Peter Bazalgette
Outnumbered: the freshest sitcom for some time
Which is the greatest British comedy series of all time? The results of our online survey are in: click here to read Peter Bazalgette’s blog on the results
There is a learned treatise to be written about television nurseries: series whose greatest significance is the embryonic talent which they nurtured. But don’t worry, this is not it. Any such study would have to record how the Tonight programme in the 1950s produced Alasdair Milne (later BBC director general) and Antony Jay (the co-author of Yes, Minister). Thames TV’s This Week in the 1960s and 1970s gave us Jeremy Isaacs and David Elstein, who went on to found Channels Four and Five respectively. In the 1980s, Esther Rantzen’s That’s Life! incubated Adam Curtis (now our most influential documentary maker) and Sean Woodward (currently Northern Ireland secretary). The 1990s Big Breakfast yielded, among others, Charlie Parsons (creator of the world-beating format, Survivor) and Ruth Wrigley (who launched Big Brother in Britain in 2000).
The common denominator between these folk is that they all worked behind the camera. Since television is part of the entertainment industry, such figures are often ignored in favour of the front-of-camera stars. This was something Not Again: Not the Nine O’Clock News (BBC2, 28th December) tried to remedy.
It partially succeeded by including John Lloyd and Sean Hardie, the producers of the hit 1980s comedy series, along with Richard Curtis, one of the writers, and Howard Goodall, who composed many of the pop parodies that the show excelled in. Was this programme biopic nevertheless just a pretext for repeating yet another potpourri of bargain basement clips? To some extent it was. But two raw stories redeemed the general air of self-reverence. One explored the painful sacking of Chris Langham after series one, as he fought various addictions. The other revealed the chilling announcement from Rowan Atkinson at a dinner, following what turned out to be the final series: “I don’t want to work with the Second XI any more.”
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Richard Sanders
Those preparing for Tony Blair’s appearance at the Chilcot inquiry must know that, in parts of Britain, there is an overbearing need to see him reduced to stammering incoherence, or even soul-baring confession: to make him pay for his supposed dishonesty. Of course, they also know that this is never going to happen.
During 2007 I spent months preparing for a two-hour interview with Blair for the BBC documentary Blair at War. I heard from nearly everyone who has appeared before Chilcot, many off the record, including former weapons inspector Hans Blix. We even interviewed President Bush. I too was striving for that “gotcha” moment. I didn’t achieve it. Why? Because Blair didn’t lie—not straightforwardly anyway.
The invasion of Iraq was a catastrophe; a study in hubris. Badly conceived and executed, it was the greatest foreign policy disaster since Suez. It will forever stain Blair’s reputation. But he, like the world’s intelligence agencies, believed Saddam had WMD. The charge against him is more complex and subtle—and not one that makes for a cathartic courtroom moment.
People believed Saddam had WMD because he behaved as if he did. In the 1990s he obstructed UN inspectors. He invited nuclear scientists to receive awards, even though his nuclear programme was dormant. He went out of his way to behave like he had something to hide. He was a gangster, a man whose career was built on terror. The UN asked him to spread his arms and say: “Behold, I am disarmed, I am weak, I am powerless.” Yet he was incapable of doing this without winking, both towards his own people and the Iranians. Among world leaders only Jacques Chirac—an “earthy” politician himself, in Hans Blix’s words—saw through him, disregarding the conclusions of his own intelligence services. Blair was merely voicing the consensus, even if he did state it with a conviction that made many uncomfortable.
Blair’s problem came when Saddam agreed to allow the inspectors back, in the autumn of 2002. Paradoxically, this was also Blair’s greatest triumph. He had persuaded Bush—against the advice of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney—to pursue the UN route. But over the next six months they found nothing. By the start of 2003 it was clear to Blix that there were doubts over whether Saddam had biological and chemical weapons. He told Blair this explicitly in a telephone conversation on 20th February, a month before the invasion. But Blair brushed him aside.
