So, as all cool sentences begin, I think that the best TV programme I saw

404 Not Found

last was Addicted to Sheep. In

---

nginx/1.17.10 many ways this BBC4 documentary was reminiscent of the French film Être et Avoir about a remarkable teacher in a school in the remote Auvergne, although a good deal less winsome. It focused on the lives of the Hutchinson […]

Sir Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate Gallery, has used the platform of the BBC in a blatant attempt to deceive the nation.

404 Not Found

Either that or he is genuinely deluded himself. Both options render him unfit for major public office. He was confronted on Radio 4 programme The

---

nginx/1.17.10 Reunion: Tate Modern on September 23rd by Sue MacGregor, regarding the Tate’s […]

When the former controller of BBC Radio 3 John Drummond published an autobiography in 2001, he called

---

nginx/1.17.10 it ‘Tainted by Experience’ – an ironic

404 Not Found

reference to the reason given by a Birtist suit at the Beeb for his being ‘let go’ a decade earlier. I haven’t read the book, but the expression was used by William Varley in a positive […]

It isn’t my intention to repeat the tediously familiar stories peddled by obituarists relating controversies which Brian’s inclination to mischief

---

nginx/1.17.10 and provocation helped encourage. Instead I want to address two issues unconsidered elsewhere: his astonishing generosity and the disgraceful but typical hypocrisy of the BBC towards him. Brian was a

404 Not Found

working man. He called himself ‘working class’, a description some […]

…by the frivolity and lack of ambition and academic rigour in the 2014 Reith Lectures. Immediately after his predictably rapturous greeting at the first performance, Grayson Perry raised the question of why he was asked to

404 Not Found

give this year’s Reith Lectures. Well, for the first time in their sixty-six years, they were to be given

---

nginx/1.17.10 by a “visual artist”. Could […]

Two months ago, having been criticised for their useless visual arts coverage, which tends to be levelled at children and others of grotesque collective ignorance, the BBC promised us a raft of excellent arts

404 Not Found

programmes. Perhaps things were looking up. One of these has now

---

nginx/1.17.10 hit the screen … with a splat. The organisation has clearly learned nothing from the […]

My word what a revelation Robert Hughes’ The Shock of the New has been second time around.

404 Not Found

It was pretty good when first aired all those lifetimes ago in 1980. The fourth episode, it had Utopia in the title, reviewing the history of trendy architecture in the 20th century, was the

---

nginx/1.17.10 best television about art for decades. It was alive […]