A celebratory tip of the Red Sox cap to David Preiser for pointing out this rather fine commenter’s fisk of Gavin Hewitt’s latest blog.
It’s a bit rich of Hewitt to now pass comment on the Europeans who “had fallen for Obama” when his own presidential campaign diary read like a romantic novel. Even I was inspired at the time, offering this as a suggestion for a book cover:
Unfortunately it didn’t get past the BBC moderators.
A couple of weeks ago Heat magazine editor Sam Delaney appeared on Kate Silverton’s radio show as her sidekick for the day, and he left listeners in no doubt about his political leanings with a rant about Cameron and the Tories. I assumed at the time that Silverton would have a different “studio friend” each week, reflecting a broad spectrum of political opinion. That was pretty stupid of me, this being the BBC (and Radio Five Live in particular). As part of the station’s new year shake-up Delaney’s role on the show is actually permanent. No surprises, then, to read this in Monday’s Guardian:
Sam Delaney… was once a researcher for Harriet Harman and Gordon Brown…
In the 1990s, as a self-confessed “19-year-old stonehead”, he was passionately into Labour politics and one of his jobs as Harman’s researcher was to deliver her tuna sandwiches when she was in shadow cabinet meetings. His boss at Millbank was Ed Miliband. “Most of the people who were part of the research group, and would have a pint with each other or lunch in the canteen, are now cabinet ministers, whereas I am editor of Heat.”
Having listened to the mockney tones of the former Labour researcher, one can stay tuned for 7 Day Sunday, presented by Tory-hating Chris Addison. The Independent’s radio reviewer wasn’t impressed with the first programme:
Chris Addison, the comedian who plays the weedy Ollie Reeder in The Thick of It, has been given his own topical news show 7 Day Sunday.
As usual, there is a certain amount of “category error” in this choice. As Ollie in The Thick of It, Addison is hilariously funny, but this is because his lines are written by the comic genius Armando Iannucci. On 7 Day Sunday, however, Addison is writing his own lines, assisted by a studio gang who would laugh at a pig’s bladder on a stick. On The Thick of It there is snappy dialogue at a thousand miles an hour, but if you talk like that on radio without enough jokes or substance then the listener’s mind skitters all over the place trying to concentrate, before giving up. The show’s brief was to “pull apart the week’s big news stories”, but in the event the only news covered was snow. Weirdly for someone who made his name in a political satire there wasn’t any. Why not? The Gordon Brown coup should have provided acres of material, but it took ages to get round to, and then got a paltry two minutes.
This reluctance to make fun of the Labour government contrasts sharply with Addison’s attitude to the Tories. This week he joked about dancing on Margaret Thatcher’s grave. Classy.
Radio Five Live. Gearing up for the general election.
Update. In the comments Ryan reproduces an email from R5L controller Adrian Van Klaveren re Delaney.
Here’s the blurb to a Mark Mardell report about Obama’s first year:
In a BBC/Harris Poll 20% of Americans would give President Obama an ‘A’ for the job he’s done in year one.
But an equal number of people give him a ‘C’, and the same percentage gives him an F! Mark Mardell reports.
An F! About Obama! Beloved Obama! It’s inconceivable! It’s outrageous!
Update. I see the BBC has flown heavyweight political analyst Richard Bacon over to the States to celebrate the first anniversary of O’s inauguration (written into his latest R5L contract, no doubt). Let’s hope the voters of Massachusetts give him something to really talk about.
Via the comments – Iain Dale on One Show bias and the BBC’s response.
In September, when US-based left-wing Guardian columnist Gary Younge popped up as a bona fide voice of the BBC on From Our Own Correspondent, I pointed out that he had recently described followers of the Tea Party movement as “(a)nnoying, bizarre, incoherent, divisive, intolerant, small-minded, misinformed, ill informed and disinformed…” In other words, just the sort of prejudice against the American right which finds favour at the Beeb. I noted also the irony of a Guardian/BBC journalist accusing others of living “in a politically parallel world where everyone they know believes the same as they do.”
We’re in the middle of a mini Obamafest at the moment as the BBC celebrates the first anniversary of The One’s inauguration. To balance the many pro-Obama films and programmes made by adoring fans, the Beeb has commissioned a couple of documentaries about Americans opposed to Obama. Amazingly, this project was given to someone with a sympathetic view of the subject matter.
I’m kidding, of course:
In this two-part documentary, author and journalist Gary Younge tells the story of the other side of the Obama phenomenon; the story of those who say that the Obama presidency is nothing but bad news. Younge asks who these people are who feel they have been marginalised by the Obama revolution. He also asks what they don’t like about him and what Obama could do, if anything, to win them over.
