BBC
What I would do if I were in charge of the BBC
Gstaad I’ve been wrestling all week with indecision, the kind that tests one’s soul, and the uncertainty is killing me.…
Affectionate and unthreatening, just like usual: Last Night of the Proms reviewed
The Last Night of the Proms came and went, and it was pretty much as anyone might have predicted, if…
Letters: In defence of seagulls
China’s covered Sir: If Charles Moore had contacted the BBC, rather than conducting a fruitless Google search, we would have…
Our Belarusian blind spot
I’d always rather liked the Finns, until I came across the conductor Dalia Stasevska. When I asked my mother what…
A convincing and hair-raising depiction of showbiz at its most luridly weird: I Hate Suzie reviewed
Fifteen minutes into the first episode of I Hate Suzie, main character Suzie Pickles was doing a photoshoot in her…
The BBC’s future is hanging by a thread
Reading the speech Tony Hall gave to the Edinburgh Television Festival, I was struck by his upbeat, confident tone. The…
My pronouncement on the BBC
Radio 4 recently ran an adaptation of Albert Camus’s The Plague in which the protagonist, Dr Bernard Rieux, was transformed…
The absurd self-pity of Stuart Broad
You are, shall we say, a famous commentator, one of a tiny elite in the British media. You are paid…
Is Chris Packham finally facing facts on shooting?
Chris Packham is widely seen as the most extreme of well-known animal rights activists. His obsessions against hunting and shooting…
The only things left worth watching on the BBC are foreign buy-ins like The Last Wave
Soon, very soon now — even sooner than I imagined, if A Suitable Boy turns out to be as lacklustre…
From riveting Hitchockian melodrama to bigoted drivel: BBC’s Unprecedented reviewed
Back to the West End at last. After a four- month lay-off, I grabbed the first available chance to catch…
The real Rupert Murdoch, by Kelvin MacKenzie
The BBC documentary on Rupert Murdoch is pure one-sided bile, says Kelvin MacKenzie
Young people have never paid attention to the BBC
In January, the director-general of the BBC, Lord Hall of Birkenhead, announced that the corporation intended to shift away from…
The politics of email sign-offs
I think Anne Applebaum is a friend of mine. I certainly hope so, since I have always admired her writing,…
The BBC's failure to report gender identity accurately
‘Blackpool woman accessed child abuse images in hospital bed’. It’s a good headline, in that it catches your attention. But…
Dysfunctional music for dysfunctional people: The Public Image is Rotten reviewed
A star is born, but instead of emerging into the world beaming for the cameras, he spits and snarls and…
Why haven’t podcasts cracked the recipe for audio drama?
In Beeb-dominated Britain, the commercial triumph of podcasting — epitomised by Spotify’s recent £100 million deals with Joe Rogan and…
Who watches the broadcast watchdog?
At the beginning of April, I became so frustrated by the supine coverage of the government’s response to the coronavirus…
Why is Robert Burton’s masterpiece Anatomy of Melancholy being sold as self-help?
The BBC has been having a good pandemic. Stuck at home, a generation raised on podcasts and YouTube has discovered…
The festivalisation of TV
Televising Glastonbury has changed the festival, and in turn transformed television, says Graeme Thomson
The musical event of the year: Wigmore Hall BBC Radio 3 Special Broadcasts reviewed
Remember when 2020 was going to be Beethoven year? There were going to be cycles and festivals, recordings and reappraisals;…
The real problem with Newsnight
The Twitter feed of BBC Newsnight editor Esme Wren (remember, I read this stuff so you don’t have to) is…
The ferocious bias against Dominic Cummings
At Dominic Cummings’s press conference on Monday, reporters tried two lines of attack. One was to behave like local detectives,…
The best Macbeths to watch online
The world’s greatest playwright ought to be dynamite at the movies. But it’s notoriously hard to turn a profit from…
How Tom Stoppard foretold what we’re living through
A TV play by Tom Stoppard, A Separate Peace, was broadcast live on Zoom last Saturday. I watched as my…
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