Did they learn anything from Caroline?

Three and a half years ago I wrote about “a modern tragedy”, one that shouldn’t have happened. I’m talking about the death of Caroline Flack, who was found dead in her Stoke Newington flat just over a month after she had been charged by police with assaulting her tennis player boyfriend. 

She had committed suicide, a horrendous outcome from a truly sorry story, in which heavy-handed processing by the Crown Prosecution Service, coupled with intense media scrutiny and even more intense social media commentary appeared to compel the 40-year-old - who’d been struggling with mental health issues for several years, despite portraying herself as a bubbly, fun public persona had already been suffering from mental health issues - to kill herself. As I wrote, “Fans blame the press. The press blames social media. Social media blames the press. Everyone is blaming everyone else for Caroline Flack’s suicide. It’s an unholy mess.”

Fast-forward to last Friday, and The Sun’s publication of a story about an unnamed BBC presenter allegedly paying a young individual tens of thousands of pounds for explicit photos over the course of three years, starting when they were just 17. And so began a five-day media firestorm, plunging the BBC into crisis, and launching a frenzy of speculation as to who the “well-known” presenter was. Day-after-day The Sun doubled-down on the story, with other media outlets - including the BBC itself - echoing the reporting with their own. Despite other things going on the world the BBC presenter story led TV news bulletins and dominated front pages. Rishi Sunak couldn’t even fly off to the NATO summit in Vilnius without being asked for his six cents’ worth. The story was, according to Alastair Campbell, what happens when “media culture loses any sense of perspective about a story”. “We have to get a grip on our sense of perspective when these things happen,” he told the BBC itself, pointing out that the frenzied saturation coverage had managed (perhaps conveniently) to obliterate other big stories such as the NATO summit and Boris Johnson's apparent lack of producing his WhatsApp messages by Monday’s deadline for the Covid inquiry.

On Saturday The Sun published further allegations, opening up the BBC’s complaints procedure to scrutiny. By Sunday, the still-unnamed male presenter was reported by the corporation as being suspended while it worked “as quickly as possible to establish the facts in order to properly inform appropriate next steps.” In the meantime, high profile male BBC presenters had to fight a rearguard action of their own to dismiss speculation that the presenter was one of them. One presenter went out of his way to post on both Twitter and Threads that he wouldn’t be appearing on air the next day because he was “looking forward to taking annual leave”, a somewhat absurd statement to say “it’s not me”.

Three more days of speculation ensued, with The Sun and its rivals still not naming the presenter on the basis that they didn’t have any legal grounds to do. Even the young person at the centre of the original controversy said, in a letter to the BBC issued through lawyers, that nothing inappropriate or unlawful happened had happened the unnamed presenter, declaring The Sun’s story as “rubbish”, and even highlighting the fact that the paper hadn’t even acknowledged the individual’s denial on Friday night.

That, though, didn’t stem the media pile-on. By yesterday morning, Jeremy Vine - one of a number of people caught up in the speculation about the presenter’s identity - spoke on his Channel 5 programme that it was time  the presenter named himself in order to spare others from being falsely accused. ”I know the individual concerned,” Vine professed, before magnanimously adding: “I am very worried about his state of mind and what this is doing to him. I know his survival instinct has kicked in and I know he saw what happened to Phillip Schofield, but my God look at the damage to the BBC, look at the damage to his friends, to those falsely accused - and the longer he leaves it the worse it will be for him.”

And then, some hours after it was revealed that the police had decided that “no criminality was identified” out of The Sun’s lurid coverage, the pressure that had been building on the presenter and his family came to a head when Vicky Flind (producer of Robert Peston’s weekly political discussion show on ITV) named her husband - Huw Edwards - as the presenter (confirming what had been known amongst journalists as the media gossip network had done its worst, with less-than-disguised posts on social media). 

“As is well documented,” Flind wrote in a statement, “[Huw] has been treated for severe depression in recent years. The events of the last few days have greatly worsened matters, he has suffered another serious episode and is now receiving in-patient hospital care where he’ll stay for the foreseeable future.” Let’s just linger on that last point for a second. Is it any wonder?

Earlier in the day, on The News Agents podcast, former BBC reporter Jon Sopel - a friend and colleague of Edward for over 30 years - told co-presenters and fellow BBC emigrés Emily Maitlis and Lewis Goodall that he disagreed with Vine’s view that the as-yet anonymous presenter should out himself: “I would say Jeremy is a friend of mine and I disagree with him on this,” Sopel said. “I think that whoever the presenter is needs to work it out himself. I cannot begin to imagine the sort of pressure, the sort of anguish, turmoil that is going on in his life. And just to hear from your colleagues, come on for the sake of me, can you out yourself please? I’m not sure that’s the best look.”

After Flind had released her statement, Sopel appeared on Andrew Marr’s show on LBC, making the very salient point that: “There was no criminality and if there was no criminality - which we have had confirmed by the Metropolitan Police - what are you left with?”. “Huw has talked in the past about his depression. The Sun initially made some very serious allegations on the Saturday morning: that he might have solicited photos from someone who was underage and had therefore committed a criminal offence.” “I did gasp when I saw the headline [on Saturday],” Sopel added. “I didn’t know who the presenter was but I thought ‘bloody hell this is serious’.” But, he said, after the story had been plastered across the next seven pages, “it was nothing”. “I don't know what went on at The Sun. But it just seemed to me that they had a slightly half-cooked story that they decided to go with. They went with the parents of a young man who was in turmoil and from a fractured family relationship. And they didn't even carry the denial from this kid, from this young man. It was nonsense.”

At the heart of this story are humans. Vulnerable humans. And victims, too - Edwards himself, his wife Vicky and their five children, the family caught up in the original story, other people who’ve come forward to make claims about Edwards’ behaviour. Was The Sun wrong to run the story in the first place? Possibly, possibly not. It will use the morally ambiguous argument that running the original story was ‘in the public interest’. But stringing it out for five days while not naming the presenter and therefore putting itself into legal jeopardy merely added the pressure on Edwards himself. If The Sun was so sure of its story, why didn’t it name Edwards when it clearly knew his identity? It begs the question - what was its intention.

This brings us to the BBC. In essence, this story isn’t about the BBC. It was, in Jon Sopel’s words to Andrew Marr,  “Someone who had a probably rather complicated personal life, who was wrestling with certain issues,” and who wouldn’t have been the first to do be in that situation. “Huw has talked in the past about his depression,” Sopel continued. ”The Sun initially made some very serious allegations on the Saturday morning, that he, you know, might have solicited photos from someone who was underage, and therefore had committed a criminal offence. And that seems to have gone away completely, given what the Met has said this evening. And so you're thinking, well what is this all been about?”.

This, inevitably, leads to the conclusion that The Sun - whose proprietor has a known ideological dislike of the BBC - were handed a golden, cynical opportunity to use Edwards’ apparent indiscretions as a means of damaging the corporation’s reputation. There is certainly a suspicion that every headline opportunity the newspaper (and its rivals) had to tag the BBC, it did.

“I don't know what went on at The Sun,” Sopel told Andrew Marr. “But it just seemed to me that they had a slightly half-cooked story that they decided to go with. They went with the parents of a young man who was in turmoil and from a fractured family relationship. And they didn't even carry the denial from this kid, from this young man. It was nonsense.”

In fairness, though, the BBC does appear to have a lot to explain itself of how it handled the original complaint, raised with it in May after the family of the young adult in the initial story had flagged it in April to South Wales Police, who deemed the allegations not worthy of criminal investigation. It took from 18 May, when a family member went to a BBC building to make a complaint about “the behaviour of a BBC presenter” until last Thursday, 6 July, when The Sun raised with the BBC press offer that there were allegations about Edwards. 