Younge spends 10 days travelling through rural Arkansas and Kentucky, talking to anti-tax protesters, fundamentalist Christians and libertarians, country club members and local dignitaries to find out how they view the last year under Obama and what their hopes and fears are for the coming year.
The BBC’s creepy Obama obsession continues on Radio 4 with Obama’s Babies:
In Swahili Obama means ‘blessed one’ and mothers across Africa were quick to bestow the name on their offspring. ‘Obama babies’ followed in America and across Europe as parents grasped at the hope that the President Elect’s magic could rub off on their children. But one year on and with the President’s dreams being tested by reality, how have some of the babies named after him fared?
Peter White explores the hopes and fears of five families and follows their lives as the babies approach their first birthdays. For the babies – including Nancy Otieno’s son, Barack Obama, and Sasha Fisher’s baby, Sanjae Obama – it will be years before they fully comprehend the hopes and aspirations imbued in a name.
The programme focuses on five very different families, examining how our changing world, in part shaped by the man they so admire, is having an impact on their experiences.
I’ve just heard the saccharine-filled trailer for the programme – it sounds even worse than the above blurb suggests.
The BBC began election year with a new topical comedy show hosted by a Tory-hating Labour supporter. What next, Labour luvvie Dermot O’Leary presenting election coverage? Actually, yes:
X Factor host Dermot O’Leary told of his “excitement” at the prospect of fronting a political show in the run-up to the general election.
The 36-year-old told the Radio Times he is obsessed with politics – but said the show would not be “particularly serious”.
The magazine said O’Leary is in talks with the BBC about presenting a political programme.
O’Leary said: “I won’t be the man with the swingometer, but politics is a huge obsession with me, so I’m incredibly excited about it.
Here’s O’Leary talking to the Guardian in 2003:
Labour, Tory, Liberal or Socialist Workers?
I suspect that these days I’m politically closest to the Socialist Workers, but they’d take all my money so it’s still Labour.
And from an article in the Independent in May 2005:
Shortly before the general election, O’Leary was branded a Labour luvvie after inadvertently suggesting at a Make Poverty History rally that Tony Blair should become head of state.
That rally, which took place during the 2005 election campaign, was covered by Ben MacIntyre in The Times:
OH, LUVVIE, I can’t tell you how marvellous it was; truly, darling, an unforgettable performance. There we were at the Old Vic Theatre — just twelve hundred of Labour’s closest friends — waiting for Tony and Gordon to do their matinee double act, when the whispered word went round the audience that the greatest political performer of our times would be making a cameo appearance — none other than old blue eyes, schmoozer in chief, the trouser president: Bill Clinton himself, via live satellite link.
The occasion was a rally — the biggest of the campaign so far — to mark World Poverty Day and held by the Make Poverty History coalition. Everybody who was anybody was there, le tout Labour: there was Dermot O’Leary, Big Brother presenter, and Alastair Campbell, Big Brother enforcer, and June Sarpong, the Channel 4 presenter.
The announcement of Ms Sarpong’s addition to the BBC election team can only be a matter of time.
The BBC is going big on “Doctor Who star David Tennant ‘backs Gordon Brown’“. Tennant, a Scot recently replaced by a younger man, is quoted:
“Clearly, the Labour Party is not without some issues right now and I do get frustrated. They need to sort some stuff out, but they are still a better bet than the Tories.”
Meanwhile, election year sees the start of a new topical comedy show on Radio Five Live presented by Chris Addison, the only person who comes anywhere near to matching Tennant’s recent levels of BBC ubiquity. So, will Addison’s new programme offer a fresh perspective on current affairs, or will it be the same tiresome worldview from the BBC’s left-wing comedy establishment? Addison’s opinions on the Conservative Party could give a clue:
“It’s very difficult, if you were brought up as a child during Thatcher’s period, to ever contemplate being a Tory. There is no way I can physically bring myself to vote Tory. That will stay with me till I die.”
On Twitter a couple of days ago he was asked what he thought about the current government and responded:
“Better than the alternative.”
A little later he tweeted:
“My political leanings are decidedly liberal.”
Which, coincidentally, is the first box you have to tick if you want to present a Sunday morning programme on Radio Five Live.
Update 5.05pm. Perhaps we’ll be treated to some of Addison’s views on Europe. From an interview with him on the BBC’s comedy website:
I am fiercely pro-European. I would very much have liked to see this country join the Euro a few years back. Not least because it would greatly annoy the kind of people that I don’t generally like.