This conversation may be among the most fertile areas for those wishing to probe Blair’s intentions. How could he justify invasion when the chief weapons inspector was telling him there were doubts? And especially when the Iraqis, unlike in the 1990s, were placing no obstacles in the way of the inspectors. Weapons, had they existed, would have been found.
But Blair has an escape clause. UN resolutions not only required Saddam to disarm, but to prove that he had. In 1991 Saddam destroyed half his chemical and biological weapons, but kept the rest, hoping to conceal them. He quickly realised this would be impossible, and ordered the destruction of the remaining half—in secret, without informing the UN. When the UN subsequently discovered evidence of this second half, he came clean. But they wanted proof of its destruction. The Iraqis claimed there was none. Blix never believed this, and felt there must be documentation, or scientists who could give evidence. Saddam’s failure to provide this was all part of his insane, winking game-playing, his deliberate cultivation of doubt. Technically, then, he was not in compliance with the famous resolution.
Even so, these are desperately thin grounds on which to launch an invasion. Blair had also committed a strategic mistake. The two government dossiers on Iraqi WMD (of September 2002 and February 2003) have been rightly criticised for over-egging the intelligence, or (“removing the caveats” in Lord Butler’s words). But their publication also meant that, as far as public opinion was concerned, Blair had shifted the burden of proof away from Saddam, and onto himself. It was Blair who now had to prove that Saddam had not disarmed. Here he has failed, and his attempts to pretend otherwise will forever discredit him.
Such intellectual contortions would be forgotten if the invasion had been a success. Blair’s true crime was his failure to plan for the postwar period, or to persuade the US to do so. He had been warned by senior officials that there was a disastrous gap in the preparations. He shared the Americans intoxication with their own power and their blithe optimism that Iraq would somehow sort itself out. Even after the invasion he appeared slow to grasp the scale of the unfolding disaster. Jeremy Greenstock, Britain’s top official in Iraq from September 2003, recalled a private meeting in Basra in January 2004 with his US counterpart Paul Bremer and Blair. Beforehand, Greenstock had laid out the problems facing the coalition in unsparing detail. But as Bremer launched into a surreal, upbeat summary of the situation, Blair simply grinned and nodded. “It was the one opportunity for the prime minister to grill the person who was actually implementing British objectives in Iraq,” Greenstock said. He flunked it.
To be fair, managing a relationship with an ally immeasurably more powerful than yourself is complex. Left to himself Blair would probably not have prioritised Iraq, in the wake of the invasion of Afghanistan. The tortuous neocon reasoning that made toppling Saddam a rational response to 9/11 was not something that occurred spontaneously to him. But Blair seemed psychologically hardwired to side with the powerful. Once it became clear the Americans had made their minds up, he displayed what was his defining characteristic: an ability to convince himself of the moral virtue of his course of action, and to believe it fervently.
In my hours of interviewing Blair, what emerged most strongly was the sheer intensity of his religiosity. One word cropped up again and again: “mission.” His mindset was that of a 19th-century evangelist. If you wanted to interest him in an issue, you had to present it as a moral cause. And once he had the bit between his teeth he was loathe to admit any ambiguity. “I don’t believe that what is happening in Iraq today is anything other than an absolutely visceral, profound struggle between what is right and what is wrong,” he said in an extraordinary passage of his 2007 interview with us—this at a time when the war had descended into an impossibly complex struggle between Iraqi factions, in which Britain and the US were little more than bemused bystanders.
Blair is a man of great gifts. A brilliant communicator, he has an agile mind, an ability to grasp a range of issues and to reach decisions swiftly and decisively—virtues sadly lacking in his successor. But he is not a deep thinker and is notoriously uninterested in detail—“lightweight as a butterfly, skimming along the surface,” in Hugo Young’s memorable phrase. Had he known how to delegate, and lead a team, he might have been a superb prime minister. Tragically, his lack of depth was allied to a burning moral conviction. It was a fatal combination, the consequences of which were played out on the battlefields of Iraq.