Here’s where the BBC itself has ended up doing The Sun’s job for it. Although a specialist BBC investigations team had instigated an enquiry into the claims made in May, new allegations appeared over the weekend that were different to those initially investigated. Under it’s “neither fear nor favour” editorial ethic, the BBC itself started reporting extensively on the story, leading news bulletins with it, and even pumping out breaking news alerts received on mobile phones about one of its own. This has been met with incredulity by Jon Sopel: “I think the BBC is a complicated beast and it would be lovely to think of it as a streamlined organisation where one bit knows what the other is doing. But the BBC is a series of completely uncoordinated limbs”. On the one hand, he said, BBC Director-General Tim Davie was claiming that its internal investigation was put on hold while the police decided whether there was anything to investigate (or not), while at the same time “BBC News is carrying out investigations and produces a report at 4 o'clock in the afternoon saying he had spoke to someone, and aggressive tones, or used swear words. I just thought: ’Hang on, does one know what the other is doing?’. I think the worst thing the BBC could be seen as being is the provisional wing of The Sun newspaper.”

My issue here with this debate is that it becomes something of a self-serving media ‘bubble’ story. In the days and weeks ahead, fingers of blame will continue to be pointed at the various actors in the media coverage. Questions will be rightly asked about many aspects of the BBC’s handling of a human resources issue, but also about The Sun’s motives, and the motives of newspapers with similar interests and their role in the pile-on. What’s not clear is what happens with the figures at the very heart of the story - the victims. Edwards himself is one of the BBC’s highest paid presenters (according to the BBC Annual Report, published on Tuesday as the furore was growing louder), but also one of its most respected, not only as one of the presenter of the 10 O’Clock News but lead anchor on state occasions. 

Should Edwards’ “rather complicated personal life”, to quote Jon Sopel, preclude him resuming his roles? And what about the young adult - now aged 20 - whose alleged receipt of £35,000 for explicit pictures at the request of the person we now know to be Edwards do next? If, as has been reported, this as-yet unidentified person has a crack cocaine addiction, you would hope that they can get the help they need. I don’t doubt, either, that their family - who raised the complaint in the first place - will be going through purgatory over the way the story has evolved (and I’m deliberately avoiding being judgemental about their circumstances or motivation for raising the complaint to begin with, even if their child has dismissed The Sun’s story as “rubbish”).

The bottom line is that, unless we see evidence to the contrary, what has been extensively and intensively reported on over the last five or six days amounts to little more than one adult’s complicated private life being made public. And he is now in hospital being treated for an acute mental health condition. Perhaps the media didn’t learn anything from Caroline Flack. Compassion, for a start.

Here’s one I made earlier: the darker side of Blue Peter

They say you should never meet your heroes, and I have to say, there have been occasions when that warning has proven valid. I once encountered Spike Milligan while working as a television publicist but, unfortunately, came up against the darker side of the notoriously bipolar comic, whose genius I’d grown up in awe of, thanks to my dad entertaining us with recordings of The Goon Show.

As a journalist, I often found that private personas were very different to the public versions that I’d seen as a child. My dad worked for the BBC, which meant that I was often taken to Television Centre to see shows he was involved in being made, in the process getting to meet many of their stars. In that context, I was treated as a junior VIP, with presenters and actors in full-on PR mode - gracious and engaging. But, when I later met some of the same people as, now, an adult writer, impenetrable walls of guarded defensiveness would inevitably get thrown up. Fair play: it was easy to see why, the way the tabloids did - and still do - stitch up celebrities, despite them engaging with the press in full understanding of the Faustian pact they had made in exchange for publicity.

Early in my nascent career - in fact, just six months after taking my A-levels - I was dispatched to North London to interview another childhood hero: John Noakes, the slightly scruffy Yorkshire-born actor who inadvertently became children’s television’s resident daredevil during his twelve-and-a-half years as a presenter of Blue Peter.

As my resultant piece for LM magazine detailed in its intro: “He fell from chimneys, dived to the bottom of the sea, raced cars. bikes and steamrollers, climbed Nelson’s Column, stepped out of an aeroplane at 25,000 feet, drove steam engines and cars of the future, broke a world record with 102 people aboard a Volkswagen Beetle, built an igloo on the side of the Cairngorms, went on safari all over the world, spent months training guide dogs, hashed up some amazing delicacies in the kitchen, and diced with death on a two-man bobsleigh at St. Moritz. And then he fell from grace - or rather, John Noakes fell out with most of the Blue Peter team”. Well, specifically, Blue Peter’s producers.

John Noakes, interviewed by me for LM magazine, March 1987

“Why should I risk my life for those idiots, only for them to kick you in the balls in the end?,” he vented at me in the pokey dressing room of the Intimate Theatre in Palmers Green, where he was playing Buttons in Cinderella. “I’ll leave TV to other idiots,” he reflected, some years after leaving the business. That, though, wasn’t the end of his ire towards the show that made his name. “Blue Peter was all one big lie and people believed it,” he revealed, my childhood illusions evaporating into the North London air. For example, the cookery segments, in which he’d confuse “decimated” with “desiccated” coconut was all part of an act. “I couldn’t cook a bloody egg,” he recalled. “The cooking [items] was a load of rubbish. I used to make up those cockups on purpose. It was all one big lie and people believed it. It was fantasy, and you’re all brought up on it.”

Much of Noakes’ anger was directed towards Biddy Baxter, the legendary, matriarchal editor of Blue Peter since 1962, who turned it into a pillar of the BBC’s children’s output. “Don’t talk to me about that bloody woman,” Noakes’ exclaimed that December morning in 1986 when I brought up the subject of his acrimonious departure from Blue Peter in June 1978, having been the show’s longest serving presenter. “The only way they’ll ever change Blue Peter is if they get rid of Baxter. You can take the programme from 15 years ago, stick it on tomorrow and you won’t notice any difference. But don’t ruin my day. I haven’t thought about all that for ages - I think of nice things…”.

Quite what he’d think about things now, with the publication tomorrow of a biography of Baxter herself, we will never know. Noakes died in 2017 at the age of 83, having settled in Majorca after he and his wife Vicky’s sailing yacht was - in perhaps the most Noakes way possible - shipwrecked in 1982, and they decided to stay there.

Picture: Ten Acre Films

45 years after his departure from Blue Peter - ending the ‘classic’ presenting line-up of Noakes, Valerie Singleton, Peter Purves and Lesley Judd - urban myths still linger. One is that Noakes and his beloved on-screen border collie Shep were forced apart by the BBC when the presenter left the show. Noakes had maintained that he’d been told that he’d be able to keep his canine partner, accusing the corporation of breaking its promise. Not so, according to Richard Marson, author of the new book, Biddy Baxter: The Woman Who Made Blue Peter. In fact, according to Noakes’ wife, he kept Shep until the couple decided to embark on their fateful voyage, concluding that the dog just wouldn’t be happy at sea. And so, Shep went to live with a lady called Edith Menezes, who’d taken on many of the Blue Peter pets after they’d retired from the show.

When I met Noakes in 1986 there were clearly many points of animosity between him and Baxter. There were industry rumours that he’d been sent on the most dangerous of stunts - like free-falling with the RAF Falcons parachute display team or scaling Nelson’s Column - without any form of insurance, allegedly the result of BBC stinginess. In Marson’s book, however, Vicky Noakes reveals that Shep was the biggest source of acrimony, given that the dog was ‘owned’ by the BBC, with the Noakes family paid an allowance for his expenses. “John used to say, ‘Oh, Shep’s just a prop’. He hated the fact that he should be given a contract to look after the dog. He said, ‘This is absolutely ridiculous’.” Noakes also took exception to the BBC preventing him from doing an advert for Spillers dog food featuring the pet.

