegal immigrants crossing the Channel. 

The BBC's report on the story is, of course, critical of Priti Patel too, but - being the BBC- their criticism comes from the opposite direction. 

Their online report quotes only one other person, a critic of Ms Patel: Bella Sankey, director of the pro-migrant charity Detention Action. 

Being sceptical of the BBC's bona fides, I looked her up. She was the Labour Party candidate in Arundel and South Downs in the 2019 general election. 

The BBC didn't mention that of course.

It's a very old story as far as BBC reporting goes. Not as old as Beowulf, but not far off.

Trees

One for Bella Sankey (see post above): November trees - the South Downs...

A tale of the BBC and two presidents

The BBC has spend most of this past month doggedly attaching phrases like "without providing any evidence" to headlines about US President Trump's claim of election rigging, so it's intriguing that they are adding no words of caution whatsoever to headlines like this this morning on the BBC News Channel: 

Iran's President Rouhani blames Israel for the assassination of a top nuclear scientist, saying his country won't be deterred from its nuclear ambitions. 

Shouldn't that be?: 

Iran's President Rouhani, without providing any evidence, blames Israel for the assassination of a top nuclear scientist, saying his country won't be deterred from its nuclear ambitions.

Moving on up

 

President Liz Bonnin

For some time now it's been quite evident that the BBC has been grooming Liz Bonnin to take over from Sir David Attenborough. 

She's a personable presenter and clearly knows her stuff, though with the BBC's obsessive pursuit of a very particular kind of diversity you can never quite rule out motives other than simple merit (of which she has plenty) for her rise. 

Of course, that obsessive pursuit is so pervasive now that the suspicion that merit alone isn't the key for someone's rise is far from being just a BBC matter. She's now also been made the first female president of the Wildlife Trusts, for example. Probably deservedly so - except that the newly-appointed vice-president of the Wildlife Trusts just happens to be another female BBC presenter of colour, Gillian Burke of Springwatch/Autumnwatch. 

The appointment of two BBC presenters to the top jobs in such a powerful, influential organisation (the Wildlife Trusts covers 2,300 nature reserves over 243,000 acres of countryside) obviously raises impartiality issues too. 

Liz herself says that she wants to use the position "to enforce the changes that must take place in order to secure a brighter future for our wild places,” which sounds rather like campaigning to me.

As David Brown of The Times writes:

The appointments will raise questions about BBC presenters’ outside roles after Tim Davie, the director-general, warned he would fire stars who make major breaches of impartiality guidelines on social media.

Vice-President Gillian Burke

 

The impartiality issue is especially relevant as far as Liz Bonnin goes. A BBC One programme documentary last year, Meat: A Threat to our Planet?, has been removed from the BBC iPlayer after the corporation's Executive Complaints Unit ruled that it wasn't impartial. The ECU said that "viewers received a partial analysis of the impact of livestock farming on the global environment and biodiversity, based almost exclusively on intensive farming methods and of limited application to the choices open to UK consumers.  In the judgement of the ECU, this fell below the BBC’s standards of impartiality in relation to controversial subjects."

Of course, having a programme taken off the iPlayer for breeching BBC impartiality guidelines won't harm Liz's BBC career. She's set to narrate one of the next big BBC natural history series, Penguins: Meet the Family.

Fisking 'an Arabic speaker'

Talking about The Critic, I read a striking denunciation there yesterday from Oz Katerji. It was one last fisking, so to speak - of the late Independent foreign correspondent Robert Fisk. 

The piece's headline, Fabricator and fraudster, sums it up what Oz thinks of Mr Fisk - though he later adds "fantasist" as well. 

In a nutshell, Oz Katerji believes that Bob Fisk was an unethical anti-American/anti-Israeli propagandist who built a successful career by making things up and getting away it, and he's aghast at the "veneration" displayed in some of the obituaries of him. 

The BBC was one of those who gave him what Oz would probably regard as a whitewashed obituary, with Jeremy Bowen  - a self-declared "admirer" - leading the eulogy. 

(Anti-Israel Jeremy and anti-Israel Bob always mutually admired each other). 

Oz Katerji puts the "veneration" of Robert Fisk down to the fact that "like him, they preferred to tell a story that was not true, because stories are often far more comforting than the reality."

One passage in the Critic piece struck me in the light of the BBC's obituary. The BBC, while saying how "highly regarded",  says, in passing: "Fisk, an Arabic speaker". Oz regards that as fake news:

So let’s separate the myths from the facts. Fisk did not speak fluent Arabic, not even after living in the Middle East for more than 40 years. Leaving aside the testimony of Arabic speakers who worked alongside him, his lack of basic knowledge of the language is contained multiple times within his own work, such as his inability to tell the difference between the words “mother” and “nation” in a well-known Ba’athist slogan.

One for the BBC's fact checkers?

Performing somersaults with gusto

An editorial at The Critic points out something that doesn't get pointed out enough: "No one in BBC management ever pays a price for the BBC’s mistakes — they just happen, like the weather".

(Poor hapless George Entwistle, who arrived as DG at precisely the wrong moment and lasted just 54 days, is the most obvious exception to the rule).

We know [the BBC] has been paying itself far too much for years because its defence now is that it’s no longer doing so. Yet if you boast about cutting Gary Lineker’s income, for example, by £400,000, who takes responsibility for having overpaid him so much for so long? No one. For years, the official BBC line on pay was: we can’t tell you what we’re paying ourselves because otherwise all our talent will be snatched away (by namelessly wealthy rival employers, they live in the next media village, you wouldn’t know them). Then it was obliged to tell us and the line became: we’re worth it. This was followed by, we’re sorry, our pay structure was racist and sexist — who did that? — but now it’s not: give us more money please.

On a related theme, there's an amusing story from Patrick Kidd in The Times today: 

For the Tory leadership contest 30 years ago this week, Radio 4 sent three wise men to follow the stars: Steve Richards with Michael Heseltine, Huw Edwards with Douglas Hurd and Robert Orchard with John Major. If only the IT hadn’t been in the hands of asses. The first technology failure came when someone played the wrong pre-recorded bulletin after the first ballot, announcing that Heseltine had won. At the second ballot the studio producer failed to hear Richards bellowing “Come to me now! Now!” in his ear and so missed Hezza’s concession speech, while Edwards was “apoplectic” that his magisterial analysis of Hurd chucking it in was binned because the radio car sent to relay his report couldn’t find anywhere to park. “It was all a serious cock-up,” Richards says. “As usual, those responsible got promoted.”