Prospect
Writers of US shows such as The Wire are "gods because the networks do not own them"
Peter Jukes (November) offers good reasons for America’s television drama being better than Britain’s, but he omits a key problem. In the US, not only is there genuine competition for talent between the networks—both free-to-air and cable—but there are powerful independent distributors that can underpin a show-runner’s position and contribute substantially to the budget. The writer-producers are gods because the networks do not own them—so they can exercise real editorial and creative control, as well as make tens of millions of dollars. In Britain, the dominant distributors are owned by the BBC and ITV. Virtually the only wealthy drama show-runner is Phil Redmond, who made nearly all his cash from the soap Brookside. True, money is made from formats—quizzes, games, “reality”—but these are a far more debased form of creativity. The incentives we need for real writing are suppressed by our vertically integrated structures. It’s no wonder that US drama dominates the international marketplace. We have simply lost the plot.
David Elstein
London SW1
David Herman
Romola Garai as Anne and Eddie Remayne as Ralph in Stephen Poliakoff’s new film Glorious 39
Near the beginning of Stephen Poliakoff’s new film, Glorious 39, a boy goes to see two old men. “What do you want to ask both of us, Michael?” says one. The boy pulls out a family album and starts turning the pages. “I am very interested in history,” he says. No British filmmaker or writer of his generation is more interested in history than Poliakoff. It has been the subject of his best work, not only his latest film but also his great television dramas Shooting the Past, Perfect Strangers and The Lost Prince. Increasingly, though, it seems that Poliakoff is not only more interested in modern British history than anyone else, but is the sole remaining mainstream dramatist engaging with the topic at all.
Poliakoff began his career alongside David Hare, Ian McEwan and Trevor Griffiths as part of a generation of mainly left-wing playwrights, who produced powerful work on central moments in modern British history. Thirty years on, he is the only one still going on the subject. History has not vanished from our screens; what has gone is the central role of writers like these in interpreting the British past. Given the importance that Gordon Brown’s government has placed on the debate over Britishness in recent years—and the problematic and conflicted results the discussion has produced—this feels like an especially glaring lack. As an election approaches, our screens are almost devoid of what was once one of British broadcasting’s richest traditions: popular, politically engaged and intellectually challenging re-imaginings of the historical events underpinning national life.
Poliakoff is also one of the last auteurs of British film and television drama. His work has a distinctive feel, often reworking familiar themes. From early in his career he understood the importance of the techniques used in thrillers. Glorious 39, released on 20th November, is a film about appeasement. In 1939, a young British woman, Anne, belongs to a rich and important family. Her father moves in high political circles. Her brother Ralph works in the foreign office. She comes across a plot to steer Britain away from war with Germany. The appeasers will stop at nothing and only Anne can prevent them. It has the feel of a 1930s Alfred Hitchcock film; it also has first-class performances and a clever weave of references.
What about the history? It seems at first to be a familiar kind of historical narrative. Lots of big country houses, men who work in government, passionate arguments on what to do about Nazi Germany. Like Poliakoff’s other historical dramas, Glorious 39 is set in an exciting and mysterious place in which strange things happen. People in his plays disappear. And when they don’t vanish, they have secrets. At the same time, though, Poliakoff’s kind of history is about things that don’t belong in thrillers at all. He is determined to bring together the past and present, to connect modern British and European history. Often his plays treat the impact of historical change as a kind of catastrophe. Indeed, there is something White Russian about his view of history as a “huge bang,” smashing everything in its wake. The first world war, Nazism, Thatcherism: who can survive such changes intact? No one. It sounds bleak, but isn’t. While he talks about the “big history” of events and wars, he also tackles ordinary lives. And his genius is to have found, in mass audience television drama, a form allowing him to explore such questions.
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James Crabtree
Prospect has just published an essay by screenwriter Peter Jukes, asking why British TV can’t replicate The Wire. It’s a deceptively simple question. The Wire (and associated long-form US TV dramas) have been universally lauded, and the format has been repeated enough times (The Sopranos, Big Love, Mad Men, etc) to think it would be worth someone in Britain having a go. But while we all have a sense that this model works—long plot arcs, interweaving narratives, gradual character development—it’s sometimes tricky to see quite how different the shows are. Which was why we gave Prospect’s Brian Semple possibly the best job a writer at the magazine has ever had.