In reality, Noakes and Shep remained a double act for a long time after Blue Peter, appearing in the children’s factual series Go With Noakes, with the collie continuing to live with the family. But, still, in that Palmers Green dressing room, his anger over many things relating to Baxter - with his love for that dog at its root - was clear. What is also clear is that Baxter, throughout her time as Blue Peter editor (she left the show in 1988 as the result of a reorganisation of the BBC Children’s Television department) was simply protective - perhaps too much - of the Blue Peter ‘brand’. The Spillers ad ban was to prevent the brand being exploited. 

During her 33 years in charge, Baxter became a powerful figure within the BBC. “She absolutely ruled [Blue Peter],” Peter Purves once said, adding: “I didn’t always agree with her views, but she was right.” Writing this week in the Daily Telegraph, Marson recounted a story of Baxter needing to make use of the Television Centre inner ring road to demonstrate a new high-tech vehicle. “BBC jobsworths tried to stop her, [so] she simply put in a call to the Controller of BBC One and steamrollered all objections. No matter that as a result there was gridlock around West London. The police were incensed but when they learnt Blue Peter was to blame, took no action.”

Presenter Lesley Judd’s future on the show came into doubt when she divorced her husband Derek Fowlds (then ‘Mr. Derek’ on the BBC’s Basil Brush Show), who in turn threatened to go to the press about their marriage. Baxter was reportedly fearful of the story’s impact on Blue Peter’s wholesome reputation. Judd’s working relationship with the show would never be the same again. “The programme was so precious, especially to Biddy,” Judd has said, graciously. “She ate, slept and lived it.”

Richard Marson is effusive of Baxter’s tenure as the show’s editor, and its lasting effect on a generation or more of children exposed to the show’s sticky-backed plastic ‘makes’. In the Telegraph he wrote: “It was Biddy’s single-minded drive and devotion to the audience that transformed Blue Peter from an inconsequential studio-bound magazine show begun in 1958 and aimed primarily at five to eight-year-olds, to a major national brand, enjoyed, imitated, talked about, mocked, criticised, revered, an essential part of the DNA of generations of children, who watched and engaged in their millions.”

Engagement was, Marson argues, key to the show’s strength: “[Children] could write in with a story, a picture, a poem or an idea for the programme. The reward might be one of the famous Blue Peter badges, which Biddy launched in ’63 and which bestowed the privilege of free entry to all kinds of top attractions the length and breadth of the UK. The scheme was wildly popular and, for a one-way medium, kept the show uniquely in touch with the tastes and interests of its audience. In a pre-Internet era, it gave children a powerful sense of ownership and belonging.”

Baxter’s legacy was established by a near-fanatical obsession with what Blue Peter was there to deliver, and by the power that stemmed from her ownership of it. “Presenters came and went but the programme spoke with one voice - Biddy’s,” Marson wrote. “She had the ultimate say over every aspect of the content, wrote or rewrote all the scripts, and was a forensic presence in the studio to ensure that her perspective and emphasis prevailed. Even in an era with far less scrutiny and compliance, she wielded extraordinary power and control. All at a time when it was exceptionally rare for women to reach such positions in television - which Biddy had managed at 29, after stints in schools radio and TV and Listen With Mother.”

To watch Blue Peter now is to see a show largely unrecognisable to that which I watched every Monday and Thursday afternoon as a child, but then so has children’s television. Plus, at 55, I’m not the audience. Today’s Blue Peter has had to adapt to, for a start, children’s television shows being somewhat marginalised in the daytime schedules and shunted into their own channels while BBC One’s afternoons are a dirge of reality shows and quizzes. When I was a child I didn’t have all the digital distractions that kids today have at their finger tips. Frankly, it’s to the BBC’s credit that shows like Blue Peter and Newsround (which my wife screens every day for her primary school class) are still on the air.

Thinking about it though, the era of Noakes, Purves, Singleton and Judd was somewhat unreal. Even for the 1970s, they hardly conformed to what we now think of as youth TV presenters, with Noakes’ ‘slacks’, rolled up shirtsleeves and Boris-esque mop of hair. Youth culture was different, but not necessarily simpler: I’m not, for a minute, suggesting that we had to make do with spinning tops and marbles for our amusement. 

Blue Peter was - and probably still is - educational and informative. Under Baxter, we experienced vicariously the presenters’ summer expeditions, to parts of the world television cameras rarely took children. We came to appreciate tortoises’ hibernation rituals, and found that a cheap Christmas decoration could be easily constructed from lashing a couple of wire coat hangers together with some tinsel. Innocent pleasures, that, I must admit, were only slightly bruised by John Noakes’ take on what life really was like behind the scenes.

Biddy Baxter: The Woman Who Made Blue Peter is published by TenAcre films on 3 July

Clarkson!

Picture: Amazon

Sometimes in the culture wars, events contrive to create the perfect storm. In the case of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex - Harry and Meghan, to you and me - the storm is a permanent state of enragement, much like that giant red cyclone near the equator of Jupiter.

For one newspaper in particular - obviously, the Daily Mail - it is ever-present. On any given day there are four or five stories about Harry, or Meghan, or both. At the height of the furore over Harry’s memoir Spare, you’d be lucky to find coverage of anything else. In recent days, though, the Mail’s apparent obsession with the Sussexes has died down to just four or five new stories a day. That, though, is still tempered by an injection of beatific pieces about Harry’s brother and sister-in-law, the Prince and Princess of Wales. It has been a prominent feature of the British media's editorial polarity that picture stories of the ever-smiling Catherine, her heir-to-the-throne husband and their adorable children get prominence in contrast to the prevailingly negative coverage of Harry and Meghan. Don’t tell me there isn’t an agenda going on there…

Back in December, before Spare came out, and in the wake of the royal couple’s exorcising Netflix series, Jeremy Clarkson stuck his size 14s in by writing a wholly offensive column for The Sun in which he suggested that Meghan should be paraded naked through the streets of Britain while having excrement flung at her by the public. He wasn't, to the best of anyone's knowledge, being literal, but in that oh-so Clarksonesque way, it was a clumsy reference to a scene from Game Of Thrones with which to emphasise the “hate” - his word – he had for the duchess “on a cellular level”. To hammer home his disdain, Clarkson placed the duchess above Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon and even serial killer Rose West. Needless to say, the shit-slinging idea went down well with people on Twitter called “Daz” or “Barry” who suffix their handles with Cross of St. George flags, and whose timelines are regularly peppered with sentiment supportive of topics such as Brexit, defunding the BBC and bringing back Boris. Basically, anything starting with the letter b. 

This is the Clarkson fan base: ‘real blokes’ who like cars, football and probably still bemoan the disappearance of The Sun’s Page Three “stunnah”, which was, of course, always only “a bit of fun” and in no way a daily dose of sexist titillation (with the emphasis on “tit” – phwoar!). These are the self-styled anti-woke warriors, who feed - and feed off - the Daily Mail’s constant chuntering about anything remotely liberal, contriving a culture war angle out of anything. So, far from merely tolerating his occasional sexism and casual racism on Top Gear, Clarkson’s core demographic have fully bought into his reactionary schtick. Which means the egregious column he wrote in December was probably regarded by most of his following as grist to the mill.

Not so, everyone else. Within a matter of days the column had attracted a record 25,000 complaints to the press regulator Ipso. As a pile-on ensued, an apparently chastened Clarkson tweeted: “Oh dear. I’ve rather put my foot in it. In a column I wrote about Meghan, I made a clumsy reference to a scene in Game Of Thrones and this has gone down badly with a great many people. I’m horrified to have caused so much hurt and I shall be more careful in future.” 

It wasn’t enough. Even to his daughter Emily. “My views are and have always been clear when it comes to misogyny, bullying and the treatment of women by the media,” she wrote in an Instagram post. “I want to make it very clear that I stand against everything that my dad wrote about Meghan Markle and I remain standing in support of those that are targeted with online hatred.”

