You used to know where you were with Victoria Derbyshire ensconced on her 5Live show, it was safe to surf the airwaves knowing that you wouldn’t come upon her unexpectedly.
That’s all over now she has gone free range. Nowhere is safe. Like a Taliban IED she is out there somewhere buried in the schedules just waiting for the unwary listener to tune in and be not so blown away.
Listening to Radio 4 yesterday, and you may be able to imagine the horror, I heard the words ‘The broadcaster Victoria Derbyshire has kept a diary since she was a child.’ They opened up a whole world of nightmarish possibilities to be inflicted upon us….what had she instore for us?
But I had a reprieve…she had no intention of letting anyone pry into the contents of her diaries, it was to be other people’s diaries that she’d be exploring….the relief was shortlived however as the first guest was revealed….Labour spinmeister Alastair Campbell.
What is it with Campbell and the BBC? They just can’t get enough of him. And it’s not as if both he and his diaries aren’t already well known. So why bother?
Why bother all the more so when you realise that there are only two programmes by Derbyshire on diaries…the next and final one is on writer Fraser Harrison who only kept a diary for a year and doesn’t believe they should be published. So why bother with him?
Finding someone living who wants to explore their diaries on public radio must be difficult but there must be someone out there who would be willing and more importantly be much more interesting and much less well known already than Campbell.
It looks like the BBC have cast around for a project for Derbyshire to keep her, and Campbell, busy.
Shame the BBC didn’t buy ‘Big Brother’….Derbyshire, Nigel Farage, Tommy Robinson, Evan Davis, Andrew Neal, Mehdi Hasan and Sarah Montague locked up together for weeks on end. I’d pay to watch that. And 24 hours a day we’d know where Derbyshire was and could safely surf the airwaves knowing we wouldn’t be ambushed by her in the remote parts of the network where we thought we were safe….or maybe send her here…
My abiding memory of Victoria Derbyshire (I have been boycotting BBC 5 Live for some time now) was her preposterously stagey tone and style of badge-wearing leftist bias. For example her interview of the anonymous Guardian source The Secret Footballer was a veritable masterclass in emphasising to the listening audience just what they didn’t particularly want to know about the sport. Naturally this being the BBC top of VD’s agenda was the dread word ‘racism’. Stearing the conversation about banter in the dressing room between players in that well-loved by the house political direction she managed to elicite the shock revelation that rather than an orange at half time one black player was once left a banana. Our Vicky’s exaggerated theatrical sharp intake of breath at that moment was quite a thing to behold. Lady Bracknell had nothing on our Lady Derbyshire: ‘A Banana?!’
Radio stations tend to have a personality – a tone or character.
BBC Radio 4 is clearly the maiden aunt – the venerable old dear with rather advanced views. The one-time Suffragette who seems to pine for that century old battle that was won long ago. Her best friend is the effete vicar and – although she doesn’t mix with any – she finds people with ethnicity simply marvelous.
BBC 5 Live is the chippy northerner. Showbizzy, star struck – but greviance harbouring. Touchy and defensive she’s liable to go off into a Twitter storm at the smallest slight. One of her Grans once received a postcard from Dublin – so she’s going to raise the tricolour to celebrate Saint Paddy’s Day with gusto – she’s not even ‘English by default’. Pre-loaded and mad-for-it but give her a wide berth lads – and don’t look there – that’s her human rights lawyer’s number tattoed there that is….
the next and final one is on writer Fraser Harrison who only kept a diary for a year and doesn’t believe they should be published. So why bother with him?
Because he is made of the the right stuff for the BBC? Wiki:
between 2002 and 2006 he practised as a caseworker advising asylum seekers detained at the Oakington Detention Centre near Cambridge.
On Tuesday, 10 December 2013, he gave a talk on Native Americans and human rights to mark Human Rights Day on behalf of the Bury St Edmunds branch of Amnesty
He is the recipient of two Arts Council grants. The most recent, awarded in February 2014, was to assist his research into the immigrant communities living in Thetford, Norfolk, which he is conducting with a view to writing a book about Thetford.
Such a Big Brother house feels incomplete without an invite for Moazzam Begg.
‘…an invite for Moazzam Begg’
Wouldn’t work. He would appeal every week and the European Court would take years to rule on his eviction.