Time to skewer BBC Radio 4’s anti-tory hate
The Skewer is a cutting-edge Saturday night comedy programme on the BBC’S flagship radio channel, Radio 4, “designed to be heard through headphones”. In its short life, it has already won or been shortlisted for 23 awards.
I had naturally avoided it, therefore. But on Sunday a friend who had listened to the previous night’s effort persuaded me to do the same. The programme is deliberately hard to follow because it mixes fantastical, slightly nasty quotations (“newspapers reported a laughing Princess of Wales beating 480 children”, the last image of the late Queen has been created “with a fuel made from old cooking oil and takeaway coffee cups”) and weird noises with actual news items. It uses words thought to appeal to the missing young listeners, such as “f---” and “s---”.
This week’s menu included a dig at Brexit, Sir Keir Starmer as a robot and Boris Johnson as the Cocaine Bear. It was mostly a fairly routine BBC satire of the sort often described as “surreal” to get round bias guidelines.
At 9.45 minutes in, with more than six minutes to fill, however, the programme intoned “What do you call a corrupt far-right government?” Different voices then attacked PPE contracts, Nadhim Zahawi’s tax affairs and Matt Hancock’s care home decisions.
The question “What do you call a corrupt far-right Government?” was asked five times more, punctuated by answers all of which cited the present administration. Using the programme’s own way of putting the issues, these included bans on strikes, bans on protests, attempts to “suppress the right to vote”, removing legislative powers from Parliament, and a government for the rich run by the “richest PM in this country’s history”. The main voice supporting the thesis, extracted from a speech in the House of Lords was, I guessed (she was not named) the well-modulated tones of Baroness Chakrabarti (Labour).
Nothing in this long sequence was funny or even trying to be funny or even surreal. It was just what, in other contexts, might be called hate speech.
“Content may not be suitable for all,” it warns on the website. Is it suitable for the BBC? No impartiality, no diversity of outlook, no sense that this is 100 per cent paid for by licence-fee payers, at least half of whom were being insulted by its assumptions. Has the poor director-general, Tim Davie, committed to higher standards, managed to change anything at all?
Ten years ago this Friday, the Falkland islanders had their first ever referendum. Did they, as the ballot paper question put it, want the islands “to retain their current political status as an Overseas Territory of the United Kingdom?
On a 92 per cent turnout, 1,513 islanders said “Yes”. Three voters (rather bravely) said “No”. The then president of Argentina dismissed the vote: it was “as if a consortium of squatters had voted on whether to continue illegally occupying a building”, she said. The team of international observers, however, was well satisfied, as were the islanders.
I have just watched a short tenthanniversary film about the event put out by the Falkland Islands government. It is surprisingly moving. The thing about voting is that, although mundane, it feels precious when it is rare or difficult. As, in the past, with most British colonies, the islanders had never before voted on their political status. No one doubted their loyalty to Britain, but they had previously lacked the formal means of expressing it.
If this does not sound too paradoxical, it was the Falklands’ first chance to express a certain independence. They were asserting that they were British, yes, but only because they wanted to be, not because anyone in London told them they were. On the Camber, across the water from Government House in Stanley, almost every working Land Rover in the islands met to form the word “Yes”.
In 2023, Argentina is getting cross again, recently repudiating an agreement made between our two countries in 2016 and renewing its Falklands claims. Argentina is one of several Latin American countries now more under the influence of China than of the West. The regional challenges are greater than they were at the time of the referendum. Britain must keep this in view: we all know what happened when we didn’t.
Two short footnotes to this paper’s scoop about the rewriting, by the publishers, Puffin, of Roald Dahl’s stories.
The first is about who’s boss. I have seen it said that it is the publishers’ job to edit, and editing is not censorship. That is true. But, as in so many walks of modern life, the key judgments were passed to the wrong people. The books were changed not by an editor, but by “sensitivity readers”. There should be no such specialist trade unconnected with what makes a good book. If a sensitivity is worth having, the editors should have it.
The second is about the nature of the scoop in the first place. It was discovered only because its author, Ed Cumming, the father of young children, had spotted the rewrites in the newly printed books. The publishers had never announced or explained them in advance, or indicated them in the text, except for a note on the copyright page.
The publishers’ evasiveness is significant: it amounts to passing off something readers will think is by a leading author when actually it isn’t, quite. The natural question is, how widely has this spread, surreptitiously, through publishing and in schools?