Christmas cheer, Chelsea-style

Picture: Reuters

A look, this morning, at the Premier League table and there is a chasm of just seven points separating Liverpool at the summit from plucky Southampton in ninth and at the bottom of a mini-league on 25 points. The main point here being that everyone seems to be circling around each other at the moment, and despite Liverpool’s ominous position at the top (well, ominous until Sam Allardyce came along yesterday), the fact that Manchesters United and City are back in the running, along with Leicester and Everton are indications that, surprisingly for the Christmas period - slap bang in the centre of the middle third of the season already - it’s anyone’s guess who’ll end up in a Top Four finish come May, or June, or October, or whenever this season actually ends.

Read the back pages and on any given day someone will write about any one of about six or even seven teams being title contenders. Or, to put it another way, have a good run and, apparently, you’re putting together a tilt. Even Manchester United, implausibly now up to fourth. So where does that leave Chelsea? Saturday’s match at the Emirates was one of the most lethargic performances I’ve seen from Frank Lampard’s side since he took charge, and really it shouldn’t have been. Premier League footballers are too professional to go nuts on the Christmas indulgence, so the apparent legginess couldn’t have been caused by overdoing the port and cheese (which would be my ready excuse for anything over the last 72 hours). So, quite why they allowed an Arsenal, stripped of many of their regular starters through illness, and coming to the game on the back of a truly abject run that raised very real questions about Mikel Arteta’s future, to monster them in such a decisive fashion is baffling. And troubling.

Let’s face it, Christmas is a lousy time for football. In normal times, the fans aren’t up for Boxing Day fixtures - especially the ridiculous 12.30 kick-offs that television scheduling insists on - and the pile-up of games has a noticeably diminished return as the period progresses. Frankly I’m usually grateful to get past New Year and onto the FA Cup Third Round. But that doesn’t excuse Chelsea’s dismal performance on Saturday that left them lying seventh (now eighth, at time of writing) and with an ugly looking record of three defeats out of their last five matches, all of them away. Lampard will have plenty to think about before making his team selection for tonight’s home fixture against Aston Villa but, then, he presumably had some weighing up to do against Arsenal. 

On Saturday, performances seemed to drop off a cliff before our vary eyes. “It wasn’t good enough,” said the Chelsea coach afterwards, adding that he was angry about the missed opportunity to go second. “You get what you deserve,” he ruminated. “Lazy,” was the other part of his assessment. “Lazy to give away a free-kick that [Xhaka] puts in the top corner,” he railed to Sky Sports, “and I'm very, very disappointed in the way we approached the first half, because some things in football are basics. It's not tactics or systems, it is 'do you want to run, back your teammate out and sprint'? Or do you want to jog and say 'maybe I don't have to run,' and we took that decision instead of the right one.”

One can imagine the atmosphere on board the Chelsea team bus back from Islington to Cobham was as chilly as the blustery evening had been in anticipation of Storm Bella blowing in. Lampard’s frustration was understandable, and while it’s usual for know-it-alls to say that a coach needs to take as much blame for a bad defeat as his players, on this occasion, it was clear how much his players were lacking. Timo Werner continued his frustrating run of games without anything meaningful in front of goal; Tammy Abraham continued to demonstrate what a dedicated forward he is, but without the goals to show for it, save for that one consolation (which was subject to scrutiny after the linesman ridiculously ruled offside due to a hair on the striker’s knee being slightly too close to goal than regulations allow). Still, though, Olivier Giroud sat it out in quiet frustration in the stands, a picture of seemingly stoic acceptance, despite knowing how he would have liked to get on and play against his former club. 

What Chelsea lacked in the forward line-up, they didn’t exactly make up for in their midfield and wide players. Even if Callum Hudson-Odoi, brought on at the break, injected some vim into the play, it was a rare uptick by anyone in blue. Jorginho’s latest missed penalty seemed to sum up the team’s performance - another one of his hop-skip-jump efforts that lacked any power and was promptly stopped by Leno. Really, it shouldn’t even be a case of sending him back to the training pitch to practice. He should never take another for the club again. 