The broad view agreed. Clarkson senior had been deeply misogynist. Questions were asked of the editorial governance at The Sun to have allowed the column to have run in the first place, with former Sun editor Neil Wallis calling it a “dreadful failure of editing.” Immediately, questions arose as to the reputational damage Clarkson had done to the broadcasters who employ him, although while Kevin Lygo, ITV’s media and entertainment boss, described the column as “awful”, he said there were no plans to replace him as presenter of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?. Amazon, which has paid Clarkson several millions to front the son-of-Top Gear, The Grand Tour, and the reality series Clarkson’s Farm, was less ambiguous. Described by Clarkson himself as “incandescent” over The Sun piece, the streaming service was reported by entertainment industry trade rag Variety as “cutting their ties” with the controversial presenter. This, in turn, set off the likes of the Daily Mail and its readers who predictably accused those offended by Clarkson of ‘cancelling’ the 62-year-old manchild. Except that he hasn’t, yet.

In fact, the Variety story said that it was only “likely” that Amazon would part ways with Clarkson, and following “the conclusion of existing agreements.” Those include one more series of The Grand Tour and two of Clarkson’s Farm. That will mean Clarkson remains onscreen with Amazon for at least the next two years. But, as we know with the tabloids’ obsession with woke-bashing, don’t let such practicalities get in the way of a good story.

Amazon has remained quiet on Clarkson’s future, although a “senior figure” connected with the company told the Telegraph that such talk of the presenter being cancelled because of his column in The Sun was “nonsense”. Another pointed out that Clarkson’s brand of gobshite controversy was hardly in the same league of offence-causing as some of the books Amazon sells, like Mein Kampf, or documentary series on Prime about serial killers. Actually, the storm only emboldens Clarkson’s brand. Ever since he started using strained metaphors in the ‘old’ Top Gear about cars “snapping knicker elastic”, he knowingly self-cultivated an image of being television’s actual Alan B’Stard, who comes out with mildly reactionary things just to get a rise. Boo!

It worked. Top Gear 2.0, with Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May, became a juvenile version of Last Of The Summer Wine, pushing the tolerance envelope with obviously scripted routines that portrayed the trio as a group of overgrown schoolboys, rather than middle-aged motoring journalists. That was until the “slope” reference in a film the trio made in Thailand which was, we were assured, a statement about a camera angle. I don’t think the Thai gentleman in shot would have been amusedThe last straw, for the BBC, at least, came with Clarkson being sacked for punching a Top Gear producer while on location after being told that the crew’s hotel couldn’t prepare a late night steak for him.

Picture: Amazon

Thus, Amazon spent £160 million on luring Clarkson & Co over to Prime to develop The Grand Tour which was, blatantly, Top Gear 2.5. Same presenters, same schtick, same demographic. Except – and this gets to the bottom of Amazon’s possible tie-cutting - the blokeish Clarkson/May/Hammond humour is intrinsically British and, even then, quite narrow. The Telegraph revealed this week that Prime has around 200 million viewers worldwide, with three-quarters of them in America. In Britain, where The Grand Tour and Clarkson’s Farm will more or less exclusively resonate, Amazon can only command 12 million subscribers. All of a sudden, £160 million seems an awful lot of money. As the GT trio found with old-TG, their form of irony doesn’t always work in America. Clarkson’s Farm, too, is probably regarded as parochial (even though it is, actually, genuinely entertaining), but US ratings for it have been particularly poor. And with any poorly performing TV property, if it doesn’t rate, it gets the chop.

The beginning-of-the end for Clarkson on Amazon is, then, pure coincidence. But that won’t keep him out of the headlines. Last week it was revealed that he e-mailed Prince Harry on Christmas Day to apologise for his Sun column, saying that his language had been “disgraceful” and he was “profoundly sorry”. A spokesperson for Harry and Meghan were less than impressed: “While a new public apology has been issued today by Mr. Clarkson, what remains to be addressed is his long-standing pattern of writing articles that spread hate rhetoric, dangerous conspiracy theories and misogyny. Unless each of his other pieces were also written ‘in a hurry’ [as he apparently stated] it is clear that this is not an isolated incident shared in haste, but rather a series of articles shared in hate.”

Clarkson has, of course, not been cancelled. He will continue presenting Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? on ITV - for now - though the network has not confirmed anything more than another series. The Sun still employs him, though his columns have been conspicuously absent, and he still has a weekly appearance in The Sunday Times. So, no, the enfante terrible hasn’t succumbed to the tofu-eating wokerati. But maybe a period of abstinence - not just by Clarkson but the rest of the reactionary commentariat constantly searching for a new club to break over Harry and Meghan’s heads - might do us all some good.

I can’t be arsed and I don’t think the pundits are either

Has there ever been a World Cup - or, indeed, any international sporting event - to generate so little excitement than the tournament now underway in Qatar? You’d have to go back to the tit-for-tat Cold War-proxy boycotts of the Moscow Olympics in 1980 and it’s equally mardy sequel in Los Angeles four years later to see the sort of apathy coming across from the Gulf.

Even in the opening match of the FIFA World Cup 2022, between the hosts and Equador, half the locals buggered off at half time, leaving vast swathes of empty seating in the Al Bayt Stadium. But if they were disinterested, what about the BBC’s presenting panel of Gary Lineker, Alan Shearer, Alex Scott and Ashley Williams? Let’s just say the energy in the room, as they introduced the fixture, was weird. As, by now, you’ll have read on Twitter or in the Daily Mail, it was the oddest opening to a football tournament ever. None of the eye-twinkling cornyness of the Des Lynam era, or slightly dodgy cultural cliches about the host nation. No. Not even a two-hour buildup and the promise of a “footballing fiesta”. Just a dead-eyed Lineker piece-to-camera, a canvass of pundits for opinions on the controversies-numerous of Qatar hosting the event, a forensic analysis of the issues from Ros Atkins, the presenter of the BBC’s Outside Source (does he ever wear anything other than that blue shirt underneath a blue blazer?) and for some ‘balance’ an interview with the BBC’s esteemed International Editor, Jeremy Bowen, on the tiny kingdom on the Arabian Peninsular. And then, more or less, straight into the opening game.

Controversially, perhaps, there was no mention or inclusion of the tournament’s opening ceremony on BBC1 (it was shown on the online iPlayer), all adding to the sense that the BBC was making the point that everyone else has been making about this World Cup being staged in a country with an atrocious record of human rights, and in which hundreds of migrant workers are alleged to have died building the tournament’s stadia in appalling conditions. 

The day before Lineker had promised a “mini Panorama”, and in that respect, the dour introduction to what should be the quad-annual highlight of the footballing calendar was a spectacularly joyless affair. “Woke virtue signalling”, came the inevitable online reaction, with the usual effluence of right-wing bile attacking Lineker - as per - and, equally, predictably, Scott (whose status as a female, black and - recently revealed - gay presenter didn’t need emphasising to wind up those with, clearly, an agenda). And, of course, the fact that it was on the BBC was enough to send keyboard warriors of a particular political persuasion fuming into orbit.

I’ve blogged before about Scott’s treatment from people who seem to have a problem with her being female, or speaking with an accent or, more likely, being a woman of colour. Credit, then to football writer Oliver Holt who - in none other than the Daily Mail - called out the “scorn” and “cynicism” her presence on the BBC in Qatar has met. “Some people want to silence voices like hers, voices which make inconvenient observations about FIFA and its decision to hold the World Cup in a country that treats women as second-class citizens and gay women as criminals,” he wrote. “She deserves our admiration for having the courage to travel to Qatar to work for the BBC and continue doing a job she loves, and which she has earned on merit. At this men’s World Cup, in particular, it is more vital than it has ever been before that there are top-class female broadcasters reporting on the sport and reporting on the issues.”

It could easily be argued that everyone should just focus on the football, and embrace the hippy ideals of nations coming together in the name of sport. The music journalist Lesley Ann Jones made the point today in a blog post that there wasn’t such indignation over the Romans executing Christians in the Colosseum, or Egyptian slaves dying in the construction of the Pyramids. But while all of that is true, the Romans and the Ancient Egyptians didn’t exist in the modern age of enlightenment. Plus, you’d have hoped that in the millennia since, migrant labourers shouldn’t be forced to work in inhumane conditions on extremely low pay, or under extremely restricted terms of employment.

