So, as all cool sentences begin, I think that the best TV programme I saw last was Addicted to Sheep. In many ways this

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BBC4 documentary was reminiscent of the French film Être et Avoir about a remarkable teacher in

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nginx/1.21.1 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

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nginx/1.21.1 the nation. 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 Reunion: Tate Modern on

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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

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it ‘Tainted by Experience’ – an ironic reference to the

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nginx/1.21.1 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

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nginx/1.21.1 by obituarists relating controversies which Brian’s inclination to mischief 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

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was a 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

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nginx/1.21.1 the first performance, Grayson Perry raised

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the question of why he was asked to give this year’s Reith Lectures. Well, for the first time in their sixty-six years, they were to be given by a “visual artist”. Could […]

Two months ago, having been criticised for their useless

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nginx/1.21.1 visual arts coverage, which

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tends to be levelled at children and others of grotesque collective ignorance, the BBC promised us a raft of excellent arts programmes. Perhaps things were looking up. One of these has now 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. It was

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pretty good when first aired all those lifetimes ago in 1980. The fourth episode, it had Utopia in the title, reviewing

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nginx/1.21.1 the history of trendy architecture in the 20th century, was the best television about art for decades. It was alive […]