This is an account of some parts of Shall I Listen? of 1933. It was the penultimate book by Filson Young (1876-1936). He was a BBC pioneer with instincts about the future of broadcasting which foreshadow the podcast age. He was a snob who disparaged Reithian London-centricity. He was a Londoner who invented a new style of outside broadcasting from a Cornish village. Read more...
In May 2022, the Lucy Worsley Investigates series had a film on the Black Death (repeated in February 2023, when I saw it). We were given the story of mid-14th Century Britain’s response to the dreadful plague. The BBC promotional blurb was full of how our heroine would investigate the… Read more...
BBC Four Extra in the small hours can be exceptionally moving. It’s something to do with listening to headphones in the dark. A good case was the hour-plus omnibus edition of Radio 4’s Curtain Down at Her Majesty’s, which I hadn’t heard before its outing in January 2023 (first broadcast… Read more...
I am interested in the fashions which blow through children's fiction and, a related matter, child-rearing mantras. This is a matter of the stories we tell children, and the stories we tell about them. They are as interesting for their consistency through our recent centuries as they are for their differences. Read more...
In 2007 I wrote "Scrap the BBC!" for the Social Affairs Unit. It was subtitled, "10 years to set broadcasters free". Well, that didn't happen. The next big though interim discussion about the Corporation's future is set for 2022, preparatory for a new charter in 2027. What are the odds of major change within ten years?
I wouldn't bet on it, not with my record. Anyway, a much bigger set of questions arises. How are we to handle the new world of media? Read more...
They did rather well didn’t they? The Granada TV company, often a trail-blazer, wittily turned its 1964 World in Action special Seven UP! into a seven-yearly snapshot of a cohort of kids who were seven year-olds in the phoney revolution of the Beetles, lifestyle Sunday colour supplements, and Swingin’ London. Read more...
This is a remarkable TV meditation on whether the African can be like, or even understand, the European, or vice versa. It makes a rather good and very sad case that they can't, or anyway that the aid system wasn't doing so in the 1980s. Both sides were too busy exploiting each other's many weaknesses. I write the following not least in case it tempts others to pitch in with their reading of the show. Read more...
There is a long tradition of women being successfull in farming, landowning and business. Here I look at Anne Lister (Gentleman Jack) and Charlotte Brontë's Shirley in that light.
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