I get it, that Qatar’s religious laws and culture - as anywhere else, for that matter - should be respected but why, then, award the staging of a competition to a country where being gay can result in execution, when the institution awarding those rights wants everyone to know how diverse and inclusive it is? Of course, we now know why those rights were awarded. And how. And while I will watch the World Cup this year, I will do so uneasily at best, and queasily at worst.

Once upon a time you’d await a World Cup with giddy excitement. While I’ve never been one to prepare for an international tournament by pinning a fixtures calendar to the fridge and compulsively filling up a sticker album with every competing squad member, I have enjoyed the traditions. Chief of these has been the fact that World Cups are staged in the northern hemisphere summer, with most of the contributing domestic leagues done for another year, and the players able to focus on their countries long enough before heading off to the beach for a few weeks until the new season gets going again. But clearly not this year. No barbecues before games, not even the draping of national flags outside houses and flying from car aerials. This World Cup has come around to flat relative indifference. 

In time, the actual football might change that, but I’m not holding my breath. I might eat my words if England progress, and I won’t pretend that I won’t be watching. But the controversy surrounding the tournament will not abate. And for that, anger must be awarded equally to both Qatar and FIFA. 

Saturday’s ridiculous rant by FIFA president Gianni Infantino (“Today I feel Qatari, I feel Arab, I feel African, I feel gay, I feel disabled, I feel a migrant worker.”) in which he effectively equated being bullied for having red hair as a child to the treatment Qatar is receiving from Western sensibilities, wasn’t just a surreal moment, but underlined the preposterousness of the competition coming to the country in the first place. “You are not gay,” Alex Scott scolded him in the BBC’s opening segment. “You will not understand travelling to a country where you are fearing for your life about your preference of who you choose to love.” Bravo, Alex. In a sport where the bland go to extraordinary lengths to avoid having opinions (even Shearer, sitting to Scott’s right, took the beige route in his own comments on the controversy), it was refreshing to hear it called out.

Not enough, though, have called out the decision to award Qatar the event in the first place. Not enough have stood up to FIFA, despite the overwhelming evidence of its snout being buried deep in the trough. In April 2020 it was reported that, following years of investigation, the United States Department of Justice said that representatives working for Russia and Qatar had bribed FIFA officials to secure hosting rights for the World Cups in both countries. In 2015 FIFA president Sepp Blatter resigned amid investigations by both Swiss police and the FBI, while several FIFA administrators have been convicted of corruption. Even the slippery Blatter admitted recently that the decision to award the World Cup to Qatar had been a “poor choice”, not that his comments will have exonerated himself from culpability in the appalling decision.

Picture: Twitter/England

The event is here now. I suppose we have to get on with it. The controversy of how it got here will not go away and, inevitably, as the tournament proceeds, fans will get caught up in all the usual arguments over penalties that weren’t, offsides that should have been given, VAR making a mockery of everyone else’s 20-20 vision, and all the pantomime villain-booing that comes with watching other countries play football (or, in other words, players from certain Latin nations diving like they’ve been shot).

England are up and running, with a comfortable win over the equally controversial Iran under their belts. England captain Harry Kane dodged an immediate yellow card before even kicking a ball by not wearing a ‘One Love’ rainbow armband (though Alex Scott did it for him). England avoided a fine from FIFA for the intended gesture. “England bottled it”, came the reaction on Twitter. “They’re just bowing to the oppression of the Qatari government.” one fan told the Press Association. “Let the players focus on the football,” came another viewpoint. They both have valid arguments. 

Nor will this undercurrent of disquiet go away as the next few weeks continue. The tournament might be progressing, but it’s a coin toss as to whether football is.

Gathering round the wireless, like the olden days

Picture: BBC

Some years ago, someone coined the expression “appointment television” to describe the communal act of everyone everywhere settling in front of the gogglebox at the same time to watch the same show. Whether it was the Christmas EastEnders shocker, the big Dallas reveal or some similar ‘water cooler moment’ of eyeball-corralling inducement, it was, in itself, the evolution of a similar phenomenon that occurred during the golden days of radio.

My parents’ generation would huddle around the Marconi at the appointed hour to listen to The Goon Show, Educating Archie or Hancock’s Half Hour, while my own age group would religiously tune in to Radio 1 on a Tuesday lunchtime for the readout of the new Top 40. It is all, perhaps, a lost art in this age of on-demand digital immediacy, where entire box sets can be binged in one go, and radio has fragmented across a mass of online stations.

All of which made yesterday’s experience both nostalgic and exhilarating in a manner I’ve not experienced since my teens, and a DJ’s first play of a new record by someone like The Police or The Jam: my stepdaughter Ella’s Solent University band, Inbound, released their debut single on Friday, and it was lined up for a first play on three radio stations - Southampton’s community outlet Voice FM, the legendary Gary Crowley’s BBC Radio London show, and the local BBC Introducing show for the Solent area. This led to the faintly hilarious sight of my wife and I, sat in a suburban car park on a Saturday lunchtime, hoping that the 5G connection wouldn’t drop as we waited with apprehension for the very excellent indie banger Something To Lose to break the airwaves for the first time. Quite understandably, there was a moistening of the eye - for my other half, you understand.

Here’s where the weirdness applied: it’s one thing to be excited with expectation at the promise of a new release from a favourite band (years ago, I was in the studio control room of Channel 4’s The Tube when U2’s With Or Without You was played on TV for the first time - with literally everyone agreeing afterwards that it had been a genuine hairs-up-on-the-back-of-the-neck moment); it’s another thing when, despite having heard a sneak preview (it’s helpful when your wife is the mother of the band’s bass player and lyricist), you’ve yet to hear a record from a brand new act blast out from stereo speakers in all of it’s high fidelity glory. I’ve not told my wife this, but even I had a lump in the back my throat, though I had to keep my mouth shut as I recorded the moment on my phone - a slightly shaky handheld shot of a car’s entertainment screen.

As if the lunchtime experience wasn’t emotional enough, the evening consumption was overwhelming. Not to the extent of more tears, just the breakout of utterly goofy grins on our faces, as Crowley - whose status as an eminent London tastemaker, was established back in the early 1980s as Radio 1’s then-youngest ever presenter - introduced Something To Lose just after 7.30pm. “We’ve got new music now from a young five-piece, literally on the first rung of the ladder,” he began. “They’re called Inbound and they sent me a terrific tune this week.” Cue more beaming. 

Just under three minutes later it was done. “Wow!”, came Crowley’s follow-up as the single’s outro reverberated. “How good is that?!” before adding “Got a feeling we’re going to be playing that one again…”.

You’d forgive us for replacing the goofy grins with open mouths, silent gasps and, yes, more moisture around the eyes. I’m new to this parenting lark. Not having children of my own, acquiring a pair of step-daughters - Ella is 21, her younger sister Meg is 17 - has opened an entirely new chapter of experiences over the last five years, as they’ve grown from teens to young adults. In fact, yesterday was quite the day for it, with us driving Meg to the first day of her first ever proper part-time job, before going off in search of that car park to listen to Ella making her broadcast debut. 

Of course, given my own professional origins and lifelong love of music, it’s been a source of immense pride that Ella has found an interest in it herself. Time and fortune will tell whether it becomes her future (and our retirement pension…). Realism will kick in: my joint-oldest friend is a professional musician of some note and an extremely high industry reputation, but even he is someone most people in the mainstream will have never heard of, despite being capable of selling out the Royal Albert Hall for three consecutive nights.

