The BBC

Lady in Waiting: My Extraordinary Life in the Shadow of the Crown author Anne Glenconner, and she's fucking tediously self important!

Scott Mills is proof that there is no god

That's a loss.

*Bit of news of my own today*

I’m delighted to say in September I’ll be joining Global, as co-host of @maitlis and @jonsopel’s new daily news podcast and Analysis and Investigations Editor for the whole network. My brief will be to supercharge the organisation’s video output. pic.twitter.com/tEJ0bgjXV0

— Lewis Goodall (@lewis_goodall) June 20, 2022

Newsnight looking like a dead man walking these days.

My LinkedIn has been going through absolute waves of "leaving the BBC" posts recently (mainly from the Throw The Proles Out of London thing and the product changes tbf). But all this is even before the promised 1000 redundancies kick in.

Every now and then the BBC simply loves to publish what reads like a breathless puff piece about a complete maniac from the US political hellscape

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-61789443

She was a natural campaigner, but fundraising lagged, so Mr Dent asked her father for a personal donation.

Her father had inherited land on the historic Galena Plantation and used the sprawling 8,000-acre property to restore the family farm, turning it into a premier quail hunting destination. The late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, and Mississippi governors Barbour and Phil Bryant, became frequent guests.

Visitors of Fitch Farms could elect to stay in the former home of Confederate general and first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, Nathan Bedford Forrest, which Mr Fitch had bought and transported onto the property.

Ms Fitch has told local media of "special" childhood memories at her father's farm, riding horses and hunting quail.

Newsnight actually not bad tonight.

Thornberry’s on Peston tonight which helps I guess.

There’s some good soothing mick lynch content in the main thread fella

the BBC should let Paddy McGuinness host something, i'm sure he'd be popular

I'd love to know why the BBC pushed Gemma Collins so hard a while back, and why they stopped. I can understand the Daily Mail pushing her, because she generated a lot of free content, but she felt a poor fit for the BBC. Even on the level of "we have to make something trashy for the plebs". There was a frequently-trailed podcast, a bunch of awards show gigs, and puff-pieces such as this ("Gemma Collins is the New Meme Queen):
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-41160646

It was odd given that she was a very limited talent who had become famous for a TV show on another channel. I only remember her for her teeth-clenched grin. Was her agent pally with someone at the BBC? Did she go to the same school as someone at the BBC? It was weird.

Did she go to the same school as someone at the BBC?

This seems highly unlikely.

The podcast was a bit of a fluke. There were not high hopes for it but it got some traction initially and attracted an audience the BBC struggles with. So it got pushed hard.

Kate Bush -----> Glastonbury-----> Wimbledon

Everywhere you look on social media at the moment, reality TV star Gemma Collins is there.

You probably can't scroll through Twitter without seeing her running around with a Shetland pony or crying about straighteners.

That's because she's the latest celeb to be turned into a meme queen online.

Think I'd managed not to hear of her till now!

Feel like her star's already in decline tbh

I’m surprised she never came up on your radar from this incident, pf!

broke: Kim Kardashian and Trump

woke: Gemma Collins and Jeremy Corbyn pic.twitter.com/dYW6w4ojuD

— Rachel 🪆 (@RachelDocca) October 29, 2018

Gemma Collins meeting Jeremy Corbyn is the funniest story I’ve read in ages lmao https://t.co/zf1YqIj7oW pic.twitter.com/XPy5DEhsug

— Conor Behan (@ItsConorBehan) October 31, 2018

All totally unfamiliar, but definitely slightly improves my estimation of this person I have only just heard of.

"The podcast was a bit of a fluke. There were not high hopes for it but it got some traction initially and attracted an audience the BBC struggles with. So it got pushed hard."

That would explain it. It's like how Adrian Chiles has a column in The Guardian where he shares hilarious anecdotes about going to the DIY shop to buy a table lamp. It's a strange fit.

She inspired this thread on DigitalSpy:
https://forums.digitalspy.com/discussion/2324068/is-gemma-collins-the-biggest-star-in-britain-right-now

I think of DigitalSpy as Ilxor but without the irony or wit or knowledge or literacy or charm or sophistication or style or anything. And then I feel bad because I'm looking down at people who sincerely like television. What's wrong with that? As the commentators there point out that she seems to have been positioned as a latter-day Jade Goody, but an empty, manufactured Jade Goody without any of the genuine offensively or conversely any of the sincerity. She did apparently go to private school and stage school, but not the same schools that BBC employees go to.

And, hey, Ilxor has a thread about Adrian Chiles:
Most pooterish Adrian Chiles column

Which popped up after Googling "adrian chiles" "private eye" guardian. I understand now why he has a column with The Guardian!

Quoth Alba:
https://i.imgur.com/Ujcmqcf.jpeg

Gosh darn it:
https://i.imgur.com/Ujcmqcf.jpeg

Ashley Pomeroy, I don't know much about Digital Spy but I agree that it's nice to be nice to people who like TV. More specifically, there was a legendary ILM contributor, Robin Carmody, who would write very frequently with furious polemics against whatever people were saying on Digital Spy. I couldn't really tell why, but then he was an unusual character.

