Omnishambles at the BBC

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March 11th 2023 was Omnishambles Friday at the BBC, a day of multiple trouble. The redoubtable David Attenborough has a new series on British wildlife and there was consternation that the final episode, apparently dealing with its dramatic decline and what has caused it, is not being transmitted but will be seen only on iPlayer. Another of their top stars, Gary Lineker, was suspended from presenting Match of the Day for a tweet criticising the government’s new asylum policy, and his co-hosts promptly withdraw from the programme in solidarity. As a side show, following complaints from listeners, the BBC issues an apology for allowing former culture secretary Nadine Dorries to make false claims about Sue Gray and Keir Starmer on a radio show, and Question Time presenter Fiona Bruce was accused of trivialising domestic abuse in an exchange with Stanley Johnson. All these incidents revolve around household names, as so much of the news does. A few days earlier, the broadcaster was under attack from another direction, after announcing a review of its classical music provision, including 20% job cuts in its three English orchestras, and disbanding the BBC Singers, whose origins go back even further than the orchestras, to 1924, a twenty-strong choir of top flight voices capable of singing anything, and a jewel in the BBC’s musical crown. Read more

Kiss Channel 4 Goodbye?

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The prospective privatisation of Channel Four induces in me a state of cognitive dissonance. Part of me is appalled at this wanton repetition of what the patrician Harold Macmillan way back called ‘selling off the family silver’, and another part of me answers back, but what is there worth saving? I remember, you see, what Channel Four was really like when it started, before it adopted a populist agenda in the 1990s, and I’m speaking not just as a viewer but as one of the numerous independent filmmakers who was commissioned by them. Over its first decade, C4 was truly novel, adopting unconventional and groundbreaking programme formats and bringing a whole new generation into production, in fulfilment of its public service remit, to be innovative, to inspire change, to nurture talent and to offer a platform for alternative views.  Read more

After Beforetimes: a New Year reflection

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The word that sums up what has happened: beforetimes. Beforetimes, life, we supposed, was normal. Our lives moved forward according to the rhythm of the seasons, the way stations of birthdays and anniversaries, and the passage of Shakespeare’s seven ages of man. This was normality, and we recognised it was imperfect. In beforetimes there was injustice, but many of us knew where we stood: underdogs in a struggle against the self-interest of capital. We were aware our weakness. We were hampered by the deficits of actually existing democracy after the collapse of communism, after the war on terrorism, after the near-death experience of capitalism. We didn’t agree about how to go about improving things or even exactly what a fair society ought to look like, but some progress was made through fighting to enlarge what society understood to be normal, insisting on everyone’s right to participate whatever their sexuality, ethnicity or religion, and protesting the injustice of the economic inequalities which exacerbated these differences. The first thing to impinge on this sense of normality was the growing awareness of climate change, which made the question of a radical change in direction a matter of increasing urgency, but still we believed that another world is possible. That was beforetimes. Read more

Going Viral: A Coronavirus Diary

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Coronavirus brings globalisation into focus by forcing attention onto the different layers of interconnectedness in our twenty-first century world. As the virus spreads around the planet in waves, the pandemic impinges on different social and economic sectors each according to its own rhythm, throwing them out of joint one by one. The synchronisation which normally keeps the whole system running harmoniously breaks down. It is precisely at the moment the system breaks down that we realise how interconnected it is. What is normally hidden because, as we used to say, it functions like clockwork, is exposed. We discover that while our clocks are nowadays calibrated atomically, public time is not at all uniform but constituted by the superposition of many different tempos.

Free Associations 78, 2020

Read it here:

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Cuba and COP26: Forbidden Thoughts

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What happens when the independent filmmaker finishes a film and begins the business of getting it out, hustling for screenings and posting on social media to reach the audience you’ve made it for? You start to have to think about the conditions for its reception, or what marketing people reductively call targeting – only you don’t have a marketing budget. The problem is the law of the internet: the network you want to reach is always further away than the network you’re able to reach from the network where you start off. This is where we’re at with our new documentary, Cuba: Living Between Hurricanes, about ecology and the prospects for sustainable development in this Communist Caribbean island. Read more

29th March +2

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What I’d like to see is Article 50 being revoked, but I don’t expect that to happen yet, if at all. So we need something to happen this week to persuade the EU to grant a long extension. (That of course should include elections to the European Parliament in May, which is only correct.) Reports suggest that even at this late stage the EU would ideally like to avoid a no-deal Brexit, so the question is what would persuade them to grant a further extension, to which the general answer is surely any significant change of position or circumstances. 

One thing could be a majority on Monday in the Commons for one alternative or another, preferably together with a second referendum, because of course there should be a people’s vote, anything else would be less than democratic. 

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Election surprises and imponderables

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A friend in Mexico asks me about the election. Can the left win? This is what I write back.

Gramsci’s famous dictum is very relevant: pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. Objectively it doesn’t look like Labour can actually win, but it does look increasingly likely that the Tories won’t come out of it nearly as well as it looked at the start, maybe enough that Mayhem will not be strengthened but weakened. Read more

Election Call: Politics out of sync

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The mainstream media seem to have already decided. The Tories can’t fail to win. Labour is going to be routed. Yet Mrs May’s opportunist election call is a signal of her weakness in the face of Brexit, belated recognition that she has no personal mandate for the task. So it’s the right thing to do but for all the wrong reasons. (See this lucid analysis by Anthony Barnett.) She wants a single-issue election about Brexit, in order, she says, to strengthen her hand vis-a-vis Europe – the question is, to do what? Does she even know? Her poker face gives nothing away but the hand she’s hiding is a real bummer. Is she panicking because, as Paul Mason puts it, ‘she has triggered article 50 with no plan, no agreed negotiating position and a deteriorating economy’? Read more

Cuba: After the Burial

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A more interesting question to ask after his death is not what Fidel Castro was – a revolutionary hero? a tyrannical dictator? a beneficent dictator? – but who would now call themselves a Fidelista and what will become of Fidelismo? The Havana where I arrived the day before his burial at the other end of the island was certainly subdued, but how to interpret the silence that the TV news bulletins during the previous week had all remarked on? It wasn’t just that the authorities had banned music and alcohol during the mourning period. An old friend of my own age ruminated: ‘People were silent’, she said, ‘because they didn’t know what to say.’ Or as a new friend, an equally thoughtful young woman of 26 put it, ‘He already wasn’t there.’ Read more

Questions about ‘Money Puzzles

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Some questions I’ve been asked about ‘Money Puzzles’, ahead of the first UK screenings in Crewe, London and Liverpool over the next few days.

lucyWhat are the origins of ‘Money Puzzles’ and how do they fit in with your background as a documentarist?

‘Money Puzzles’ is a sequel to ‘Secret City’ (2012), which is about the City of London—the square mile that has been described as ‘a state within a state’. ‘Secret City’ was made in the wake of the Occupy movement, which concentrated attention on the City as the Vatican of financial capitalism. ‘Money Puzzles’ reverses the perspective and looks outward, beyond the citadel of finance, towards the global system of financial capital of which the City is one of the principal agents.

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