I never could understand David Cameron’s enthusiasm for C.I.N.O. Chris Patten becoming BBC Trust Chairman, Here we see Patten once again living down to expectations;
BBC Trust chairman Chris Patten has said there are not enough women in on-air roles at the public broadcaster. “We should have more women on radio and television,” the former Conservative party chairman said in an interview with The Observer. (Naturally) He singled out Radio 4’s Sarah Montague and Martha Kearney as being among the “good ones”.
Oh really? Montague and Kearney “the good ones”? Well, I suppose both can be relied upon to attack the Conservatives, to attack Israel, to worship Obama, to praise the EU….
I really don’t enjoy listening to either of the two women mentioned. Strident and opinionated immediately spring to mind. They also interrupt and speak over the supposed interviewees to the point that nothing can be learned from the discourse. Rather than more, I’d suggest fewer. Two fewer.
If you’re going to get rid of BBC women, please start with Stage Performer Maitlis.
You should have seen him be interviewed on BBC World “Hard Talk”, it was the motherload of smug, delusional arrogant greed. they have no self awareness
The media is already female dominated.
In that article there also seems to be some confusion between female presenters and female roles in dramas. That is conflating two different issues surely. BBC producers can’t do anything about writers who write more male leading roles than female ones. That is a creative choice.
I think the BBC have a tendency to exhibit a slightly bone-headed anti-men stance. Do I need to list the number of problems with what he said? Oh well here’s a couple.
Firstly it’s all a bit perplexing – is there really a serious imbalance between the genders on air? I don’t see a problem. The Observer journalist conducting the interview, Rachel Cooke, has a problem with “too many [BBC] programmes both on radio and television featuring men shouting at one another (Today, Newsnight), and far too few voices and faces belonging to women over the age of 45″
Well that’s her view. I don’t need there to be a “Man’s hour” every day on Radio 4 just to balance the time spent on Women’s hour. But you have to be willfully obtuse to not recognize that programme as going some way to remedying this perceived (by her) imbalance.
What next? Shall we change the news around in some way, so it contains an equal number of men and women? The Beeb could employ someone to count! At what point does Rachel Cooke’s observation become a totally childish complaint? Yet Chris Patten is ‘cutting-edge’ enough to go along with it.
A further point worth making is that making quality programmes seems to have fallen by the wayside, overtaken by a thousand considerations: are we LGB-friendly enough? Have we got an equal enough balance of the sexes? Are we educating people about attitudes of race and multiculturalism? Making a good programme seems of only secondary importance to them.
That they think they are ‘educating’ us, by the way, is another part of their jaw-dropping arrogance, and another reason why they are blind to their own political slantedness.
So when he kowtows to the BBC’s thought police so cravenly, Lord Patten is enthusiastically endorsing the kinds institutional problems that most of us here have a beef with. Hardly encouraging
The important thing to know about getting along in public life in today’s Britain is recognise the people who will hate your guts if you disagree with them and mount a hate campaign against you with their fellow sociopaths till you acquiese or are ruined, and then agree with whatever they want you to say.
That is why Britain is such a toss hole these days.
I dont mind Martha Kearney; Montague from what I’ve heard of her is a snippy hoity toity little madam – both though in my view have the ability, if not in Montague’s case the professional integrity to merit their jobs at the BBC. The idea of anyone though getting jobs on anything other than merit I find repellent.
In the real world, men will always be favoured over most jobs because they dont need to take mega time off having babies and then they dont pose the risk of having taken that paid time off deciding they’d like to stay at home full time. This whole baloney about compulsory male paternity leave is just social engineering regardless of the economic consequences to the country.
Is it possible that the country will ever come to its senses over such obvious, basic issues as these? Not while the Thought Police at the BBC have their way.
Yes, Martha Kearney is one of those warm-sounding friendly voiced Beeboids so she has quite a likeable quality about her.
That’s exactly why Patten likes her. Montague’s voice also has something of that “Book at bedtime” quality. Like Catherine Bott on Radio 3.
Yes, why doesn’t BBC-NUJ begin a policy of positive discrimination for women by setting up a daily programme called ‘Woman’s Hour’?
