On TV & Radio.

Monty Don is an extraordinary figure, and never more so than in his new series on French gardens. At home, and normally, his approach on Gardeners' World is a work of art. It draws one in. His persona is the antithesis of the TV celebrity. There is no concession to the plebian or the demotic. He is quite Bloomsbury, or Sitwell. He is of the 1950s - somehow, in his world, we are only just out of rationing. Electricity has been invented, but is kept indoors - it has not reached the garden, quite.  His is the manner of an eccentric aristocrat, or gnarled bohemian. But there is the affectation of peasant authenticity, and quite possibly a dread of the common, the flashy, the arriviste and the nouveau. That produced a fine muddle in France. Read more...

All right. My headline may be over-egging things a little. Still, I am pretty sure I helped save the BBC from making a fool of itself over climate change politics. (If I'm wrong, and someone in a position to know lets me know in confidence, I'll cheerfully take this blog down.) The issue is especially interesting to me since I want the BBC to be scrapped but I don't really share the right's horror of its supposed left-wing bias or even the current blogosphere outrage at the BBC's climate coverage. Read more...

It's early days in the re-investigation of claims of paedophilia in Wales, but it is perhaps a good moment to hope that the work of Richard Webster gets re-visited. In his The Secret of Bryn Estyn (2005 and 2009), Webster (who died in 2011) made a detailed case that many of the allegations of abuse were false, and had indeed been induced by police, judicial and journalistic practices.  He claimed these failings had led to several false imprisonments. Webster criticised the Waterhouse Inquiry for misunderstanding the nature of false allegations, and for allowing them to go unchallenged. In short, Ronald Waterhouse (who also died in 2011) may have failed to uncover some cases of abuse, but it may well be that his inquiry also failed to uncover some gross miscarriages of justice. Read more...

Tessa Jowell has proposed that the BBC must be preserved and that it should be a mutual owned and controlled by the licence-fee holders. This is a socialist romantic's vision and it mirrors rather well my "right-wing" proposal for a National Media Trust. Read more...

There was something quite blissful about David Dimbleby's contribution to today's BBC Today programme (12 November 2012). He said the BBC was over-managed, and that such organisations as the BBC and NHS spawned bureaucracies. The paradox here is that he doesn't grasp that one reason that the NHS and the BBC are alike is that they are both state-sponsored behemoths with monolithic tendencies. Read more...

We should hope all hope that BBC is well-managed. Why not give George Entwistle a nice contract to design an organisational and cultural shake-up, now he's free to concentrate on such a cerebral operation? After all, surely the problems which sank him were of others' making, and Lord Patten says Entwistle was appointed precisely on this ticket? Read more...

After Steve Hewlett's masterly commentary on the mea culpa Newsnight (BBC2, 9 November 2012), I would only add two thoughts. Read more...

David Priestland had a fascinating but flawed take on Tom Stoppard's take on FMF's take on the Tory type (The Gentle Tory is alive and well – on television). Actually, I say, the BBC drama is unsurprisingly BBC-ish, but with valuable quirks. Its adaptor may be rightish, but the BBC's leftishness can live with this show pretty well.  Read more...

Britiain's economic success clearly matters just now and it's germane to wonder if the Olympics have helped. Here are some pros and cons on the matter. Read more...