Go home this morning, we said about a month ago, and watch a Wire box sets. The only snag was Brian was (a) tasked with noting down the plot lines as they popped up and perhaps less joyously (b) having to also watch a BBC drama for comparison. Here is what Brian turned up:
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Mary Fitzgerald
Despite the hype, we won’t ever know the real impact of Nick Griffin’s appearance on BBC’s Question Time. Like any other small party, the BNP’s vote is contingent on how people feel about the major parties. We know very little more about the British National Party, or its future, than we did before. We may, however, have learned some valuable lessons about how to argue with them—or more precisely, how not to.
Back in 2007, when I was interning on a national broadsheet, I went to the party’s local election press launch at a pub in Dagenham. It turned out I was the only journalist to attend. The experience bordered somewhere between the terrifying and the absurd. At Dagenham East tube, I was ceremoniously greeted by seven or eight big men in black suits, shaved heads and black sunglasses and taken to a pub swathed in the flags of St George. The function room inside had been transformed into something resembling a medieval court; when Nick Griffin was led in by a procession of flag bearers to a robust fanfare, we all rose. At one point during the proceedings Griffin asked me to stand up and take a bow for being the only journalist “brave enough” to show up.
Now that the BBC has been “brave enough” to entertain Griffin too, he has finally found a national platform to say—almost verbatim—the farcical things he said in that pub back in 2007, that “Islam is a wicked and vicious faith,” that the sight of “two men kissing is creepy,” that Britain should be home only to its own “indigenous peoples” (something he utterly failed to define). No surprises there, then: Nick Griffin is still not a mainstream politician, and his policies don’t make sense.
What was striking, however, were the similarities between the BBC studio audience and that pub audience back in 2007: the liberal outrage voiced by the panel and audience was so homogeneous that it quite chillingly reminded me of the same, unquestioning accord held by those who turned up to see Griffin in Dagenham. The only difference is that I happen to side with the liberals. To someone who doesn’t, the show must have looked like a stitch-up.
After the launch in 2007, I interviewed Griffin on a picnic bench in the pub’s garden. He was very much like how he appeared on television last night; a man, seemingly a little uncomfortable with his weight and diminutive stature, prone to nervous laughter and fond of splitting semantic hairs. (The only big change was the backdrop; instead of black-suited minders hovering nearby, there was Bonnie Greer, leaning disdainfully into her chair with her back to him, dropping in the occasional history lesson.) As we sat in the garden, Griffin told me how the launch the previous year had been packed full of cameras, microphones and journalists taking notes. “Why has no one apart from you showed up this time?” he asked. “It’s a conspiracy.”
It may have been a conspiracy, of sorts. In the days preceding my date with Griffin there had been a feeling across the media, and certainly in the newsroom where I was interning, that the BNP should not be given “oxygen”: that the publicity they had had the previous year had helped them win seats, and that they should not get the same assistance again. Which is why, presumably, the paper only sent an intern, hedging their bets that they weren’t going to cover it. And this theory seemed to bear out: my interview with Griffin was never published, relatively little coverage of the BNP appeared elsewhere and in that election, despite high expectations, the party made no significant gains.
Given this precedent, did allowing Griffin onto a platform as large as Question Time risk boosting the BNP’s support? Yes, undoubtedly. The reason, however, may not be the fact of his appearance, but rather the manner in which it was handled. No matter how repellent one finds Griffin and everything he stands for, the show did degenerate, as one BNP spokesperson put it, into “have a go at Nick Griffin time”—and this is both lazy and dangerous. Instead of being pressed on issues, a series of questions were shouted at him in a manner less resembling political debate, and more, as Andrew Neill later put it, karaoke. What made it worse was that other members of the panel dodged and evaded questions when it suited them as much as Griffin did; when asked if the rise of the BNP was due in part to new Labour’s misguided immigration policies, Jack Straw fudged his response almost as shamelessly as Griffin did when challenged about his Holocaust denial.