Oh, I don’t know George…an hour a day doesn’t really cut it.
Now, if it were their very own station, then we’d be talking, eh? Wonder what Sir Patten would think of that.
Is he going to give his job to a women then? There have been too many male chairpersons at the BBC.
I just don’t think Sarah Montague is very good at her job.
As far as not enough women; whenever I hear who ‘today’s editor’ is on the appropriate progerammes and read the credits at the end of other programmes there seems an awful lot of women behind the scenes to me.
Shush! Dont depribe a man of the joys of posturing!
The BBC have disliked Top Gear for being not just presented by three middle class white men (straight as well) but also the bulk of the production crew are white men.
Were it not for the fact Clarkson and Wilman have full control over Top Gear and it makes the BBC millions they’d have been forced to have a lesbian, homosexual or black/female presenter by now.
I have also read there is pressure growing in the BBC to make the next Dr Who a woman, why?
As was pointed out above much of the drama on TV is female focussed especially the crap called soaps.
What the BBC should focus on is what makes a show tick, Top Gear works not because it’s three men as such but because of how they relate to each other and the audience.
Having a female Dr Who won’t work if the character is all wrong.
Has anyone else noticed that two of the BBC’ so called auto cuties (Michelle Hussain and Fiona Bruce) have this annoying habit of shaking their heads at the camera when they introduce a story they don’t like and sit up when a story they do like comes on?
The Tories should be concerned about the political bias of the BBC, which even Cameron has acknowledged but failed to do something about.
What I find amazing is why those right wing Tories who have noticed the bias of the BBC don’t make more of a fuss, Cameron seems to be happy to bed over backwards for lefty Lib Dems but sticks two fingers up to his own party.
It will serve them right if as we suspect at the next election the BBC come after the Tories even more forcefully than the last election.
Expect stage 1 to take place with the BBC backing Red Ken over Boris next year.
He has to make it work with the LidDems. If he doesn’t, where will he be? Unfortunately, we are stuck with those loons. He didn’t get the votes and that’s the whole problem. It’s a tough hand to play. Will the boundary changes make it possible to get elected the next time around? It would be a different story then.
If he didn’t get the votes when up against one of the most discredited Prime Ministers ever, he has only himself to blame. The election was his to take, until he reneged on giving a vote over the Lisbon treaty. From that date his huge lead began to evaporate as it began to dawn on many erstwhile Tory voters that he was no more to be trusted than Brown. That he would rather follow the BBC’s agenda than a Conservative one.
So I will give him no latitude simply because he now has to please the Lib Dems. He does not, bar the odd crumb. They have nowhere to go. If they bring the Government down now, they go with it.
It was indeed – only a fool could have lost from such a postion.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/feb/23/icm-poll-february-2009
Patten is talking for the sake of it. No one has noticed him – so he wants to raise his profile. The best way to do that is to say something ‘controversial’
“Wise men speak because they have something to say; Fools because they have to say something.”
Plato
If people are claiming to be alientated by the excessive masculity of the BBC’s output, feminism truly has jumped the shark. The average night’s output on BBC1 makes Elton John’s hairdresser look like Ollie Reid.
Meanwhile, we again have the ridiculous site of the BBC ostentiously agonising over whether or not they have a workforce that ‘looks like Britain’… but still running all their recruitment ads in the Guardian.
Patten is showing what a silly old man he is, at least two if not three decades out of date. His call for more women on air is nothing more than “Harriet Harman in trousers”. Instead of seeing a presenter doing a good job, or in the BBC’s case a crap job, he sees a skirt. He thinks they need more skirts, like that’s the problem. Not enough skirts.
No Patten. You don’t understand what the problem is.It’s not whether they are male presenters of female presenters, its that they are crap presenters.
Sneering arrogant opinionated private school and Oxbridge educated harpies. The only difference between you and them, Patten, is the bit between your legs.
Oh, my, is the BBC the same kind of old boy’s club, woman are second-class citizens as the Obamessiah Administration seems to be? Shame.
But you guys all know where this is going, right? Next Director General = Helen Boaden.
You know it makes sense. It’s in her DNA.