Arsenal’s goals were well taken, but as good as they were, Chelsea were also at fault for all three: a needless penalty given away by Reece James, a cheap free kick conceded by the usually dependable N’Golo Kanté, and then Bukayo Saka’s bizarre cross that somehow redirected itself and into the goal, like a cruise missile dynamically changing course at the last minute and down a different chimney to the one its handlers had intended. With the exception, perhaps, of Christian Pulisic and Mason Mount’s ever-present industry (although even they were off their usual pace), none of the team Lampard put out against Arsenal did much to draw praise. It wasn’t that they were bad, per se, it’s just that they were just so ineffective. Yes, lethargic. Which means that the selection tonight against a vibrant Villa - who sit one place above Chelsea on goal difference, but with two games in hand - will be crucial. Because if Chelsea’s supposed best 11 can put in such a dismal shift against an Arsenal we thought were there for the taking, the second string certainly won’t fare so well.

Inevitably, though, questions are being asked again about Lampard’s own future. Lying eighth in a tight title race is not what Roman Abramovich bankrolled a £250 million summer spending spree for. The pressure is on the 42-year-old manager do better in his second season than the fourth place and a cup final finish from his first. Christmas is a lousy period to assess a football team, with the fixture logjam - worsened by the pandemic - making life hard for any team. Lampard faces the challenge that they are already four points off where they were after 15 games last season, with too many in-form teams above Chelsea who could pull away further. He’s clearly also dealing with some fitness issues in his squad. Ben Chillwell made such a miraculous recovery after exiting the home West Ham fixture after seven minutes with an ankle problem, that his teammates called him ‘Lazarus’. He definitely wasn’t sharp enough against Arsenal, as could be said of his neighbour in the backline, Thiago Silva. And elsewhere along the defence, Reece James looked like he wasn’t firing on all cylinders, either. But, then, Lampard has options. Club captain César Azpilicueta is still one of the best right-backs in the business, even if he's lost his starting place to James. To add to this, Lampard's religious adherence to 4-3-3 is starting to highlight a lack of flexibility that means he labours with Werner in his left-of-centre forward position.

“They have gone from looking one of the paciest, quickest sides in the Premier League, to one of the most pedestrian,” former Chelsea midfielder Craig Burley said on ESPN, noting that such a dip in form is the sort of thing the capricious Abramovich, takes note of - whether the head coach is a club legend or not. “I’m not suggesting Abramovich is going to sack him in the next couple of weeks,” Burley added, “but there is one thing they need to remember – top four. If they don’t get in the top four, he’s probably done.”

Picture: Facebook/Chelsea FC

An ominous thought to end on, and although one bad game at Christmas doesn’t make a disaster, three defeats in as many trips away is the stuff of form issues. The next few weeks of league and cup fixtures are not going to be helped by individual players at Lampard’s disposal not pulling their weight, either due to confidence or fitness, factors that can be helped by the coaching staff. 

Where I do have some sympathy is that, as with every year it seems, the Christmas fixtures are relentless. While Lampard can’t complain about the recovery time between last Monday's game at home against West Ham and Saturday’s at Arsenal, he’s got a point about his beleaguered squad having to go again tonight. 

“I'm not trying to be clever,” he said last week. “It's an important point for us, because there are other teams that are challenging at the top of the league that play two games in three days. Manchester United, Tottenham and Liverpool play two games in three days. It's counter-productive for the quality of the Premier League, it's a risk for players if they are going to play both games at top-end elite sport, everybody knows that.” And he added that Aston Villa also wanted an extra day’s grace, but both clubs were overruled, he says, by the Premier League and by the broadcasters. “I know in conjunction with each other, this was bounced around, it got decided that we play twice in 48 hours, when other teams that are challenging at the top of the league play twice in three days. I don't see how it's a fair playing field, I think it's wrong.” 

It’s a refrain we hear every Christmas from every club and every manager. And from a fan’s perspective, the games themselves are never quite the attractions the broadcasters hope they’ll be. But it’s Lampard's job, come what may, to manage his squad through the period, maximising those in form, resting those who clearly need it - mentally as much as physically - and taking a punt on players who deserve their chance. Hudson-Odoi comes to mind, and Billy Gilmour. And, perhaps, Giroud, could do with more use.