I’ve been around the business long enough in my own career to know that fame, fortune, adulation, financial success - whatever new artists are ultimately seeking - can be a long haul or simply unattainable. But that, thankfully, is not what’s on the table right now. Ella and her band have to first graduate the university that brought them together, and then do boring things like securing first jobs or future studies. But let’s not dampen the moment: for two minutes and fifty seconds, we all had a communal moment that could never be repeated, and for many will never happen at all.

Gary Crowley’s first play of Inbound’s Something To Lose can be heard online for the next 29 days at https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p0c3yvlr. For news and information about Inbound and where to stream the single, visit https://linktr.ee/Inbound.official.

Elocution defeat

Picture: BBC

The things people get steamed up about, eh? I’m sure there are plenty of weightier matters for Lord Digby Jones to get peeved about than Alex Scott’s pronounced London accent, but the BBC Tokyo 2020 presenter and former Arsenal footballer’s elocution has properly riled the portly baron.

“Enough!”, the self-appointed Professor Higgins harrumphed on Twitter. “I can’t stand it anymore! Alex Scott spoils a good presentational job on the BBC Olympics Team with her very noticeable inability to pronounce her ‘g’s at the end of a word. Competitors are NOT taking part, Alex, in the fencin, rowin, boxin, kayakin, weightliftin & swimmin”. He then went on to call out Sky News political editor Beth Rigby and Priti Patel (amusingly conflating the two in his tweet by saying that Scott was “hot on the heels of Beth Rigby at Sky the Home Secretary for God’s sake! Can’t someone give these people elocution lessons?”.

Scott hit back, declaring that she was proud of her accent and her roots: “I’m from a working-class family in east London, Poplar, Tower Hamlets & I am PROUD. Proud of the young girl who overcame obstacles, and proud of my accent! It’s me, it’s my journey, my grit.” And she added: “A quick one to any young kids who may not have a certain kind of privilege in life. Never allow judgments on your class, accent, or appearance hold you back. Use your history to write your story. Keep striving, keep shining & don’t change for anyone.”

As if Digby hadn’t dug himself a deep enough hole, the former CBI director general and, briefly, government minister, then doubled-down on his original tweets by posting: “Alex Scott, please don’t play the working class card. You are worthy of much better than that! I admire & often publicly praise the adversity you faced & defeated to achieve all the success you deserve. Not sounding a ‘g’ at the end of a word is wrong; period. It’s not a question of class, it’s not a question of accent, it’s a question of poor elocution. Don’t let it spoil your otherwise excellent performance.” He didn’t just leave it there, either. When confronted by The Times, Jones said that he was “disappointed” with Scott’s reaction, adding that it wasn’t a matter of class. “I come from very modest beginnings in Birmingham. I got a scholarship to a public school; my parents never could have afforded to pay. It’s got nothing to do with it. It is about elocution and the fact it is inaccurate.” He dismissed the public reaction to his comments about Scott’s pronunciation, adding that “At last, someone’s talking about it”. Peak patronising gammon.

While I do grate at some of the political correctness the BBC goes in for, its approach to regional accents is not one of the things I care too much about. We’re a nation of almost 70 million people - why should one “received” accent be the only one that matters? Scott’s regional pronunciation is no different, in principle, to the former BBC political editor John Cole, whose rich Ulster accent was never considered a problem by anyone, as I recall, only getting a light ribbing in Private Eye, which spoofed his commentary with parody stories that always began with “Hondootedly…”. 

Likewise, does Scott’s One Show colleague Alex Jones get grief for her Welsh pronunciation of “moosic? Or what about the plethora of Scottish presenters down the years? Even Gary Lineker and Jeremy Clarkson have regional accents - the footballer’s Leicestershire vowels and Clarkson’s Yorkshire flattening occasionally revealing their origins. The list goes on, and Digby really should get over it.

Stephen Fry had a good point by saying the pompous patronising peer’s view on Scott was “everything linguists and true lovers of language despise”. The problem is that accents aside, Jones’ ridiculous moan has served as another painful salvo in the supposed culture war. Scott receives enough abuse as it is for being black and female, with social media’s anti-woke/anti-BBC hate brigade regularly branding her a box-ticking token (when false rumours circulated last year that she was replacing Sue Barker as presenter of A Question Of Sport, the bullies went into overdrive. When she was actually announced as Dan Walker’s replacement in Football Focus, there was even more misogynistic - and, yes, racist - shit directed her way).

Picture: The Times

Scott has become an unlikely and unfortunate lightning rod in the cultural divide that’s been allowed to fester in Britain in recent years by the political classes. It’s the same war that has Labour Party deputy leader Angela Rayner branded “thick as mince”, simply for having a strong Lancashire accent and having been a single mother at a young age. Somehow it has become ingrained that a regional accent equates to its owner’s intellect, and that only the plummy-voweled have any right to be in positions of authority. In broadcasting it’s even worse, as if anyone on camera or with a microphone should conform to Reithian ideals, of continuity announcers in dinner jackets and ballgowns. It’s true that until not that long ago the BBC appeared to be largely voiced by purveyors of so-called “received English”, but not exclusively: Michael Parkinson, for example, had a prime-time Saturday night chat show, and yet spoke with a Yorkshire burr, as did John Noakes on Blue Peter.

What makes me applaud Alex Scott is that she hasn’t tried to modify her accent, as so many do in public life, such is the apparent stigma of sounding regional (I was always shocked to discover that Kate Adie comes from Northumberland). The sad fact is that people with provincial accents are still perceived as being less intelligent. A recent University of Essex study found that, that anyone speaking with an apparent working-class accent was judged less intelligent, friendly and even trustworthy than middle-class people when reading aloud. The same applied to people from minority ethnic backgrounds.

“The link that people make between accents and competency is something we need to break down,” Dr Amanda Cole, who led the Essex study, told The Times. “An accent reflects where we’re from, our class, our ethnicity, our identity. So to criticise someone’s accent is a veiled criticism of those different social factors.”

So on that learned note, let me end this post with a screenshot of Lord Digby Jones’ Wikipedia entry, as of yesterday (it has since been edited...), which some enterprising scamp had updated to reflect his ridiculous attack on Scott.

Stay classy, TV newsland

I remember, distinctly, the scene, 32 years ago, in the Sky TV press office in Osterley. It was late afternoon and Sky’s five channels were due to go on air at 6pm. We kept reminding ourselves that no-one had ever launched as many TV channels at the same time (this was February 1989 - until Channel 4’s arrival in 1982 the UK only had had only three terrestrial offerings). Sky News would be the first “live” channel on Sky with in-vision presenters. Everyone was nervous. Sky’s HQ - three converted industrial units on what was still a muddy site, underneath the Heathrow flight path - was still being constructed around us, which meant that the inaugural news bulletin, presented by Penny Smith and Alastair Yates, had to be fed through an outside broadcast link in the car park connected to a facility in central London. Anything could have gone wrong. Thankfully, it didn’t.

The parallels were there this last Sunday when upstart GB News launched at 8pm with a monologue from Andrew Neil (who was Sky’s executive chairman in 1989), promising “to do news differently”. As the newcomer’s chairman, Neil - who still has the huge-shouldered, hunched gate he had when I encountered him in the Osterley boardroom - promised: “We are committed to covering the people’s agenda, not the media’s agenda.” This, as has been well documented, is GB News’s PR schtick: to draw in the anti-woke brigade and satiate their belief that the BBC and, indeed, Sky News, are now portals for left-wing liberal thinking, and give them a voice (the fact that we’ve had a right-of-centre Conservative government for over ten years, which has delivered Brexit, doesn’t seem to have sunk in amongst those breathlessly endorsing GB News in comments beneath the Mail’s various puff pieces on the channel).

