The Radio 4 Blog Feed

Feedback - Today programme

2015-02-20T09:38:22+00:00

Editor's Note: You can listen to Feedback online or download it here.

During the Falklands War in 1982, in the aftermath of the sinking of the Argentinian ship the Belgrano, and the resulting death of 323 members of its crew, the BBC’s Director of News and Current Affairs, Dick Francis, expressed his sympathy for the family of the dead.

He said that “the widow of Portsmouth is no different from the widow of Buenos Aires”.
A good Christian sentiment, you might feel.

Some in Mrs Thatcher’s entourage thought differently and indeed expressed their outrage. What was the BRITISH Broadcasting Corporation doing? It should be supporting “our boys” and not giving solace to the enemy.

Mrs Thatcher commented that, “The case for our British forces is not being put over fully and effectively. I understand there are times when it would seem that we and the Argentines are almost being treated as equal”.

It was around this time that the Newsnight presenter, Peter Snow, was called a “traitor” by the Sun newspaper - and some Tories - for saying that “We cannot demonstrate that the British have lied to us but the Argentinians clearly have”.

It is always difficult to see wars in the round and not primarily through one’s own national perspective.
Certainly when I was at school I was taught little or nothing about the Soviets role in World War 2, and their appalling losses. (They lost over 13 and a half million in total, including famine and forced labour; we lost 449, 700 including civilians).

Few issues, however, remain as controversial as the Allied bombing of German cities, and in particular the firestorm which consumed Dresden in 1945, a few months before the end of the war.

Families and friends of those who served in Bomber Command had to campaign for decades to get its contribution to the war against the Nazis properly recognised. They argued that for much of the war bombing was the only way we could significantly damage the German war effort, and they pointed to the appalling loss of life that resulted for those aircrews. A staggering 44% (55,573) of them died in the conflict. The average age of crewmen was 22.

Critics of the campaign against cities and Dresden in particular, use terms like “war crime” and at a recent commemorative ceremony in Germany the Archbishop of Canterbury, a relative of Viscount Portal who devised the bombing strategy, expressed his “profound feeling of regret and deep sorrow” and said the bombing “diminished all our humanity”.

The Today programme discussed the issue and was accused by some listeners of not providing sufficient context.

In Feedback this week I talked to the Editor of Today, Jamie Angus, and to Dr Peter Bush, a German who is Senior Lecturer in War and Media at Kings College London.

You can hear this week's programme here.

In another item this week I talked to the BBC’s deputy news editor about using shocking audio of the shootings in Copenhagen. Do let me know what you think about that and anything else of course.

Roger Bolton

Roger Bolton is the presenter of Feedback

Feedback: Is the BBC impartial?

2013-07-05T15:39:30+00:00

Editor's note: Feedback is available to listen to online or to download and keep.

Robin Day

Sir Robin Day and I were having one of our many arguments about the coverage of Ireland.

It was over 30 years ago. The veteran TV interrogator, with his “cruel glasses”, was in his prime and I was his very young programme Editor. There was a consensus between the two frontbenches in Westminster that the future of Ireland, indeed the possible reunification of North and South, should not be discussed. I thought it should.

I argued that the conflict in the North had been going on for almost 15 years, with great loss of life, property and the maiming of many innocent bystanders. It showed no sign of ending. Several opinion polls had indicated that between 40 and 50% of the British people thought that British troops should be brought back to the mainland. Surely the audience in a democracy should be allowed to hear the arguments for and against?

Robin’s view was that it was Parliament which set the agenda in a democracy. “After all”, he said, “no one elected us”.

I thought of that exchange again this week when reading the latest report from the BBC Trust on impartiality. Stuart Prebble, the former Chief Executive of ITV who is its author, argues that the BBC’s journalists, though in general doing a pretty impartial job, are too often influenced by the Westminster hot-house, and that the network journalists, now all brought together in their spanking new newsroom in London, home also to the World Service, could fall prey to the dangers of “groupthink”.

The danger is that voices from the rest of the country and from the margins of debate could be excluded.

In Feedback this week I talked to Stuart Prebble about his report.

Feedback reports on the BBC Trust's latest impartiality review and hears listeners' views.

Also this week, as a result of listening to last week’s discussion on Recycled Radio, we were sent this song by David Summers. We couldn’t play it in all in Feedback but here it is in all its glory.

Dave loves Recycled Radio so much that he dedicates his song to anyone who doesn't.

By the way did you hear the two old 69 year old men talking on the Today programme?

I refer of course to Mick Jagger and John Humphrys. Sir Mick showed real talent as an interviewer. He got John to reveal that he will never retire but intends to present Today for as long as he is wanted. I’m not sure how well that news will go down with some of the BBC's younger presenters!

Listen to Feedback

Download the Feedback podcast

When the crime writer met the Director General

2010-10-11T16:11:13+00:00

Crime writer and radio pugilist PD James has won one of the most prestigious awards in British journalism - the Nick Clarke Interview Prize. She won it for her on-air punch-up with BBC Director General Mark Thompson, during her guest editorship of the Today Programme on Radio 4 last new year's eve.