Helen (Hugs) Boaden, whose leadership style has really cut a swathe through so much that is… er… [snore]….
From emails that get totally ignored by staff, to emails from customers that she ignores, seems like the perfect person to be paid a fortune to do nothing in today’s touchy-feely-useless UK…
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/tv-radio/michael-crick-cuts-are-hurting-newsnight-the-bbc-lacks-cando-spirit-2356855.html
Crick says he raised the matter with the BBC director-general, Mark Thompson, and the director of news, Helen Boaden. “Nothing ever happened about it.
Simply another over-promoted makeweight to tick a box.
She’ll make a worthy successor to the useless Thompson then. 🙂 Has that man ever done anything other than grab as much money as possible and play politics?
It’s always amused me in a hollow sort of way whenever I’ve heard Obama portraying his election as a victory for women’s equality and himself as a champion of women’s advancement and example for his daughters. Yes, I’m sure his daughters are going to look at their parents’ respective life paths and take the lesson that suits his ego and his political pitch to the masses. He has that kind of brass neck to make grand claims even when they are risible.
Millie, according to the BBC, the best example being provided to His daughters is that a woman’s greatest achievement is being married to a powerful man.
Is Patten also one of those who want to put a lot of men out of work. He should be carful what he is doing. Unemployed men do not always just stay at home.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1359891/Athens-riots-erupts-Greek-protesters-set-policemen-fire.html
Chris Patten? What, the “advisor” to both wind-farm-making EDF and let’s-screw-Libya BP? I thought his job was to propagandise green energy policy and regime change!
ian, a man with some self-awareness, some ethical backbone, would at least consider how this apparent contradiction in loyalties would be viewed by the public. Not so, Chris Patten. Being, for so long, one of the self-enriching political elite he has become institutionalised – the outside world barely exists, & its opinions, less so. This self-serving elite are all at it, Mandelson (where did he get £8 million from to buy a house in Regents Park? Somewhere to the east of Poland?), Blair, Straw, ergo, it cannot be wrong. The group’s collective behaviour justifies the individual’s. Big juicy directorship? Get in there, my son, any chance of one in the pipeline for me? Besides, large amounts of money, taken regularly, are an effective cure for any rumblings of cognitive dissonance. The political elite are thoroughly dishonourable. Shameless parasites. There are more honest men in gaol.
Patten’s first task when he arrives in the office each morning, probably around 11:30, should be to spend 15 minutes catching up with the comment threads on Biased BBC. Then he might have some semblance of the enormity of the task ahead. Instead he will be preparing himself for whoever is joining him for lunch. Patten has no “mean and hungry” look: that face is of someone well fed and watered. I am sure he is not stupid, and no doubt he knows he was appointed to do nothing. Just another in the long line of wasted opportunities for reform from team Cameron.
I think that Chris Pratten should face up to the fact that the BBC Trust has too many aged white left-wing incompetent males, do the honourable thing and resign. Or does equality only apply to ‘other’ jobs / roles / positions?
I see the BBC are siding with the criminal classes again.
Firstly we’ve got the BBC crying for the pikey scum being evicted today and then we had the Radio 5 female beeboid suggesting that people who stab burglars are ‘vigilantes’
Doesn’t the stupid cow know a vigilante is someone who goes out looking for revenge not someone sitting at home minding their own business?
It’s typical of the BBC to side with the criminals.
If only he’d have stabbed Rupert Murdoch, they’d be booking him in now for a full Lewinksky from Jeremy Whine….
Patten has got a point. I think he should bring back some of the classic all women programmes that were championed by one of the now defunct cable channels – Topless darts and the weather forecast in Swedish.
Patten, the CINO, got the job because Cameron is of the same persuasion, a conservative-in-name-only!
This is sexism – and ought to be replusive …
Nobody would dream of saying “we have too many women” but somehow “we have too many men” is political correct sexism.
If only we could truly judge people on ther virtues and values …
I agree with Liam. Patten clearly has no idea of virtues and values, because neither his beloved Sarah Montague nor his sainted Martha Kearney has that one essential broadcaster’s attribute. Large breasts.