The festive fixtures congestion argument will cut little ice with Lampard's bosses. Maybe not now, but certainly when the end-of-season review comes around. Lampard knows he’s not in charge by some default of having been the club’s highest scoring player of all time. When he signed the contract to become manager, that legacy was confined to the trophy room. What happens between tonight and season’s end is partly in his hands. I wish him well: as much as I can’t fault Abramovich for what he’s done for my club, his readiness to dispense with managers before they have had the chance to establish themselves has at times been predictably ugly. With the exception of one or two - the divisive Rafa Benitez and the frustrating Maurizio Sarri come instantly to mind - some stability and heritage creation would also have been nice. Lampard deserves no more favours than any of his predecessors, though fan loyalty is justified. But that also requires a reciprocal match in terms of team performance. And on that, he still has some distance to carry.

Prepare to enter the Christmas cheese coma

Picture: Alex James Co

For reasons I won’t bore you with, my diet this Christmas has had to be substantially modified from the traditional gorging on things that, I’ve been told, will lead to an unfortunate outcome. But the one thing I’ve not given up (or been told to…yet) is cheese. In fact, one of the last functions performed before battening down the hatches and being confined to our Tier 4 bunker this week was to carry out the annual gathering-in of pricey festive cheeses. Which, I readily accept, is probably the most middle class thing I’ll ever commit to the blogosphere.

So, while some of you prepare to binge on cake, crisps and Quality Street, I’ll be giving my nine months of calorie-controlled abstention the slip and dive into the fifty quid’s worth of exotic queso we picked up on the final port of call of Crimbo preparations yesterday. That haul includes an Italian Robiola, a pricey brick of Parmesan (not for grating over spagbol - eating it on its own is a delight), Roquefort and Comté. Given that - at time of shopping - a no-deal Brexit was steaming towards us like an asteroid on collision course, so in rehearsal for next Christmas’s cheese board, exclusively sourced from these islands, we also picked up a Lancashire Black Bomb, Caerphilly and an Oakwood smoked cheddar from Dorset. Whatever the outcome of Boris's final EU negotiations, we can be rest assured that there’s plenty of British cheese to fill the void left by being priced out of Port Salut and Edam, let alone a cheeky Camembert de Normandie. 

In fact, the UK produces more than 700 cheeses, from the geographically familiar Cheddar, Cheshire and Wensleydale to the Christmas-traditional Stilton, and even a local interpretation of that ultra fromage français, Brie. While cheesemaking is most strongly associated with our European cousins, it's a tradition dating back to the Stone Age in this country, according to cheesemonger Ned Palmer, whose paperback A Cheesemonger's History Of The British Isles has been the surprise bestseller in this year’s Christmas book sales.

Palmer reveals that cheese may have been part of the British diet for 6,000 years, when our pre-agricultural ancestors were still hunter-gatherers, mostly living off fish and fruit. Palmer believes that cheese came to these islands via neolithic explorers who found cheese being made - as a means of preserving goat milk - on the continental mainland. As a result, its existence in Britain might even pre-date Stonehenge by a millennium, ironic, given how those slabs, presumably built as an altar, would make for an excellent cheese board for the various types that come from the surrounding fields of Wiltshire (fun fact: the phrase “like chalk and cheese” originated in the county). At first, ancient Britons experienced what we’d now call lactose intolerance to this creamy new substance from abroad, but the human metabolism adapted - over a thousand years or so - to all forms of dairy. Early cheesemakers honed their craft (no pun intended), and across Europe as a whole, both hard and soft cheeses began to evolve and diversify. Hard cheeses, in particular, became migratory, especially when the habit of moulding them into wheels allowed them to be literally rolled from town to town. At some point in English history, someone in Gloucestershire discovered they could be rolled down a hill competitively for lols. 

Fast forward to Roman times, and Palmer reveals that the invaders are quite likely to have brought their own cheesemaking skills to this part of the empire, which should require a substantial rewrite of that scene in Life Of Brian about what they did for us. We can, Palmer surmises, add ripened stinky cheese to better sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system and public health. However, he also says that cheese in the UK didn’t really get going until the Anglo-Saxons were in charge, when it was even used in a medicinal capacity for treating everything from chest infections to sore feet.

Fast forward again to the 21st century, and we’ve been eating more locally made cheese in the UK than ever before. In the early days of the first lockdown we consumed as much as 23% more cheese than in the same period last year, according to market research company Kantar. But with this came a downside, as the closure of pubs and restaurants led to as much as a 90% decline in trade sales of artisanal cheeses, threatening the future of small, independent manufacturers who’d been hitherto enjoying a boom. British craft cheeses have been returning over the last 40 years, with more recent champions including former Blur bassist Alex James, who runs a burgeoning business from his Oxfordshire farm (with such rock and roll-influenced delights as 'Blue Monday No.7' and 'Grunge No.5'). 