Tory peer Sayeeda Warsi claimed that the event had been a success because Griffin had not been able to put forward “the PR version of what he says.” Sadly, having seen him roll out exactly the same argument to his party faithful in Dagenham, I’d have to disagree. He kept to the routine he has practised for many years and, in the process, managed to look like a victim. Of sorts.
To be fair, it’s not easy interviewing Nick Griffin. I found it difficult to get him to say anything that was explicitly racist, though most of it was casually vile. At the end of our chat, I asked him if he ever became prime minister, he would let me stay in the country. “But you’re British,” he said. “Of course you could.” When I told him I was American and probably of mixed racial ancestry, he seemed flustered and replied that it was obvious that I had “culturally assimilated,” so my staying wouldn’t be a problem. I had to laugh. And when I laughed, that was the only minute that he seemed genuinely thrown.
So, should he have been asked on to appear on TV? Yes; his party has enough votes to justify it. But what was needed was an audience and interviewers willing to do more than throw abuse at him, who would come up with things that he didn’t expect and, above all, would make him look ridiculous. Which is why the star of the show should have been the young British Asian man who offered to start a whip-round for a plane ticket—to send Nick Griffin to the South Pole, a “colourless landscape” that he’d presumably enjoy.
Peter Jukes
Read Prospect’s interview with The Wire’s creator David Simon, in which he explains why writing is a team sport in the US
It’s been a slow burning fuse. From its first broadcast on the US pay-TV channel HBO in 2002, it took seven years for The Wire to accumulate widespread critical recognition in Britain. And it has grown into something bigger than an artistic success. Like a great Victorian novel, David Simon’s epic portrait of the policing, crime and politics of post-industrial Baltimore is now cited by politicians and leader writers. But the success of this show and a raft of other imports such as The West Wing and Mad Men begs a question about the state of one of our key cultural industries. How come US television drama has captured the high end of the market and we have abandoned it?
It wasn’t always this way. Although America dominated postwar television drama from Bonanza to Dallas and Dynasty, Britain had a healthy export trade. Till Death us Do Part was transformed into All in the Family, and Monty Python changed US comedy. But our most important impact was not in quantity but quality. Epic historical series such as Jewel in the Crown or experimental melodramas such as Pennies from Heaven set a benchmark for US writers and producers.
But something has happened in the last ten to 15 years. In 1994, I wrote a tribute to Dennis Potter in the New Statesman about the decline of the single authored play on British television. The most obvious cause of this decline was the concentration of commissioning into a few hands. Despite the growth of the independent sector, just four men decided what millions would watch. The difference between 1994 and 2008 is startling. Instead of being the responsibility of four network controllers, most drama is now commissioned by one person.
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Peter Bazalgette
The five main terrestrial channels pay for more than 90 per cent of the original content produced for British television. A combination of BBC cost-savings and the collapse in television advertising means this expenditure is declining for the first time. At the current rate, by 2012 the funds committed to indigenous production will have fallen by more than a third since 2004. So how are the main channels responding?
In the first week of August, it became depressingly clear that from now on they are going to acquire as much free programming as possible. The free footage in question comes from police videos, CCTV and the prison service. This was British telly’s “crime and punishment” week. The crime was the lazy preponderance of law and order shows. The punishment was for viewers unlucky enough to watch them. During the week, no less than 11 per cent of primetime viewing (defined as 7pm-11pm) was filled with the video detritus of our justice system.
On Monday 3rd August, Channel 4 pitched Cherie Blair on knife crime against BBC1’s Panorama about drugs in prisons. Blair was reporting on the results of her campaign against street weapons. As ever with matters criminal, you needed a doctorate (sorry, PhD) in acronyms. VRU? Violence Reduction Unit. MIT? Mobile Intervention Team. HEMS? Helicopter Emergency Services, of course. Come on, keep up. The best moment was when justice minister, Maria Eagle, was confronted on the lack of progress. Cherie wanted “national plans” and “London-wide strategies.” But the minister demurred, arguing central government was not the answer. This is the turf on which parts of the next general election will be fought.