I’m fiercely pro-European as well (OK, maybe not “fiercely”), but I don’t buy into the anti-democratic EU project.
BBC environment correspondent David Shukman has a book out in April: “Reporting Live From the End of the World“. A suitably alarmist double meaning in the title there, but I guess it’s more catchy than “Reporting Live From a Temporarily Low Reservoir (Rain Sure To Follow)”.
In his tips to schoolchildren on how best to report on the environment Shukman offers this advice: “If it’s about rubbish, get yourself right in the middle of it.” Like this:
At least he knows exactly what will happen to all the unsold copies of his book.
On Monday I blogged about some of the ‘global warming is going to kill the ski industry’ stories produced by the BBC over recent years. Many of those news items came from the BBC’s long-time ‘man in the Alps’ James Cove who, I pointed out, had just started his own online ski news venture. For some reason I was in an uncharacteristically generous mood because I offered Cove my best wishes for his new PlanetSki website.
I’m feeling less generous today.
Cove spent a decade producing global warming scare stories for the BBC, but in December on his PlanetSki blog he said, “the snow level has been pretty similar on average throughout the last decade” and quoted a 73-year-old mountain guide who said, “Overall things really haven’t changed that much.” That’s not the impression Cove was creating with his articles for the BBC. He knew what his editors wanted and gave it to them. It’s what hacks do.
Now I see that Cove’s PlanetSki website is facing accusations of plagiarism. A writer for another ski website, PisteHors, has noted the similarity between an article of his about Corsica and one written by Cove in August 2009 for PlanetSki (the Internet Archive shows that the PisteHors article first appeared in June 2006 and was last updated in April 2008). Cove even embellished his version with invented quotations:
PisteHors:
The snow is usually very good above 1800 meters and can be found down to 1400 meters depending on the conditions. Skiing is possible from December through to April but you can only rely on snow after mid-January. There are currently three downhill ski areas on the island and always talk of projects of creating a real ski resort in the style of the Southern Alps.James Cove:
The snow is usually very good above 1800 meters and can be found down to 1400 meters depending on the conditions.
“Skiing is possible from December through to April but you can only rely on snow after mid-January,” says a spokeswoman from the island’s tourist office.
“There are currently three downhill ski areas on the island and always talk of projects of creating a real ski resort in the style of the Southern Alps.”PisteHors:
In 1934 the worst avalanche of this century occurred on the slopes of Castagniccia at only 700 meters altitude, sweeping through the village of Ortiporio and killing 37 people.James Cove:
In 1934 the worst avalanche of this century occurred on the slopes of Castagniccia at only 700 meters altitude, sweeping through the village of Ortiporio and killing 37 peoplePisteHors:
The regional ski committee has a long standing plan to develop a ski station in the bowl at La Lattiniccia on the road pass close to Corte The proposal is for 30km of pistes between 1550 and 2400 meters altitude with the possibility of doubling the area in the future. The total cost of development is estimated at 12.5 million € including necessary artificial snow cover. Presumably a large part of this money would come from European funds. Whether this project will ever be realised remains to be seen.James Cove:
Corsica has several small ski stations and one, near Corte in the centre of the island, has ambitious plans.
The regional ski committee has a 12m euro plan to develop the bowl at La Lattiniccia.
The proposal is for 30km of pistes between 1550 and 2400 meters altitude with the possibility of doubling the area in the future.
It would however need funding from the EU for the project to go ahead but, so far, that is not forthcoming.PisteHors:
Before you get ideas of snow, sex and sun in the isle of savage beauty you should be aware that Corsica is basically a 2,500 meter high rock surrounded by huge expanses of ocean. As such it catches every weather system as it tracks across Europe. Off piste skiers and freeriders need to carry an altimeter, maps and compass and know how to use them.James Cove:
Corsica is basically a 2,500m rock surrounded by huge expanses of ocean. As such it catches every weather system as it tracks across Europe.
Off piste skiers and freeriders need to carry an altimeter, maps and compass and know how to use them.PisteHors:
In the winter violent storms are somewhat less frequent but the constant wind drives the snow into potential slab avalanches. Powder is rare due to the wide daily temperature variations which leads to its rapid transformation. This stabilized snow-pack is favourable to extreme skiing.James Cove:
In the winter constant wind drives the snow into potential slab avalanches. Powder is rare due to the wide daily temperature variations that leads to its rapid transformation. This stabilized snow-pack is however good for off piste skiing as it makes the snowpack safer.
With that level of journalistic integrity is it any wonder Cove’s alarmist articles for the BBC were so unconvincing?
