The Bluestocking, vol 233
a device that cuts the engine if you enter a war zone.
Happy Friday!
I hosted Start the Week on Monday, with Syrian architect Marwa al-Sabouni, engineer Jo da Silva, and Civil War historian Jessie Childs. The theme was sieges, disasters and rebuilding.
PS. I’m speaking in Glasgow next Friday about feminism, and with Adam Rutherford on eugenics at Charleston the week after.
A Year Inside GB News (New Statesman)
As the first lockdown eased, [Robbie] Gibb and [Angelos] Frangopoulos flew to France in early August to make their pitch over lunch. [Andrew] Neil would be both chairman and host, taking the 8pm prime-time slot, Monday to Thursday, for 40 weeks a year. Half would be from the studio, the rest could be broadcast largely from his home in France. Enthused, Neil told them that American TV news was 20 or 30 years ahead of the UK; he suggested GB News invest in the same state-of-the-art video walls.
They discussed Nigel Farage. Neil didn’t object to his proposed involvement, but all three men agreed he should not be part of the launch line-up. That would send out the wrong message – that GB News was Fox News, Ukip-lite. Neil also insisted that Farage should not have a prime-time slot, and there was a discussion about “balancing” him with a left-wing co-presenter (GB News later approached Alastair Campbell and the former Labour minister Andrew Adonis, who declined).
When I wrote my early piece about GB News last year, Angelos Frangopoulos argued that it was ridiculous to suggest it would be Ofcom-edging culture warrior, and that anyone who thought so was a typical blinkered meeja elite. (Clearly, Andrew Neil believed him, at least until he arrived at the studios.) But his hirings always told another story: poor old Gloria de Piero is as left as the channel will go, and she is surrounded by Nigel Farage, former Farage aide Alex Phillips, Dan Wootton, Darren Grimes, and—I learn from this piece—the double team of Esther McVey and Philip Davies, two Tory MPs who did a joint interview with. . . Tory prime minister Boris Johnson. During the local election campaign. Luv 2 b legally mandated to b impartial.
The takeaway is that television is hard to make, and even harder to make well. Floor managers exist for a reason. Guest bookers have nerves of steel. Independent production companies are great, but they are full of people who learned their craft at the publicly funded/owned broadcasters.
Stuart McGurk ends with this vignette, which is exactly the kind of thing that the institutional expertise of the BBC or ITN would prevent from happening: “In mid-March, [GB news correspondent Mark] Steyn and his team decided to take their show to eastern Ukraine. They flew to Hungary, only to learn that Hungarian rental cars have a device that cuts the engine if you enter a war zone.”
From the postbag: “I think King Simeon [of Bulgaria] is not the only former monarch to become an elected leader of his country, there was also Sihanouk of Cambodia,” writes Zaab Sethna. “However, King Simeon does I believe have the distinction of being the only World War II head of state still living.”
My question: is Sihanouk the only monarch in history to abdicate in favour of his father? (His claim to the throne was through his mother, and he wanted to concentrate on politics.) He might also be the only king to abdicate twice.
Bluestocking recommends: I’m biased, but Alex Garland’s Men is one of the trippiest films you’ll ever see, and worth the price of admission alone for what I’m calling Rorys Kinnear (like attorneys-general). Regular readers will know that Big Eck’s approach to third acts is controversial, and it feels like here he has just really leaned into that by making the film go bonkers in the last 20 minutes.
By chance, I finally saw Jerusalem last Sunday, which is the masterpiece everyone says it is (although I wasn’t as taken with the third act as I was with the first). Jerusalem is an overtly English play—something which disquieted the Guardian’s reviewer Arifa Akbar, but which I absolutely loved. I grew up in a world of May Queens, hymns, flat-roofed pubs, meat raffles, and intense, skinny guys who thought they were DJs. I don’t often think of myself as English, but it’s part of who I am.
Men is just as English—all that damp foliage!—and takes its power, like Jerusalem, from pre-Christian mythology. Where Mark Rylance’s Rooster Byron talks to a giant near Stonehenge, Jessie Buckley’s Harper is haunted by the Green Man.
Maybe I’ll return to Men after it’s been released, because it’s the kind of film best watched with no preconceptions or spoilers.
Did I mention the ending is completely bananas?
Quick Links
“‘With the platforms where the monetization is through tokens or flowers or stupid little emojis,’ he says, ‘it doesn’t click in a kid’s head, I think, that they’re actually being paid’ and ‘the parents don’t really stop and think, ‘“Okay, someone's paying my kid to dance. No, they're just getting little flowers and little hearts.” It allows people to separate that.’” TikTok Live is being watched by pervs, inevitably. (Forbes)
“The writer Kathryn VanArendonk has called this recent genre “empathy tourism”: an attempt to take viewers on a voyage to a past that’s recent enough to be recognizable but distant enough to feel bizarre. As a result, some efforts — and, perhaps even more so, the way that people talk about them — can tip into a kind of smugness.” Jessica Bennett on all those “empowering” re-examinations of women’s lives, like Monica Lewinsky and Pamela Anderson (New York Times).
“Tom* is a 37-year-old British political journalist who stood to inherit a trust and a large family property portfolio when he was 18. ‘I knew I wasn’t ready to take on the money or the generational responsibility and asked for the whole thing to be deferred until I was 30. I needed to know who I was,’ he says. ‘In the end I realised that I wanted none of it.’” I’m choosing to believe this is Tom McTague. (Financial Times, £).
I want a Get Back, but for Blackadder.
Alex Massie on whether Brexit was really made in the Oxford Union (Substack).
Petition to get Michael Gove to share his drugs with the rest of us.
See you next time!