Over on BBC1 Panorama was explaining a mystery—how do skipfuls of drugs get into secure prisons? CCTV footage showed how stashes are brought in (usually in visitors’ private parts) and discreetly swallowed by inmates to be regurgitated later. BBC1 also hosted Nick Ross on Tuesday, completing a series about crime in Oxford and people’s attitudes to it. It found that the public are far more worried by vandalism and litter than by the knifings and drugs that the media get so excited about.
At least these three programmes were serious attempts at crime reporting, albeit with oodles of that free footage. The rest of the week, however, deteriorated into a crime pornfest. The same Tuesday evening poor old ITV had Car Crime UK, with a sententious voiceover from Trevor MacDonald, Send in the Dogs, and, God help us, Police Camera Action! (I’ll give you one guess which channel has to make the biggest spending cuts.) BBC1 added Neighbourhood Watched for good measure. Wednesday saw ITV keep at it with Total Emergency. Five weighed in with CCTV Cities. Thursday saw ITV headlining with Real Crime: The Tesco Bomber and Friday offered Traffic Cops on BBC1 and You’re Nicked on Five. Crime and punishment week was also bolstered by copious quantities of crime drama—mainly American programmes for cost reasons. CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and its two spin-offs appear by the yard on Five, also the home of the Law & Order franchise.
Meanwhile, ITV was heavily promoting The Bill, chiefly because they have shifted it from 8pm to 9pm. This was another emergency measure—the channel had to halve the number of episodes and then move them to take the place of more expensive decommissioned dramas. It was therefore with relief and not a little affection that I settled down to watch Midsommer Murders (ITV 8pm Wednesday) and New Tricks (BBC1 9pm Thursday)—the two jewels in the crown of the week. Both were new first-run editions of dramas that cost in the region of £750,000 an hour to produce. The village of Midsommer is, famously, the murder capital of the world, far exceeding the homicide rates of Mexico City or Mogadishu. The bad news from this bucolic charnel house is that John Nettles will be hanging up his police whistle and quitting the part of Inspector Barnaby. My theory is that he was the only actor never told that this is a work of comedy rather than a thriller. When he rumbled this ruse, he resigned.
New Tricks is the BBC’s most popular crime drama. And to see the extraordinary cast of Alun Armstrong, Dennis Waterman, Amanda Redman and James Bolam work together is a joy. True, the plots are getting far fetched, but no matter. This week it concerned a murder at a film studio. The film itself was described in the script as, “a reflexive, post-structuralist exploration of the nature of film itself.” Dennis Waterman’s down-to-earth character called that “a real J Arthur Rank,” the description summing up the rest of the week perfectly.
Felix Salmon
Have financial journalists had a good crisis? Some certainly made their names, like BBC business editor Robert Peston, an old-fashioned scoop-getter with good sources. In September 2007 he not only broke one of the biggest stories of the crunch—the Bank of England’s emergency support for Northern Rock—but arguably triggered Britain’s first bank run since 1866.
Others emerged as powerful commentators on financiers’ failings. In the US, a Rolling Stone article in July 2009 by political writer Matt Taibbi about Goldman Sachs started with a bang, likening the firm to a “giant vampire squid wrapped round the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” It was soon the most discussed article of the crisis in the US.
But these are only a few chinks of light: although journalists aren’t down in the basement with the bankers, they have hardly had a good crunch. It’s now commonly noted that the financial media in Britain and America didn’t see the crisis coming, while its journalists egged on the derivative pedlars and leveraged-loan wallahs. Many media organisations acted as relentless cheerleaders for the boom. Take US financial cable channel CNBC, known for its focus on daily stock price moves, cacophonous studio debates, and the slogan of its most famous presenter Jim Cramer: “there’s always a bull market somewhere.” Such boosterism came unstuck when Cramer was interviewed by television presenter and comedian Jon Stewart in March 2009. The CNBC host just let the blows fall, unable or unwilling to defend himself or his employers.