Quoted in The Guardian, Evan Davis, full-time Today programme interviewer said: "She shouldn't be guest editing, she should be permanently presenting the programme..."

The shortlist for the award included a number of other heavyweight full-timers: Owen Bennett-Jones, from the World Service; Andrew Hosken, also from The Today Programme; Jeff Randall from Sky News and Mark Lawson courageously challenging Russell Crowe on his accent on Front Row.

The Press Gazette has the story (and the full shortlist), The Guardian covered PD James' Today stint and here's the running order from her excellent edition of the programme. Mark Damazer, Nick Clarke's friend, introduced the prize on the blog last year.

Steve Bowbrick is editor of the Radio 4 blog

Sarah Mukherjee's week

2009-08-21T14:33:39+00:00

There are many advantages to working in August.

True, while many of our colleagues (and listeners) are battling with dilemmas like "white or red?", "pool or beach?" and "if I eat anything else for breakfast, will I still be able to get into my swimsuit?", I am trawling through websites, specialist journals and my contacts (those who are left at work, anyway) to see what stories they may have that we can get on air.

But while London can be, like any big conurbation, rather oppressive in hazy, sticky summer days, you can at least get a seat on the train, the queue for coffee is mercifully short, and anything story you turn your hand to will have an excellent chance of getting on.

I've been a broadcast journalist for twenty years now, and every year it's the same. There is often, sadly, one overwhelming story that happens in August - the death of the Princess of Wales, or the murder or the two little girls from Soham (both of which I covered).

But lower down the running order, there's an interesting shift in editorial standards that takes place at about the end of July. A gradual descent downwards, hurtling towards the bottom of the barrel at about this point in the summer. Part of the job of a specialist correspondent is to advise the outlets we serve about the merits of a story. But no-one wants to hear "we've done it before" at this time of year - there are still hours of airtime to fill, and not a lot with which to fill it.

But if you manage to dodge the pleading emails from output editors, August can be a fantastic time to prepare for the big stories later in the year. So much of modern day journalism can feel like a bit of a hamster wheel. Within a day you must take calls and read emails from contacts, mobilise resources, book crews, check equipment (when I do radio slots for the Today programme it's me and a satellite dish, no back up, so it's vital to make sure it's working before you leave), talk to editors, and research and turn around a story at lightning speed. So the chance to lift your gaze towards the horizon at quiet times is enormously helpful.

Yesterday, I and producer Nora Dennehy took a trip up to Sandy in Bedfordshire, to the headquarters of the RSPB, to talk to their experts about illegal bird hunting, here and in the EU, and about the effectiveness - or lack of it - of the European legislation designed to stop the practise.

Much of our planning time is now being devoted to a big UN meeting in December in Copenhagen, at which - it's hoped - there will be a global deal to reduce in the future the carbon dioxide emissions that the vast majority of scientists believe are causing climate change.

My big concern is how we are going to cover a story that involves lots of people talking impenetrably to each other in a large conference hall, and cover it in a way that makes it relevant to our listeners, explains what is going on and considers the difference it could make to us all. Already there are some very highly placed people I've been talking to who think such a deal is too much to ask in the time available - so we already have to ask the question: what happens then?

One of our ideas it to take a van that runs on chip fat around the UK to visit some low-carbon projects and schemes that are actually up and running. It's obviously a big commitment, financially and logistically, for the BBC, so we've been talking this week within the department about how viable it would be.

But before I think about covering talks designed to save the planet, I need to check out a story about a UK-wide early conker harvest, and conker-killing beetles that seem to be travelling by car. August may always be quiet, but the variety of stories that cross your desk as environment correspondent never ceases to surprise me!

Sarah Mukherjee is BBC environment correspondent.

Picture of a conker by Nick Thompson. Used under licence.

Peter Day's week

2009-07-30T15:34:51+00:00

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006s609

It is 21 years this summer since I started working on In Business, thanks to a sudden crisis. The programme's previous presenter had been tempted to a more lucrative job in television, and the vital deadline of the Radio Times billing was looming. That was when we decided what ought to be in the programme, and who the presenter would be. And though the presenter has stuck, this is still a familiar deadline, I'm afraid.

In Business had started some time before, in the 1970s, at a time when business got short shrift from BBC News. The powers that be must have thought it too boring, too specialist, too incomprehensible for a general audience.

Economics coverage was mostly restricted to a canter round the monthly economic indicators and a routine daily mention of the ups and downs of share prices as indicated by the Financial Times Index.

Business was a distant world. Radio 4 had woken up to the fascinating intricacies of the financial markets in 1971, when a long postal workers strike badly affected the City of London. The deputy editor of the World Tonight, Vincent Duggleby, was alerted to this, commissioned a piece on it, and very soon after that the Financial World Tonight was born as a separate programme, with Vincent at the helm.

In Business came a bit later; the first series was commissioned by Radio 4 after BBC governors were badgered at a 'Meet the BBC' meeting to recognise that there was a lot more to business than the City. That has turned out to be true.