Picture: Alex James Co

The Specialist Cheesemakers Association estimates that there are more than 200 artisan manufacturers in the UK, many applying traditional, smallholding techniques, to produce their own interpretations of classics as well as new varieties. However, it also warns that the pandemic may lead to many of these manufacturers going out of business, with the traditional skills they employ being lost forever in the process. Perhaps cheese itself can spearhead the fightback against the dreaded lurgy. In July, Dutch researchers revealed that patients admitted to intensive care at a hospital in Nijmegen were deficient in Vitamin K, which is found in spinach, eggs and some types of cheese. Given that COVID-19 causes blood clotting and the degradation of elasticity in the lungs, the vitamin has been found to be key to producing proteins that regulate clotting and can protect against lung disease. Not every cheese, though, can offer these benefits, but the cheese industry is inevitably keen to point out the other health benefits of their product, not the least of which being a source of protein and calcium. 

That, then, is my prompt to dive in and indulge. Cholesterol and blocked sinuses be dammed. We’ve got a fridge full of cheese and, with most other festive treats now on my verboten list, I’m going to indulge tomorrow afternoon, with a cheeky glass of port, and worry about the consequences on Boxing Day. Once a year, right?

My favourite aunt

I owe a great deal to the BBC. My late father worked there for 35 years (that's him, behind the camera). I was brought up in a BBC household, rarely ever watching ITV (remember, kids, there was a time when there were just three - THREE! - channels...) appreciating what the corporation provided the nation and even the world, via its television and radio output. There was also its authority. It’s journalism was beyond question, its presenters peerless. And, best of all, you could watch a film at Christmas without interruption from adverts. As a child, I was able to visit Television Centre often, thanks to my dad. I’ve sat ‘in’ Daleks, been on the Blue Peter set, met the legend that was Brian Cant and still is Johnny Ball, Crackerjack presenters and Roy Castle, and was able to get precious tickets to be in the studio audience of Top Of The Pops. OK, all that was privilege, but they still emboldened my appreciation for the institution that is the BBC.

So, I’m naturally biased towards Auntie. However, within that very nickname lies the reason it, today, comes under attack from every direction like never before. Just look at the last six weeks: politicians from both sides have accused the BBC of editorial bias towards one side or another and, now Boris has landslid into No.10, the murmurings and mutterings have begun again about the sanctity of the TV licence fee, which funds everything from the Beeb’s television output to five of the UK’s 13 symphony orchestras. Paying for a licence is therefore considered to be a contribution to the national cultural fabric.

The inescapable truth, however, is whether this is still relevant. The days when the ever-cheerful Christmas Day episode of EastEnders drew audience figures of more than 20 million - somewhere close to a third of the population - are long gone. Ditto big-budget dramas and variety shows. Even a big draw like the Strictly Come Dancing final this year lost a million viewers from 2018. Thishas nothing to do with the quality of the BBC’s output (as the profoundly anti-Beeb Daily Mail would have you believe) but, simply, the continuing drain on so-called “terrestrial” audiences (an anachronistic phrase given the availability of most terrestrial programming on catch-up services) from other places. Kids, in particular, are just as likely to be consuming television in bite-sized chunks from YouTube, mainlining Jack Whitehall box sets on Netflix, or glued to TikTok*. And with that particular service commissioning ever more ambitious series and co-investing in semi-theatrical films like The Irishman, plus the inroads made by Amazon Prime to original programming of its own, the television landscape has shifted further than I think many people with a traditional view of it realise.
*A teenager reliably informs me

30 years ago I was involved in the last great revolution in British broadcasting, the launch of Sky TV. Then, on 5th February 1989, five new TV channels were added to that landscape on a single day, just seven years after the UK had gone from three to four. Today there are around 460. Something - quite a lot, actually - has to give: if you’re watching Lisa Snowdon’s Jewellery Collection on QVC you won’t be watching Pointless on BBC1. And yet you still need to have a TV licence to watch La Snowdon flogging her sparkly wares. No wonder there have long been Tory murmurings about the licence fee (most recently, the idea of decriminalising non-payment, a thin end of the wedge), but while inevitably some of that will be down to vindictive intent, some will also be the result of free market thinking. The topic of the BBC’s funding comes up periodically, and it is always regarded by noted beard scratchers as an “existential threat”. But with the return of a weaponised Conservative government, empowered like never before and driven by belligerent strategists like Dominic Cummings, that threat is actually, now, looking very real.

