BBC
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…
Isn’t it puke-inducing being lectured about poverty by millionaire comics?
Going Forward (BBC4, Thursdays) is a BBC comedy about the continuing adventures of Kim Wilde, the fat, cynical but lovable…
Radio 4's bold challenge to government policy
Monday’s ‘World on the Move Day’ on Radio 4 was a bold challenge to government policy and proof that radio…
Why did Cameron call a referendum if he thought it could start a war?
One of the many problems with David Cameron’s threat that leaving the European Union could plunge us into war is…
The BBC needs to be rescued from its own groupthink
I see that law students at Oxford University were told that if they found the contents of a lecture on…
The vaping craze isn’t about nicotine. It’s about gadgets
Probably you never visited the flats of middle-class student drug dealers in the 1990s, because crikey, neither did I, and…
Might Eurovision determine the outcome of the EU referendum?
You might not think that the Eurovision Song Contest (screened live from Stockholm tonight) could have any connection with how…
De Gaulle knew it: Britain does not belong in the EU
‘England in effect is insular, she is maritime, she is linked through her interactions, her markets and her supply lines…
How the BBC made the most unlikely TV hit of the swinging Sixties
‘Comedy is like music,’ said Edwin Apps, one of the characters in Wednesday afternoon’s Radio 4 play, All Mouth and…
What would happen if Rupert Murdoch owned the BBC?
A new book published today by the Institute of Economic Affairs called In Focus: The Case for Privatising the BBC…
A feral, all-powerful press? The Whittingdale story disproves that
For weeks, Westminster has been full of rumours about the private life of a certain cabinet member. It was said…
Why won’t the media call a cock a 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…
Why does no one in the cabinet admit to being a Europhile?
One of the oddest features of the cabinet majority for staying in the EU is that almost no one in…
Why must David Cameron insult Oxford, when it gave him so much?
In 2000, the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, accused Magdalen College, Oxford, of class bias in failing to…
I want to see President Trump – if only because of who he’d annoy
I suppose spite and schadenfreude are thinnish reasons, intellectually, for wishing Donald Trump to become the next American president (and…
‘It’s good to chop out the boring bits!’: Andrew Davies on adapting War and Peace
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
The integrity and chain-smoking of these East German Commies is rather attractive
No one remembers this now but there really was a period, not so long ago, when the Eighties were universally…
The children’s author BB had the right idea about man’s part in nature
Wild Lone is one of the most violent books I’ve ever read. It was published just before the last war…