Like Sky, though, the build-up to GB News launching was coloured by a media narrative similar to that we endured in the latter half of 1988 as we worked towards launch day. Being a then-Rupert Murdoch-owned channel, the tone had been somewhere between cynical and hostile, such was the proprietorial tribalism amongst the UK’s various media corporations. As a cousin of News International - home, then, to The Sun, News Of The World, Today, The Times and Sunday Times - Sky News was envisaged as “The Sun on TV”, somewhere between the tabloid’s cor-blimey popularism and a Thatcherist political bent. We were even known as “Tits at Teatime” in rival newsrooms (when Channel 4’s Drop The Dead Donkey appeared, there were eerie similarities - even the desk phones and vending machine in the fictional GlobeLink newsroom were identical, which suggested some well-placed research).

So, despite the political colour that was part of the chatter before GB News’a launch on Sunday, we should, I suppose, give it a chance. It’s opening night technical hitches (Neil’s monologue looking like it had been lit by candle, Scottish academic Neil Oliver’s microphone not working, and so on), may have given it the air of satirical pisstakes, but these were teething problems that could have happened to anyone. As Hugo Rifkind writes in The Times today, the media should give their new competitor some slack, given the rate of attrition that the journalism profession has experienced in the online age: “Any journalists resenting the expansion of their own industry probably ought to be in a different one,” he commented. 

There is a notion, in the old days of printed newspapers, that when you launch a new product - be it a brand new paper or a redesigned one - you do so with a scoop. To some extent, it’s a marketing hook to put you on the map. After a while, everyone - broadsheet or tabloid - soon levels out, covering more or less the same stories in their own particular style. It is, actually, quite a skill to write for a tabloid: trying to cram into 250 words for The Sun what you’d have more than a thousand to make use of in a broadsheet. I can speak from experience, it’s more challenging than you’d think. I’ve also worked with journalists of all creeds, and regardless of their publications’ political orientation, all work to the same objectives. It would, though be horrendously naive to think that all journalism is objective and without nuance. Which is why GB News is, to me at least, a curious experiment. Its debut-edition scoop is to declare a culture war and somewhat cynically tap into the same opposition to political correctness that has Piers Morgan railing about Harry and Meghan’s apparent snowflakery, and ends with footballers being booed for taking the knee at Wembley. There was just a little dog whistle about Neil’s opening: “We are proud to be British. The clue is in the name,” he intoned (and from someone who spends much of his time living on the Côte d'Azur…).

GB News knows full well what it’s doing (and the number of endorsements from people with “defund the BBC” in their social media profiles speaks volumes). Certainly, opening night excitement - even with the Euros on - buoyed the channel’s numbers, with 336,000 viewers tuning in to watch Neil’s opening statement, according to TV industry magazine Broadcast. Sky, by comparison, had just 46,000 viewers, but 8pm on a Sunday night was never going to be a big battleground for eyeballs amongst channels not predisposed for mass viewing. Time will tell whether GB News will genuinely prove the challenger it pretends to be. There’s no doubt that it has attracted a strong calibre of presenters to its line-up, poaching the likes of Simon McCoy from the BBC News channel and former ITN anchor Alastair Stewart to a roster of experienced journalists, including several from Sky News itself. What this says about them, politically, is a matter for debate, and the channel’s editorial content so far hasn’t shown any great surprises, with Nigel Farage and Priti Patel amongst its early interviewees.

It certainly is trying to do things differently. Television news in America, for example, is a largely homogeneous experience: drop into any TV ‘market’ (i.e. a city or large town), and you will see an identical format: a male and female anchoring partnership, a chipper sports presenter and a mildly amusing weather presenter. Yes, Anchorman. Unlike America, however, television news here does vary, thankfully, and GB News takes its place in a landscape where, say, the BBC’s 10 O’Clock News and ITV’s News At Ten do have distinct stylistic differences. Whether they have any editorial differences is a matter of personal opinion. One thing, though, is that I’ve never had any quarrel with the political orientation of any of the mainstream channels’s news output. That, I know, might inflame those who cast the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg, ITV’s Robert Peston or Sky’s Beth Rigby as lefty activists - all three regularly get pelted from both sides, leading to the maxim that they must be doing something right if that is the case.

GB News has opted for something else, editorially, and subtly alternative with its look and feel. It’s breakfast show looks like ITV’s GMB but in a studio painted on a limited budget; it’s mid-morning show could be coming from the comfy sofas in the office canteen. And, two full days in, it was still suffering from sound problems - this morning, I had to have the TV volume turned up to 70 just hear anything Colin Brazier, as he sat on the couch wearing an open-necked blue shirt as if we’d caught him during his coffee break, rather than a news bulletin. I’d ask whether this consciously casual approach is what the occasional viewer actually wants, given that rolling news channels are mostly watched by people dipping in to see what’s going on in the world. 

GB News believes that it is resetting the way news is presented, arguing - not too discreetly - that existing platforms talk down to viewers. I’m not so sure that’s the case, but again, GB has found its schtick. If you believe that the BBC, ITV and Sky talk down to you, then you’ll find news presented by someone hanging out in the canteen works for you, although no one ever complained about John Craven’s jumpers on Newsround lacking gravitas (though in fairness, his demographic was somewhat different to Kenneth Kendall’s on the Nine O’Clock News).

Anchorman: staying classy in San Diego

Rolling news channels have always found their strength during times of crisis. Only saddos like me have them on constantly in the background while they work during normal times. For the most part, as the description provides, they are repetitive, especially on mundane news days. But it’s when the news hots up, and situations become dynamic, that a news operation is fully tested. Before Sky had even launched, it covered the Lockerbie disaster as part of its trial operation, making the industry sit up and notice as word got around the media village that the channel wasn’t, after all, going to be a televisual version of its print cousin. Live reporting from ‘hot’ news stories - be they wars, disasters or political eruptions - are the mark of a news broadcaster, and its reporting (and production) talent. It’s why the publicity biographies of many news anchors are such colourful affairs, proudly claiming to have been on air during moments of global notoriety. I once had to deal with the fallout of two Sky presenters having a punch-up in the Osterley corridor following an ego spat that began with both claiming to be on air at the moment Nelson Mandela walked free from Robben Island Prison. I swear to this day that someone involved in Anchorman must have heard about it, given that it escalated into a war of attrition that ended with the pair “rolling” down a corridor, not unlike Alan Bates and Oliver Reed in Women In Love (though, thankfully, fully clothed). 

GB News will want to avoid any such chicanery, as it seriously dents a channel’s reputation and detracts from the core mission of delivering news as authoritatively as possible. That is when it will truly be worth considering. For now, we can chatter about the gimmicks, the Wokewatch on-air clickbait, and controversialists like Dan Wootton or Michele Dewberry mixing it up for kicks (Sky’s early days had a confrontational debate show featuring Norman Tebbit and Labour MP Austin Mitchell), However, it is when sharp, analytic journalism is required that any news organisation comes into its own. Anyone can read wire copy of what has happened, but it’s a whole different matter being able to objectively explain why it has happened.

In its charter (no doubt, an Ofcom-mandated requirement), there is no mention of GB News’s headline-grabbing intentions. Actually, it’s a pretty standard declaration, pledging to stand for journalistic independence, a fact-based approach but also respect for opinions and freedom of expression. It’s focus is, notably, the UK (the clue is in the name, as Neil stated) and what is “good and bad – it’s about covering what is going on, not just what is going wrong.” That might be a pointed statement about pepping up our lives with feel goodery, but sadly, news doesn’t arbitrate that way. It’ll be interesting how long GB News can remain so differentiated.

The 21st Century Model T Ford

Picture: Apple

The date when, arguably, face-to-face conversation ended was 9 January, 2007. It was the date when the television set, as the “electronic hearth” of collective family engagement, ground to a halt. It was when the morning commute (remember that?) became a head-hunched, spinal strain-inducing exercise in what we British islanders, in particular, do better than anyone else - social avoidance. Because that was the day Steve Jobs introduced, with customary understatement, “a revolutionary and magical product" that he claimed was "literally five years ahead" of any rival: the iPhone. 