Picture: BBC

The argument over the TV licence’s relevance in an age of streamed entertainment is a strong one. I’m relatively happy at paying for one, and between Sir David Attenborough documentaries, Countryfile, Mock The Week, Gavin & Stacey, Rick Stein’s foodie travelogues, Radio 5 Live and my mate Gary Crowley’s shows on Radio London (plus of course, much, much, more), I couldn’t be any happier at effectively paying a subscription fee to the BBC. Given one option in the future, with a licence fee replaced by a pic’n’mix model, I would continue to pay for BBC programming, such is the quality of its output. But with the arrival of Netflix as a producer, not just a rebroadcaster, and Sky planning to invest millions in new original productions at its forthcoming new studio complex in Elstree, programming choice to dilute BBC viewing figures is only going to increase.

Daring to mention the general election just gone, those with an agenda against the BBC have been gifted a fresh grinding wheel for their bilious axes. The accusation of editorial bias is one that I’ll defend any broadcaster from. Generally the rule is that if both left and right are accusing you of political bias, you’re getting it right. The online and even institutional bullying that broadcasters like the BBC’s political editor Laura Kuenssberg and Sky’s Kay Burley received during the election campaign was at times beyond toxic. The far left accused Kuenssberg of being a shill for the Tories, and I’d accept that her comment about postal votes looking “grim” for Labour in a live report was ill-advised. Interestingly, though, both Labour and the Conservatives have had a pop at the BBC’s election coverage, something robustly defended by election night anchor Huw Edwards in a LinkedIn blog post: “You are expected to deliver a results programme which upholds the BBC's reputation for quality and fairness,” he wrote, “but you're doing so in a world where toxic cynicism and accusations of bias (from all sides) are adding to the pressures on the entire team. And you realise yet again that the real purpose of many of the attacks is to undermine trust in institutions which have been sources of stability over many decades. The apparent purpose, in short, is to cause chaos and confusion.”

Edwards pointed out, validly, that unlike journalists working for certain newspaper and website proprietors (“where regulation is risibly weak and blatant propaganda can be passed off as 'news’”), broadcast journalists are obliged to adhere to strict laws on impartiality. Political interests might not always like that - such as the Tories’ petulant complaint to Ofcom over Channel 4 replacing the absent Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage with melting ice statues during a televised leaders’ debate on climate change - but on balance, the BBC in particular gets it right. Occasionally, it will get it wrong, or appear to do so, such as Kuenssberg’s gaffe and that by political correspondent Alex Forsyth, who referred to Boris Johnson winning “the majority that he so deserves” during a live broadcast. This prompted shadow transport secretary Andy McDonald to say the BBC was partly to blame for Labour’s defeat last Thursday. “I’m very worried about our public service broadcaster,” he told the Today programme on Radio 4. “I’m really worried about the drift. You’ve seen the catalogue of criticisms that [Labour is] making,” adding, “if the BBC are going to hold themselves out as somehow having conducted themselves in an impartial manner, I think they’ve really got to have a look in the mirror. We’ve got a lot to say about this.”

Labour, of course, have other things to consider when it comes to their “period of reflection” on the election defeat and, frankly, the BBC should be the least of their considerations. The Conservatives, too, should lay off the BBC. Their victory had nothing to do with the BBC and, in what was most certainly a clear strategy, in spite of the BBC. I’m as uncomfortable with Boris Johnson evading scrutiny as anyone else, but swerving Andrew Neil in favour of doing selfies with Phil and Holly on This Morning was as belligerent a dismissal of the BBC as Jacob Rees-Mogg’s “disappearance” from the election campaign was a deliberate policy. Time will tell whether Johnson’s media performances in the election will come back to haunt him (hiding in a fridge to avoid an ITV reporter is not a good look, and despite his permanent ‘bumbling oaf’ comedy persona - honed on Have I Got News For You - he is as terrible a communicator as his predecessor, Theresa May). The Fourth Estate exists for a reason. The trick is how you engage it. Refusing it is counter-productive.

