So, as all cool sentences

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begin, I think that the best TV programme I saw last was Addicted to Sheep.

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nginx In many ways this BBC4 documentary was reminiscent of the French film Être et Avoir 301 Moved Permanently about a remarkable teacher in a school in the remote Auvergne, although a good deal less winsome. It focused on the lives […]

Sir Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate Gallery, has used the platform of the BBC in a blatant attempt to deceive the nation. Either that or he is genuinely deluded himself. Both options render him unfit for major public office. He

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was confronted on Radio 4 programme

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nginx The 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 it ‘Tainted by

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Experience’ – an ironic reference to the reason given by a Birtist suit at the Beeb for his being ‘let go’ a decade earlier. I

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nginx 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 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

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towards him. Brian 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.

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nginx Immediately after his predictably rapturous greeting at the first performance,

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Grayson Perry raised 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

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nginx their useless visual arts

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coverage, which 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

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New has been second time around. It was pretty good when first aired all those lifetimes ago in 1980. The fourth episode, it had

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