In 2005, broadcaster Melvyn Bragg fronted a series that documented the story of ITV. The title was perhaps a comment on what the independent broadcaster was and what the BBC wasn’t – The People’s Channel. Last week, in a similar vein, Bragg criticised the BBC for its crass portrayal of the working class. The BBC has long had a class problem – both on screen and behind the scenes. Tellingly, when ITV launched in the 1950s, the BBC’s first director-general, Lord Reith, compared the arrival of popular television to the bubonic plague. He feared that independent television would not advance the mission of the nation’s public-service broadcaster, established during his tenure, to ‘inform, educate, entertain’. He compared the BBC to a ‘drawn sword parting the darkness of ignorance’. His paternalistic approach to the masses would go on to set the tone for the institution we now know as ‘Auntie’. Indeed, the BBC today is as synonymous with that paternalism as it is with the Oxbridge pedigree of its staff, which has forever been a priority when it comes to employing programme makers and board members. While Lord Reith made sure that women never read the news, and divorcees and homosexuals never played in the BBC orchestra,

5 mins 59 secs read

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It’s hard to believe it, but the inspiration for the fictional Euphoria — the drug-crazed, fashion-conscious, sex-obsessed drama set in a high school in Los Angeles — was a tragic death that occurred in Israel. An 18-year old was confronted by the boyfriend of a girl he was talking to in a club; he was later found murdered. This sequence of events led to the Israeli series of the same name in 2012. American actor and filmmaker Sam Levinson created the US version, which made its debut in 2019. The delayed second series (Covid being the culprit, naturally) is now with us, with HBO teasing diehard fans with a new episode ahead of each school week. The opening episode of the new series was a taster for the excessive violence and nudity heading our way. Euphoria travels to extremes that no other TV teen saga has ever chartered. The territory is unique to Generation Z, the Tik Tok age and the 21st century. The current series begins by going back a decade, taking us through the infancy of young drug dealer Fezco — before he built his empire in a local garage, assisted by his pre-adolescent, gun-totting accomplice, Ashtray.

4 mins 51 secs read

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In October Alan Yentob and Camila Batmanghelidjh appeared in court at the beginning of a nine-week hearing following the collapse of her charity Kids Company, of which he was chairman. Six years earlier the pair were seated together in a setting suited to the excesses that led the charity to insolvency. It was a black-tie dinner at a Mayfair hotel where select guests paid tribute to a figure as synonymous with the BBC as Eric Gill’s Ariel and Carole the Test Card girl: Yentob. The event was organised by the Media Society and overseen by its president, Peter York. One speaker joked of the millions Nigella Lawson had made since Yentob put her on screen. Another claimed the Daily Mail harangued Yentob because he continued to produce radical films (he’d recently interviewed Bette Midler). Some referred wryly to Judaism; many namechecked Oxbridge. Yentob, they said, the ultimate BBC insider, was once an outsider, being the one intern that wasn’t an Oxbridge graduate when beginning his BBC career in 1968.

12 mins 47 secs read

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