Nevertheless, despite the explosion of business broadcasting in the past 20 years led by the American networks and then taken up round the world, it is still those perpetual motion machines the financial markets that get the most attention, in minute detail.

Leaving In Business (and its sister programme Global Business on the World Service) ample room to pursue some of the longer term trends. In particular, that means addressing the endless story of change: high technology crashing into the established way of doing things in companies, industries, countries, over and over again.

It's strange but true that the new millennium in 2000 really did seem to usher in a whole new world of business activity, reasserting the significance of the dot-com bubble even after it burst so apparently definitively the same year.

And organisations are still busy learning how to cope with the new wired-up interconnected, interactive world... look at the confusion in the global media industry at the moment if you think the implications of the Internet are now out in the open.

But it may go deeper than mere business models, such as shifting retailing to the web, or not.

Some 10 years ago the great management thinker the late Peter Drucker told me that he did not think that the computer had yet begun to effect the way organisations were managed. At the time, it seemed to be a crazy remark, but thinking about it afterwards it made more and more sense.

Henry Ford transformed industry after industry with his adoption of the production line in Detroit 100 years ago. Theoretically, the interactive information generated by the computer network should be having just as much disruptive impact on business now as Ford had then.

But few pre-existing companies seem to have changed their shape, size or business model to reflect what they now know about the clients and customers.

The mass production corporation tells itself it is making things its customers want to buy, and giving them a choice. But big companies seem to erect walls around themselves to keep the customer at bay. They commission market research rather than themselves go out and ask questions, and they mainly want customers who want to buy the things they make, not the other way round.

Inside the company all is ordered and predicable, punctuated by meetings and lunches and access to the company car parking space. Outside, in the real world, there is fearful chaos.

Big companies seem scared of the individuality of the people in the market place. They long to bring order and branding and simplicity to the disorder of real life.

It is something you see vividly in India at the moment, where the country's 12-million roadside hawkers and tiny corner shops are fighting to prevent the spread of the big corporate supermarkets.

Company Man and Company Woman see chaos on the street and in the bazaars of India, when what I see is huge choice and enormous convenience... backed by a remarkably efficient supply chain getting produce from the wholesale markets to the streets. Choice and convenience now under threat.

Business people get business qualifications that give them the tools to bring what they think is order to the chaos of the real world, in the same way that the whiz kids in the financial markets thought they had packaged up sub prime risk so that it wasn't risky any more.

The 21st century post-Ford lesson that business may have to learn is that the real world is full of millions of individuals with individual needs who want their individuality respected and served. The network computer makes this sort of intimacy possible, if companies were to learn how to use it to craft the mass market products for a clamour of different preferences.

Providing goods and services in this way was not possible when I started doing In Business 21 years ago. Perhaps we ought to make a programme about it. Perhaps that's what we are doing.

Peter Day is presenter of In Business

This week's In Business, Learning Curve, is about training in the Internet era and is on Radio 4 at 2030 tonight.
I took some photographs in the offices of Radio Current Affairs in White City - the department that produces Moneybox, Analysis, More or Less and In Business.
Peter Day remembers Peter Drucker on his death in 2005.
The In Business archive is one of the most comprehensive at the BBC. You can listen to programmes going back to 2002.
Peter Day's World of Business podcast combines In Business and his 52 weeks-per-year World Service programme Global Business.

Nick Clarke interview prize

2009-06-17T09:02:05+00:00

Update: details of how to enter an interview for the award and the competition rules are now here. The closing date for this year's award is 4 August.

Nick Clarke was a great Radio 4 broadcaster. He died far far too young in late 2006 and is remembered by many of us - and I am sure many of you - as a master of his art - on The World at One and Round Britain Quiz in particular. The man with the marvellous voice and intellect and unique interviewing style.

Radio 4 and BBC News launched an interview prize in his honour - for the best broadcast interview over a 12 month period. Last year - the inaugural year - the prize was won by the BBC's Carrie Gracie - though I am delighted to say that we had a pretty healthy number of entries from all over the industry. The prize was announced at the Cheltenham Literary Festival in early October and we are expecting to repeat the pattern for this year.

Entries have to be in by the end of July and we have a very able group of judges who listen in pairs before a final list is drawn up and listened to by a panel of three. Last year that final panel consisted of Gillian Reynolds (of The Daily Telegraph), Peter Hennessey (the renowned political historian from Queen Mary, University of London) and Nick's long time editor - Kevin Marsh (Editor of the BBC's College of Journalism).

Mark Damazer wrote an obituary for Nick Clarke for The Guardian in November 2006. Of Clarke's return to radio after his first illness, he says: "His first Any Questions outing was at a school in Tring, Hertfordshire. The audience in the hall knew it was his first programme since the cancer. When Nick came on to the platform there was a Radio 4 version of pandemonium. The walls vibrated to the sound of the clapping and stamping. Many people stood."
The Press Gazette on Carrie Gracie's 2008 win
The picture shows Nick Clarke presenting The World at One in 2001. It's from the BBC's picture library.