StephenTall.org

The Guardian reports today: The BBC should have been free to drop Miriam O’Reilly from Countryfile without attracting any accusations of age discrimination, according to comedian Rowan Atkinson, in a controversial intervention into the debate about the lack of older women on television. It appears, though, that Rowan Atkinson has confused two concepts: ‘creative freedom’ and ‘unjustifiable discrimination’. Slightly bizarrely  [ Read More ]

If you’ve caught even a minute of the BBC News Channel’s tawdry tabloid coverage of the police’s hunt for Raoul Moat, you may have noticed the striking resemblance to The Day Today – broadcast an astonishing 16 years ago, and yet still as satirically astute as ever. Here are some of its best bits: That’s the funny stuff over and  [ Read More ]

If you missed this week’s first episode of Rev, BBC2′s new Dibley With Attitude sit-com, I suggest you catch up prompt via Auntie’s blessed iPlayer. It won’t be everyone’s cup of tea … there’s no laugh-track (how very modishly cinema verite, dahlins), caricatures-a-plenty, and it takes itself seriously enough to allow a couple of reflective lines on the nature of  [ Read More ]

Excuse me, while I discard my customery mode of politness, and begin to vent … [vent] What is it with the media, and their inability to report the Lib Dems or our policies or statements? The political news this morning has been dominated by a ‘Stealth tax’ dispute … PoliticsHome informs us that, ‘The Conservatives have [...]

Cast your mind back two weeks, and you may recall the BBC making a hash of selecting its panel for the weekly political discussion show Question Time. In the week when the big political issues were the Iraq war, electoral reform and MPs’ expenses – on all of which the Lib Dems have a distinctive [...]

A couple of years back, I was moved to write to the BBC complaining about Question Time’s pro-Tory bias, regularly featuring Tory-supporting journalists alongside Tory MPs. Well, that’ll learn me to be careful what you wish for. Because what do we have to look forward to on tonight’s QT panel? The following: an official Labour representative [...]

‘It’s all about fairness’, is the refrain we can expect to hear a lot from Nick Clegg in the next few months, leading up to the 2010 general election. It was noticable that the word ‘fair’ was deployed in each one of Nick’s four key policy areas set out in his Times article yesterday on [...]

There’s been a story doing the rounds too inane even for me to want to read anything about it – the ‘controversy’ over Gordon Brown declining to name his favourite type of biscuit. This is, according to some of the more desperate right-wing blogs, evidence of the Prime Minister’s tendency to dither. Or perhaps it’s [...]

Even to suggest today there are 2 Big Stories other than The One Big Story seems a trifle daft – the news that spread late yesterday evening of the death of Michael Jackson has dominated, and will continue to dominate, news coverage this weekend. RIP the ‘King of Pop’, of course, but spare a thought, too, for Farrah Fawcett, whose  [ Read More ]

The Government has just published its Digital Britain report, detailing the UK government’s strategy for broadband and digital content. The Guardian has a quick summary of its conclusions: • Illegal filesharing is “tantamount to theft”, repeat offenders will have their broadband connection reduced. • Part of the BBC licence fee will be used to fund universal broadband access • But  [ Read More ]