For the right, the BBC has always been a safe space. Now this space is being contested – and it scares the life out of themFor almost 50 years MI5 had agents embedded at the BBC, vetting job candidates with the specific aim of weeding out prospective left-leaning employees. It was known as the “Christmas Tree” process, after the discreet symbol on a personnel file that would advise executives that a particular individual was to be blacklisted. The practice continued well into the 80s, and until a 1985 Observer exposé was denied at all levels.Perhaps this jars a little with the warm and fuzzy image of the BBC that has been bequeathed to us over the generations. This lovable national...
We all lose when the state, no matter how third-hand or arm’s-length, is able to engineer the silence of public figuresKeep politics out of sport. Ha, yeah. Good luck with that. Meanwhile, in what we must, if only out of a sense of convention, call the Real World, we have this: the strange and sinister developments of Friday evening in what will now come to be known as the Lineker affair.The suspension of Gary Lineker from BBC presenting duties – not Newsnight or Question Time, but the bloodless warm bath of Match of the Day – over a tweet sent on Wednesday afternoon criticising government policy on migrants is, frankly, a jaw-dropping act of political intervention. Continue reading...
Playing in a pre-qualifying league with fellow minnows would help them to improve and also benefit more established teamsBy no means the first football grandee to assert that playing international cannon fodder such as San Marino ought to be beneath the England team, Gary Lineker was the most recent and high profile. During the Wembley rout on Thursday, the man who served his country with so much distinction mused aloud on social media, tweeting: “Surely we’ve reached the stage where the lowest ranked nations should play among themselves to qualify for the right to play at this level. It’s become absurd.”While one suspects a younger Lineker would have happily looked past the absurdity of such a mismatch and seen instead...
England’s glorious day in the sun lifted the BBC pundits but there was still caution amid the commotionComplain about the licence fee if you must but the bottom line is the BBC’s comprehensive World Cup coverage offers something for everyone. Toddlers across the land, for example, have been cavorting joyously to the simple pleasure of the Kicky Kicky Kick Kick song from the Hey Duggee cartoon. Meanwhile on Radio 5 Live there is the Robbie Savage breakfast show, for those who have not yet graduated to CBeebies.It is a broad church. But the actual match coverage must please everyone at once, no mean feat. England’s support can be roughly split into two categories – the blindly optimistic and the morbidly fatalistic – and...
Lineker has been one of Fifa’s most visceral critics and it is baffling to find him presiding over events in Moscow, even in an industry where the phrase ’complete moral volte-face’ tends to draw blank looksAs the days ticked down you kept thinking he might still have something up his sleeve. Maybe this is a brilliantly orchestrated inside job. Maybe halfway through the World Cup draw in Moscow, as the balls are divvied up and shark-like Fifa men with faces as blank as the polished granite interior of a Panamanian bank vault yawn behind their hands, Gary Lineker will wink at the camera, drop the mask of sickly corporate piety and get on with trashing the place.This is how it...