Picture courtesy of Huw Edwards/LinkedIn/Jeff Overs, BBC

At the weekend Lord Grade - Michael Grade, the former BBC chairman and scion of one of British entertainment’s most influential families - wrote that Neil’s rant-to-camera, goading Boris to come on his leaders' interview show, was petulant. “The situation appears to be bordering on open warfare – in which case I’d advise all concerned to take a step back and remember that it’s normal for governments and independent broadcasters to be at loggerheads.” Grade, writing in the Mail On Sunday, reminded readers that government enmity towards the BBC is nothing new, citing Tony Blair’s press secretary Alastair Campbell “declaring war” on it over the ‘dodgy dossier’ row, and Margaret Thatcher’s attempt to appoint sympathetic governors to the BBC’s board following alleged negativity towards her over the Falklands War and the miners’ strike. During this election, however, Grade said that the BBC got things wrong. “I’m a huge fan of Mr Neil’s intellectually rigorous style,” he wrote, “and have been for 40 years, ever since I oversaw his selection as an unknown presenter on a London Weekend Television current affairs show. I am not a fan, however, of the way journalists such as Neil hijacked the airwaves, using humiliation tactics in a bid to force the Prime Minister to face their questions. This was a serious abuse of one’s position, and I have written to Ofcom requesting an urgent review to ensure it does not happen again.”

“The issue here is impartiality, and broadcasters have a statutory duty to respect that,” Grade continued. “It is not their job to use the airwaves to cajole and try to coerce politicians into interviews – or to shame them publicly if they exercise their right to refuse. British viewers do not want to see blatantly biased political reporting on mainstream television such as the Americans get with the Right-wing Fox News. But I fear that’s the way we are going.”

Senior Tories are now said to be staying away from Radio 4’s Today, too, ironically now that John Humphrys, and his uncompromising approach to interviewing, has retired. Nick Robinson, one of Today’s presenters, was even president of the Oxford University Conservative Association while a student. But he is still one of the most capable of political interviewers. Avoiding him is not the answer. If I had one criticism of the Tory election campaign (and I’m not going to get into lies and deceit here), it was the flimsy nature of some of the people they put up for broadcast interviews. With Rees-Mogg benched after five minutes of play over his awful Grenfell Tower remarks, the likes of Nicky Morgan and Matt Hancock were deployed, both lightweights. In fact, on one day of media campaigning, Morgan had to be augmented by Hancock. Where were the heavyweights, like Michael Gove and Sajid Javid? (I’d include Dominic Raab here, but he, too, was clearly - and correctly - judged to be too cold and toxic an Alan B’Stard to go anywhere near any broadcast outlet of influence).

But back to the BBC’s future: Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Rishi Sunak, has said that the BBC’s funding model is something the government “should look at”, targeting the iPlayer service as one particular area of focus. He has also said there would be wider consideration of licence fee when the BBC’s current Royal Charter ends in December 2027. “The media industry is changing,” Sunak has said. “How people consume media is changing and it’s of course right that we continue to look at those things over time.” For once, I agree with someone from this government, up to a point. That point is where a government - any government - adopts frankly dystopian tones about the BBC. Funding is one thing, but censoring by stealth is something else entirely.

In another piece for the Daily Mail, John Humphrys has also weighed in on the darkening skies gathering over the BBC. “Much more worrying are the threats emanating from Number 10,” he wrote pointing out - as Grade did - that Downing Street leaning on the media is nothing new. “I can't think of a single prime minister in the past half century who would not, at some point in their career, have despatched the BBC director-general to Devil's Island if they'd thought they could get away with it.” But, he ended, senior BBC executives come and go, but the corporation “tends to sail on regardless. When Mr. Johnson raises the question of the licence fee, though, we are entering infinitely more dangerous waters. Make no mistake, this is an existential threat to the BBC.”