Other forces militated against a bearish media culture. Journalists had been encouraged to build relationships with bankers, creating a dependency for their diet of mergers, price moves and management rows. The noise suited the bankers, helping to tee up deals or move stock prices, but it institutionalised a culture in which editors ignored the big picture. Financial coverage is usually ghettoised in business sections and on news wires unseen by the public. Even if journalists had clear-eyed explanations of systemic problems, no one outside the financial world was reading them.
But to a great extent there weren’t any explanations, at least in the non-specialist press. Such mainstream news as did creep out over-emphasised daily market price moves with few attempts to push big stories onto the front pages. The public followed all this with barely half an eye, and emerged without any hint of what the financiers were up to.
But while the crisis exposed the average financial hack, it has allowed more in-depth writing to shine. Michael Lewis’s December 2008 cover story,“The End,” for Condé Nast Portfolio, racked up over 5m page views. Similarly former IMF chief economist Simon Johnson’s attack on financial oligopoly in May 2009 in the Atlantic, “The Quiet Coup,” changed the tone of debate about the future of regulation.
Britain had its bright spots, with the Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf highly influential on both sides of the Atlantic, and markets editor Gillian Tett (see main article) consistently insightful in her coverage of derivatives. In April she published one of the most successful of the crisis books—Fool’s Gold. The Times, edited, like the Daily Telegraph, by a former FT staffer, produced some striking coverage which helped it to win the Newspaper of the Year 2009 award.
But perhaps the best performer has been the blogosphere, which has arguably had a bigger impact on policy making than the mainstream media combined. While the FT’s Alphahville is the best of the few British blogs, it’s high-profile US economists like Paul Krugman and Nouriel Roubini who drive debate, while others, like Mark Thoma, have created influential clearing houses where the thoughts of hundreds of other top-flight economists are aggregated and debated. Current and former financial professionals, such as the anonymous Epicurean Dealmaker or the semi-anonymous Calculated Risk, have also provided analysis a cut above the newspaper business desks. Recently, an angrier streak has been seen, exemplified by the take-no-prisoners Zero Hedge, a blog written under the pseudonym “Tyler Durden”—the nihilistic character from the film Fight Club. Zero Hedge was instrumental in pushing problems with automated “high-frequency trading” onto the wider agenda, after which a variant known as “flash trading” is almost certain to be banned.
The blogs, then, do a great job of feeding avid financial news junkies, and easily beat the mainstream press for their understanding of macroeconomics or banking regulation. But navigating the blogosphere still needs critical faculties beyond most news consumers: there are many more bad blogs than good. So most will continue to rely on the mainstream media, be it the BBC or Rolling Stone. If financial journalists don’t provide the type of context and clarity that the public needs, we’ll likely see more vampire squids before too long.
Felix Salmon blogs for Reuters in New York
John Lloyd
BBC: to be shut off under the Tories?
An interview is not a policy (Ed Vaizey in the Sunday Times: a Tory government may make the BBC sell Radio 1) but it’s a straw in the wind. That wind now blows against the BBC: bloated, smug, out of touch, destructive of the private sector. When I wrote for Prospect in July 2009, that this attack came from the right, I was wrong: it now comes from everywhere. But as the likely next government, the Conservatives will inherit this trend.
It’s mistaken. The BBC is an elephant, but it’s a fine elephant. The fact that, by chance, it has grown to strength and maturity in the British public sector rather than the US private one, seems to strike many as contrary to the laws of nature: and inspires more polemics about its bias than ever comes the way of private media.
I think and have often written that the BBC has a liberal-left bias, and often I find it grates. It pays some of its stars and many of its executives very large sums, and that must excite envy –and with it the question: would they be worth that in the private sector?
But the arguments stands. The two large reasons for preserving the BBC as it is, are that at a time when news and analysis and documentary are being failed by the private sector, a public levy through the licence fee which delivers for all tastes is a welcome, even a necessary, antidote. And also: that where private media’s decisions cannot be challenged except by turning off or on, the BBC’s are a matter of public debate and controversy – now more or less permanent.
To start lopping away at a success which is also a provider of a great public good and is firmly within the democratic square is plain daft. My hope is that the kite flown by Ed Vaizey remains just that: and that it is pulled down if and when the Tories have to make governing decisions.
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