BBC
Universal appeal
Yet another sign that we are living in very strange times: a pair of celebrities, their names made by TV,…
Big Auntie
It’s sneaky, the way in which the BBC, so much regarded as part of the family as to be nicknamed…
The Spectator’s notes
We went to the first night of the Proms last week. Thinking it was all over, we left the auditorium…
Media culpa
A thread runs through several of the stories that have defined this turbulent summer: reporters have been shocked by the…
Counting on sheep
Going Forward (BBC4, Thursdays) is a BBC comedy about the continuing adventures of Kim Wilde, the fat, cynical but lovable…
Pulling power
Monday’s ‘World on the Move Day’ on Radio 4 was a bold challenge to government policy and proof that radio…
The Spectator’s notes
One of the many problems with David Cameron’s threat that leaving the European Union could plunge us into war is…
Write a leftie column and win a doctorate
I see that law students at Oxford University were told that if they found the contents of a lecture on…
Vaping’s appeal isn’t about the nicotine. It’s about the gadgets
Probably you never visited the flats of middle-class student drug dealers in the 1990s, because crikey, neither did I, and…
The power of song
You might not think that the Eurovision Song Contest (screened live from Stockholm tonight) could have any connection with how…
The Spectator’s Notes
‘England in effect is insular, she is maritime, she is linked through her interactions, her markets and her supply lines…
Word processing
‘Comedy is like music,’ said Edwin Apps, one of the characters in Wednesday afternoon’s Radio 4 play, All Mouth and…
What if Murdoch owned the Beeb?
A new book published today by the Institute of Economic Affairs called In Focus: The Case for Privatising the BBC…
Fit to print
For weeks, Westminster has been full of rumours about the private life of a certain cabinet member. It was said…
Cock
On the Radio 4 news at 11 o’clock last Saturday morning there was a joky report about roosters in Brisbane. The…
Portrait of the week
Home An official analysis by the Cabinet Office said that if Britain left the EU it would lead to a…
What do all these evil maniacs have in common?
More bad publicity for the Islamic State’s ‘Kafir Tiny Tots and Babycare Service’. A burka-clad madwoman wandering through the streets…
The Spectator’s notes
One of the oddest features of the cabinet majority for staying in the EU is that almost no one in…
The Spectator’s notes
In 2000, the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, accused Magdalen College, Oxford, of class bias in failing to…
What fun it will be if Trump becomes president
I suppose spite and schadenfreude are thinnish reasons, intellectually, for wishing Donald Trump to become the next American president (and…
Pornographer-in-Chief
What does Andrew Davies have to say to those who accuse him of gratuitous rumpy-pumpy in his adaptations of the classics? Stephen Smith finds out
Class of ’83
No one remembers this now but there really was a period, not so long ago, when the Eighties were universally…
Nature is red in tooth and claw. Get over it
Wild Lone is one of the most violent books I’ve ever read. It was published just before the last war…
New word order
Peter Robins reports from Nottingham on a unique adaptation of a novel by the literary innovator B.S. Johnson
Diary
First, an apology. Thanks to me, all journalists at BBC Radio’s ethics and religion division are being sent for indoctrination…