Apple’s press release on the day said that it combined three products: the aforementioned phone plus “a widescreen iPod with touch controls, and a breakthrough Internet communications device with desktop-class email, Web browsing, searching and maps.” There was also an “entirely new user interface based on a large multi-touch display and pioneering new software, letting users control [it] with just their fingers,” adding that it ushered in “an era of software power and sophistication never before seen in a mobile device, which completely redefines what users can do on their mobile phones.”

This was peak dream-weaving Jobs. As Apple had done with the iMac in the previous decade and indeed the iPod in 2001, they’d taken an existing concept and made it desirable and cool. The iPhone was certainly not the first smartphone (anyone working in the corporate world would have already endured years of BlackBerry envy as they were provided to more anointed colleagues), nor was it the first touchscreen-enabled gadget. But, Jobs’ spin notwithstanding, for once, the tech marketing cliché “revolutionary” was broadly applicable. 

In addition to cellular connectivity and the music player, what really drove the revolution was the iPhone’s ability to carry a vast array of native software applications, a statement in itself, given how “app” has established itself in the common lexicon. In fact, those colourful app icons we tap on our smartphones are as significant as the expensive hardware they're downloaded onto. In old(ish) money, Uber or Deliveroo would be regarded as online destinations, but we all use them as physical services that just happen to be accessed through an app on our phones. 

Today, nearly 90% of British adults own a smartphone, with ownership in older demographics notably increasing during 2020, most likely because of lockdown necessitating connectivity. Despite their upfront cost - a full-specced iPhone 12, bought outright, will set you back just under £1000 - they have become indispensable, but they can, too, be easily be taken for granted. They are, despite their form factor, highly sophisticated computing devices equipped, invariably, with camera technology to rival that from the big names in photography. One common trope, however, is that the smartphone in your pocket is more powerful than the technology that landed Apollo 11 on the moon, which is a fallacious comparison, given that NASA was working with beyond-state of the art capabilities in 1969. But it’s not a bad way of looking at the sheer power today’s smartphones represent, and the - still - unprecedented functions they perform.

This forms the core of Always On: Hope And Fear In The Social Smartphone Era, a new book by Rory Cellan-Jones, the BBC’s technology editor, and someone who was there where it all began. In fact, when it began. Recalling that Jobs press event early in 2007, Rory went on to compare, on the BBC, the new Apple phone to the Model T Ford in terms of its potential impact. Viewers complained that he’d given a commercial launch too much prominence on the BBC’s ad-free airwaves, and even Rory himself was initially worried that he’d gone “over the top”. But on later reflection, he felt totally vindicated, writing on the tenth anniversary of the launch that it had truly been a “moment in history”, heralding “the key transformative technology of the last decade, putting powerful computers in the hands of more than two billion people and disrupting all sorts of industries.” Rory expounds on this shift in the book, discussing how Apple's effective invention of the smartphone founded entire industries and economic ecosystems. I was working at Philips at the time of the iPhone launch, and as its evolution began, it became apparent that it wouldn’t just eclipse the predominant handsets from Nokia, Motorola and others, but posed an existential threat to PC manufacturers and consumer electronics brands as well. Over time, the smartphone would become your TV set, your home cinema, you music system and its content library, and - crucially in its development, Rory points out - your camera (a moot point with me, given the forest of phones you have to peer through at gigs…). 

But, Always On also argues, the smartphone didn’t just become a replacement for a multitude of devices. It also turned “software” into “app”, the word even your granny is now familiar with. How many times a day do you interact with an app, or hear the word? Even freedom to travel might soon be facilitated by the NHS app, acting as a Covid passport. So, when you combine the hardware, the software, the functionality, the connectivity, the rise of social media and the innovation of app developers (even the term “swipe right” has entered popular convention thanks to Tinder), you can begin to appreciate the enormity of what that rectangular box in your pocket represents.

Always On delves deeply into the smartphone's social impact, not just focusing on the consolidation of consumer electronics into a single device, but on the global impact of digital engagement facilitated by it, as our “hyperconnected” society lives and breathes on social media, elects governments, supports economies, finds people jobs (and loses them through misuse…) and more. Rory even draws on the role the smartphone plays in healthcare, given how the NHS app was placed front-and-centre in the fight against COVID-19. My own company, Vodafone, helped develop an app called DreamLab, which enables Imperial College London to effectively crowd source the immense computing power of dormant smartphones at night to dramatically shorten the number of thousands of hours required by human research into developing therapies for cancer and the coronavirus. 

Rory Cellan-Jones

Rory, however, has an even more personal health connection with the smartphone: a couple of years ago, while doing a live demonstration of 5G technology on BBC Breakfast News, viewers noted a tremor in his right hand. Unbeknownst to all but a few friends and colleagues, he’d been diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease some months before. Shortly afterwards he revealed on Twitter what he’d been going through: “It was a vivid example of the positive side of what this book describes as the social smartphone era,” he writes. He says we’re now immersed in an era in which technology has become personal, in which these devices enable us to connect with “friends, strangers, celebrities and even Presidents and Prime Ministers via new networks which appeared to democratise communication.” There is, though, a negative side to this - an acute example being the recent football boycott of social media, the result of the repugnant racist, sexist and homophobic abuse that some players of both genders have had to endure - but Rory hopes that his book faithfully examines the positives of what smartphone technology has done for individuals and society in general, as much as its dark side.

To return, though, to my introduction to this post, there is still a residue of old farts who look upon the revolution that Jobs’ heralded as the start of a societal breakdown that will never be repaired. The response to such arguments is always ‘do you want to go back to how it was?’ (i.e. outdoor toilets, steam trains, ‘the wireless’, etc). “We have a slightly problematic nostalgia that romanticises the past,” Professor Daniel Miller, leader of a 16-month international anthropology study into smartphone use told The Times recently. “TV was way more passive,” he added. “Smartphones are far more interactive and far more social. So why is that a loss?”. Miller and his colleagues argue that the Internet has, rather than creating digital zombies, brought society together. The problem, they say, is that digital connectivity has also brought down divisions within individual households. We’ve all done it: we’ve all sat there as families, idly thumbing through our phones while half watching something on TV.

Rory Cellan-Jones’ original thesis that Steve Jobs produced a Model T Ford for the 21st century with the iPhone shouldn’t be in any doubt. But, says Miller, it comes at a social price. “At any point, whether over a meal, a meeting or other shared activity, a person we’re with can just disappear, having ‘gone home’ to their smartphone,” he said in The Times interview. It’s almost, he believes, as if the smartphone has become too ubiquitous. “We have become human snails carrying our home in our pockets,” Miller and his colleagues write in their study, going so far as saying that we spend more time ‘in’ our phones than in our own homes. Moreover, they contest, the smartphone now plays such a fundamental role in how we engage with our families, friends, colleagues, celebrities, politicians and anyone else we can just ping on WhatsApp, the technology has virtually become as basic a form of human communication as talking. That, though, is nothing new. Almost every form of technology communication is accused of supplanting something else.

Which is what makes Rory’s book so engrossing. As the BBC’s primary technology correspondent since January 2007, and indeed the week when Jobs strode the Moscone Center stage, replete in trademark polo neck, stonewashed Levi’s and New Balance trainers, he has reported on every gadget, trend, startup, collapse, innovation and outbreak of industry hyperbole since. And when you put it all into perspective, you’d struggle to disagree with the central belief that Always On entertainingly proffers, that most of those “breakthroughs” my peers in technology PR peddle don’t even come close to the smartphone. 

The telephone is generally regarded as one of humankind's greatest creations, after the printing press, the electric light and industrial manufacturing. I’d argue that, given that it is more than just a mobile phone, the smartphone might one day find itself up there in the same pantheon of achievement.

Always On: Hope And Fear In The Social Smartphone Era by Rory Cellan-Jones is published tomorrow,  13 May, by Bloomsbury