BBC
Class acts
The Last Night of the Proms came and went, and it was pretty much as anyone might have predicted, if…
Letters
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…
There’s no business like show business
Fifteen minutes into the first episode of I Hate Suzie, main character Suzie Pickles was doing a photoshoot in her…
Public disservice broadcasting
Reading the speech Tony Hall gave to the Edinburgh Television Festival, I was struck by his upbeat, confident tone. The…
Ill-received pronunciation
Radio 4 recently ran an adaptation of Albert Camus’s The Plague in which the protagonist, Dr Bernard Rieux, was transformed…
Test of character
You are, shall we say, a famous commentator, one of a tiny elite in the British media. You are paid…
The Spectator’s notes
Chris Packham is widely seen as the most extreme of well-known animal rights activists. His obsessions against hunting and shooting…
Bonjour happiness
Soon, very soon now — even sooner than I imagined, if A Suitable Boy turns out to be as lacklustre…
Soho moonwalk
Back to the West End at last. After a four- month lay-off, I grabbed the first available chance to catch…
The Murdoch I know
The BBC documentary on Rupert Murdoch is pure one-sided bile, says Kelvin MacKenzie
Youthful mistakes
In January, the director-general of the BBC, Lord Hall of Birkenhead, announced that the corporation intended to shift away from…
The Spectator’s notes
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 by dysfunctional people
A star is born, but instead of emerging into the world beaming for the cameras, he spits and snarls and…
Audio onanism
In Beeb-dominated Britain, the commercial triumph of podcasting — epitomised by Spotify’s recent £100 million deals with Joe Rogan and…
Who watches the watchdog?
At the beginning of April, I became so frustrated by the supine coverage of the government’s response to the coronavirus…
Beige-washed Burton
The BBC has been having a good pandemic. Stuck at home, a generation raised on podcasts and YouTube has discovered…
Homage to Avalonia
Televising Glastonbury has changed the festival, and in turn transformed television, says Graeme Thomson
Live and let die
Remember when 2020 was going to be Beethoven year? There were going to be cycles and festivals, recordings and reappraisals;…
The great Newsnight delusion
The Twitter feed of BBC Newsnight editor Esme Wren (remember, I read this stuff so you don’t have to) is…
The Spectator’s notes
At Dominic Cummings’s press conference on Monday, reporters tried two lines of attack. One was to behave like local detectives,…
Macbeth at the movies
The world’s greatest playwright ought to be dynamite at the movies. But it’s notoriously hard to turn a profit from…
Withdrawal symptoms
A TV play by Tom Stoppard, A Separate Peace, was broadcast live on Zoom last Saturday. I watched as my…
Watcher of the skies – and the coffee pot
‘To be recognised and accepted by a peregrine,’ wrote J.A. Baker in 1967, ‘you must wear the same clothes, travel…