I dunno if there's a word for the kind of lightweight talk radio DJs that take up way too much air time on 5 Live and presumably other stations, where the show is just blathering about fuck all interspersed with no mark media celebs and unfunny anecdotes and humblebrags from the listeners

example: Scott Mills and Chris Clark, Laura Whitmore, god knows how many more

anyway, what the fuck is that about? does any sentient being enjoy this shit?

Chris Stark, not Clark

Stark and Mills have been on Radio 1 in the afternoon for more than 10 years. this autumn they’re moving to Radio 2. A lot of people like them. It’s extremely “LadBible” radio.

Actual soccer coverage and discussion on 5live is now also suffused with "Banter" in a way it was not in the days of Mike Ingham.

I dislike it greatly, though I have a higher threshold for Chris Sutton than some do - finding him, in his way and on his day, quite shrewd and dry.

Sutton and Savage are as bad as each other, playing the Talk Sport controvery trolling games

Savage has made 606 (which was already bad) completely unbearable. I remember about 13 years ago when he first co-presented it with Neil Warnock and he was so awful I thought he'd never get invited back again.

Savage is an utter moron, which Sutton isn't. Both unbearable, of course.

I haven't listened to it in ages but World Football Phone-In used to great, mainly because Tim Vickery is intelligent and very knowledgeable rather than fucking trying to kill us all with bantz

Dotun Adebayo is quite annoying though, but not enough to ruin the show

i am annoyed at the bbc because i went to watch the final of sewing bee on the pvr and got an hour of tennis instead. because 14 hours of tennis on one day isn't enough.

Sutton is bad on 606 and plays a very bad role of trying to provoke people, with Savage, who is dire.

But Sutton on other programmes presents a somewhat different persona. In World Cup 2018 he even had a schtick of learning facts about the cultural history of Russian cities.

Vickery is good in various ways. Think he is, oddly, a THFC fan, and also some kind of socialist.

He probably is a socialist because he grew up in Hemel Hampstead! Andy Brassell is decent as well, but he's another one who offers thoughtful observations rather than idiotic controversy and banter. The cricket coverage on 5 live is pretty good, but with football they feel like they need to do it *this* way.

another very fine Spurs fan being interview by Nick Robinson on R4 at the moment. joking obv

Brassell is a Wimbledon fan, who are a much more likable club than Spurs!

Best of BBC iPlayer

Young Brits selling Dubai real estate

DUBAI HUSTLE

A career change with a difference...

ROOKIE COPS

Just reading this piece (by Robin) on Tim Westwood but managing to touch much else.

https://shirazsocialism.wordpress.com/2022/07/31/tim-westwood-how-should-the-left-respond/

Somewhat baffled by the reference to Tony Blackburn, who sounds exactly like what he is, an ex-public schoolboy who is a professional radio DJ, and always has done

Actually John Peel is a much better comparison, with the manufactured accent and the somewhat dubious sexual history.

Well the comparison to Blackburn is to do with the pushing of a strand of black music, and the early career in pirate stations but I get that it isn't a perfect fit.

What I must say to the mans and dems is the thing about the Westwood after party is the ladies

Westwood was more like Savile in the sense he seemed to be constantly in public confession mode, but in that bizarre posh English cunt pretending to be a homeboy from the projects syntax. But how the fuck did this cunt last so long? I grew up with white people who talked a bit like him. But they were mostly from a council estate parts that were like 30-40 % afro-caribbean and some of them only looked white but were part of extended black families or the kind of people who might just knock you out if you start talking about cultural appropriation to them! But this wanker got a free pass not just from the bbc, but from the UK black communities, from UK/US rap artists ... just how the fuck did he manage to pull this act off for so long - even before it came out he was a predatory paedophile.

That is such a weird article: it’s like someone mostly mastered the cultural tools and framework for making a reasoned long-form argument, but uses them to veer off into the strangest tangents, and take in personal long-standing assumptions, arguments and grievances that the author has had over the years.

3/10 - please try again, and do not deviate from the exam question set by calzino just above.

sorry but I can barely answer exam questions, never mind ask them! But I'm a whizz at quick crosswords and kakuru

radio 4 killing me with their trailers. especially the one for a mindfulness podcast which features some woman with a nails down chalkboard voice inducing in me the very opposite feeling to mindfulness.

if it's the same voice I'm thinking of it's how I imagine Laura Barton would sound like when talking about borrowing a friend's 2nd/3rd home in the lake district for a few weeks to go on an inner journey of self-discovery only to find she had everything she ever wanted at her posh flat in London.

wait isn't that like 80 percent of Radio 4 voices?

absolutely is, but when promoting mindfulness in that voice there should be a trigger warning for people who might have a raging predisposition for class war!

i think they just dose us with Ian McMillan in case of emergency