In the short term, it is something that the ‘temporary’ Minister for Culture, Digital & Sport, the newly ennobled Nicky Morgan, will no doubt be looking at as she arrives back at the desk she vacated to stand down as an MP at the election. Some on the left will regard any threat to the BBC from this government as karma for the supposed bias during the campaign. But politics aside, by 2027 when the BBC’s charter is renewed, the media landscape will have changed even further. 5G, for example, will have arrived (and even, according to the wonks at my old employer Nokia, 6G), transforming how and, notably, where media is consumed ubiquitously. Even with the BBC’s embrace of online technology, it is still largely a construct of the broadcast industry it invented almost 100 years ago. It is still, though, whether hawks like it or not, a national institution like few others, save for perhaps the Royal Family. It’s motto “nation shall speak peace unto nation”, adopted on 1 January 1927 by the newly formed Corporation to signify its purpose, was a latent symbol of a decaying empire, an empire that itself would come under existential threat 12 years later and the outbreak of war. The BBC’s purpose has clearly shifted since then, and even if people who dress up in red, white and blue to wave flags at royal weddings still see the BBC as a projection of Britain and British values, that function has long since ceased to be relevant. At the end of the day, we should just want Auntie to keep producing the best of British television and radio. We just need to figure out how to pay for it, first.

The end may be nigh: Eric Clapton is releasing a Christmas album

It is exactly four months to Christmas Day. Sorry to lay that on your morning head, but if you head out early enough you should get the shopping done in time. Being the season when sentimentality hangs heavy, you might be drawn in your gift-giving to the novelty of celebrity Christmas records. You know, a Susan Boyle or, God help us, Bradley Walsh* annihilating the classics for a CD you might charitably buy Granny on the basis that hard-toffee bon-bons no longer agree with her dentures.
*See also, and in no particular order, David Hasselhoff, Anton de Beke, Roseanne Barr and Sir Christopher Lee

The last person I would expect to fall into this category of record making is, however, one of the greatest rock stars of his era, once the subject of graffiti declaring him “God”, who at 17 became the most feted blues guitarist in London, who played on The Beatles’ While My Guitar Gently Sleeps, who almost replaced Mick Taylor in the Rolling Stones, whose mesmerising guitar playing in Cream planted him permanently in the upper echelon of rock royalty, and so on and so on. Yes, Eric bloody Clapton is to release his “first full-length Christmas record”, Happy Xmas which, according to the official press release, will contain “holiday classics along with an original [i.e. new] holiday song, For Love On Christmas Day. Let me say again, this is Eric Clapton. Well at least God releasing an album themed for the Son of God’s arrival on this Earth is at least seasonally consistent.

Quite what the guitarist’s real motivation is to release such an album is not explained, beyond a statement in the press release about Clapton getting the idea that standards, such as White Christmas and Away In A Manger, “could be done with a slight blues tinge”. But still. This is one of the most exalted musicians of rock era, a point underscored by Lili Fini Zanuck’s brilliant documentary, Eric Clapton: Life in 12 Bars released back in February which charted the course of his complicated childhood in rural Surrey, his emergence as a teenage guitar virtuoso in my neck of the London woods, and his elevation to greatness via the Yardbirds, John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, Cream, Blind Faith and Derek & The Dominos in the space of a decade. What came through strongest in the film was that Clapton was a hard core blues obsessive, from his earliest trial-and-error attempts at Big Bill Broonzy numbers whilst sat on Ripley Green, to busking Robert Johnson songs in the riverside pubs of Kingston-upon-Thames. His amplified blues with Mayall set the tone - and the decibel level - that rivals could only aspire to. But now you’ll be able to hear his blues ‘tinged’ treatment of Jingle Bells, Silent Night and Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas.

I shouldn’t, of course, pre-judge the record before it comes out on 12 October, any more than one should pre-judge anything sight-unseen or sound-unheard. But, really. Does the world need a Christmas record from one of the greatest guitarists of all time (an accolade universally afforded from across the professional spectrum)? Even with all the packaging extras in the “deluxe box” (such as “Pop-up Art derived from EC's original sketches”, “One-of-a-kind metal alloy Christmas tree ornament from Eric's hand-drawn ‘Bushbranch’ horse” and - wait for it - a “custom rubbery USB drive designed from Eric's Santa sketch that doubles as an ornament”), I really do feel that this album from one of my absolute musical heroes, someone who sprinkled much-needed stardust over my part of suburban south-west London in the 1960s and blazed a global trail as one of the UK’s greatest musical exports, is somewhat letting the side down. As Smash Hits was fond of saying, “it’s like punk never happened”.