BBC
A purity test for artists is the end of art
However we keep ourselves amused over the holidays this year, two sources of entertainment are off the docket. Amid the…
Are driverless cars really the future?
Philip Hammond’s last Budget focused on driverless cars as an example of the brave new technological world. But should we…
Once you get over its political correctness, Netflix’s Godless is a cracker
Boy came to me the other night in a state of dismay. ‘Dad, I just turned on Match of the…
Presenting a quiz is far from easy
It’s a weird sensation getting your child back for an extended period when for the previous decade you’ve been packing…
Why local radio is thriving
It’s 50 years since the first local radio stations were launched by the BBC in yet another instance of the…
I never understood the appeal of Ken Dodd
It’s always odd to hear a familiar voice on a different programme, playing an alternative role. They never sound quite…
It’s not victim shaming to suggest there might be two sides to every story
Somewhere towards the end of the 1980s I was suddenly promoted three grades upwards in my job at the BBC;…
It’s hard to preserve the primacy of head over heart while watching this doc about refugees
Anybody who wants to maintain a strong and untroubled stance against mass migration to Europe should probably avoid BBC2’s Exodus:…
Why talking about death is a essential part of living
Mandy was 38 when she was told she was ‘in the end stage’, suffering from COPD and finding it more…
The idiot box
How to sum up David Frost? The lazy writer’s friend, aka Wikipedia, calls him ‘an English journalist, comedian, writer, media…
Speed limit
Slow radio is popping up everywhere at the moment — programmes that have no outward form but just meander through…
Blame the grown-ups for the safe-space tribe
A car driver ploughs into a bunch of people outside the Natural History Museum in London and lefties are furious…
Loose ends
On Sunday night, Holliday Grainger was on two terrestrial channels at the same time playing a possibly smitten sidekick of…
Seeing the light
‘You can’t lie… on radio,’ says Liza Tarbuck. The Radio 2 DJ was being interviewed for the network’s birthday portrait,…
Face time
The inimitably pukka voice of Jacob Rees-Mogg echoed through Radio 4 on Thursday morning. He was not, though, talking about…
Straight to hell
No, The State (Channel 4) wasn’t a recruiting manual for the Islamic State, though I did feel uneasy about it…
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…
