Category Archives: Arts

Arts, Culture, Government, Media, Scotland

The monolithic BBC and its privileged position

BBC: SCOTLAND

THE BBC’s new Scottish channel, which launches in February, is designed to offer a platform to new, more diverse voices that collectively should allow the corporation to present a more rounded view of modern Scotland.

The new channel is a tacit admission that BBC Scotland is not, in its present form, capable of meeting the supposed demand for more and better Scottish programming. According to this point of view, a country with exciting and expanding political aspirations deserves a public sector broadcaster with ambitions to match.

The channel is also a belated answer to a question that has, like so many discussions in Scotland, rumbled on unanswered for more than two decades: should there be a dedicated hour-long news programme mixing Scottish news with reporting from the rest of the UK and the world? The answer, at long last, is yes.

This is positive, even if it seems likely that there is a disconnect between the channel’s stated ambitions and the budget it has been given for original programming. The new channel, however, is also a defensive move, designed in part to rebut accusations that the BBC is incorrigibly biased against the ruling Scottish National Party. It has become an unfortunate – and baseless – article of faith in certain nationalist circles that the BBC’s coverage was a major reason why Scotland rejected independence in 2014.

The BBC is controversial precisely because it is Britain’s most powerful media enterprise. So powerful, in fact, that it enjoys a dominant position. Across the United Kingdom, 97 per cent of the population access its services each week. In Scotland the BBC has a 30 per cent share of the television market and nearly 50 per cent of the radio audience. Its website is an increasingly dominant player in digital news, accounting for nearly one in three visits to all news sites in the UK.

OFCOM, which regulates the BBC, is charged with “promoting competition”. Most broadcasters, newspapers and citizens should have an evident interest in this happening. It is not obvious how the BBC’s ever-expanding remit assists this process.

If the BBC restricted its activities to broadcasting, these competition concerns might be less pressing. Increasingly, however, the BBC is a publisher as much as it is a broadcaster. Modest moves to support local newspapers threatened by the BBC’s monolithic and full-spectrum muscle are both insufficient and a step in the wrong direction: self-restraint on the BBC’s part would be more useful than linking to newspapers from its own website. Thanks to – as the corporation says – the “unique” way the BBC is funded, it has a significant advantage over all its rivals. The imposition of what is, in effect, a poll tax gives the BBC a privileged position that is ripe for abuse.

Because the licence fee, which is guaranteed to rise in line with inflation until 2022, is effectively a tax, the BBC feels bound to move beyond any strict or limited definition of what a public sector broadcaster should offer. It is a commercial organisation itself, and a rival to media companies in the private sector.

The BBC argues that it must be popular, in every sense of the word, to justify the licence fee but the more the BBC behaves like other media companies, whether in terms of broadcasting or publishing, the harder that becomes. This is the paradox in which the BBC traps itself: the more it tries to justify its monopoly over the licence fee, the less it does so.

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Arts, Films

Film Review: The Wife (15 cert) 100 min

REVIEW

GLENN Close is the living actress who has most often been beaten to an Oscar: six times since 1982, the words “but no cigar” have been ringing in her ears. With The Wife, she has her best shot since Dangerous Liaisons (1989) of laying this curse to rest. The tantalising irony of the film is that it’s actually about an awards presentation – the Nobel Prize in literature, no less – and that her character is not the one receiving it. She’s the one sitting, in a manner Close presumably knows all too well, neglected and on the sidelines.

She is cast as Joan Castleman, destined forever to remain a mere adjunct to Joe (Jonathan Pryce), one of those Great American Novelists in the Roth/Updike mould. The pair have been married for most of a lifetime, ever since Joan’s college days, when Joe, her energetic professor, squirmed out of a loveless first marriage to pursue her. Their life together has involved a kind of crooked deal, where he gets all the credit for literary brilliance, and she uncomplainingly tags along. She turns a blind eye to his frequent affairs and often questions what exactly is in it for her.

Meg Wolitzer’s 2003 novel was narrated by Joan, and on its very first page, as Joe took fancy to an air stewardess on their flight, she began savagely outlining to the reader all the reasons why she planned to leave him. Adroitly adapted by Jane Anderson and directed by Swedish veteran Bjӧrn Runge, the film eases itself into her predicament more stealthily, laying down the basis for all her buried grievances. It lets Close come in wearing a kind of kabuki mask, a civilised if lightly sardonic front concealing who knows what dissatisfaction and anger lies beneath.

The glittering, frozen quality of her performance is as mesmeric as it is mysterious. The camera lingers on her often as she’s absorbing various slights: when Joe introduces her to peers at a pre-prizegiving social event, announcing “my wife doesn’t write”, her expression barely flickers, but the thermometer somehow drops a thousand degrees. When she watches him flirt with a photographer, you imagine daggers flying out of her eyes.

Veiled hints about the true nature of their marriage are gradually dropped by the script. A hack biographer played by Christian Slater, thwarted in his attempts to gain authorised access, pesters Joan into a private drink, hoping to prise those secrets out of her. But her ability to remain a smiling clam, who can toy with succulent revelations and even flirt with Slater without giving anything concrete away, should never be underestimated.

The Castlemans have a daughter, who has not followed them to Stockholm, and a son (Max Irons) who has, a would-be writer bitterly struggling to escape his father’s shadow. In the book he was a disturbed, occasionally violent computer nerd – a recluse – which felt like a less clichéd conception, but it has presumably been decided that the film needs someone on screen, besides Slater, who notices what doesn’t quite add up about Joe’s literary credentials: his ability, say, to forget the name of a major character from one of his novels.

Pryce’s bluff, garrulous performance suggests a born blagger, as well as an overgrown toddler whose ego needs constant spoon-feeding, whether from Joan, Nobel Prize committees, or the young woman he has managed to ensnare with his spuriously earned fame. The role fits Pryce like an expensive silk glove.

Still, the real point of The Wife is the interior journey it offers to Close, like a red carpet smoothly unfurling towards the kind of Oscar-clip-showcase scenes that genuinely warrant the airplay. She unleashes an explosion in a limousine that feels like 40 years of neglect and disappointment fizzing free from a test tube. But still that glacial repose is hers to resume, if Joan feels like it, choosing to become the sole custodian of her own private legacy.

Close could feasibly miss the Oscar, but watching her lose again – for this, of all roles – will be a thespian psychodrama for the ages.

Verdict: Glenn Close is on stupendous form. A mesmerising performance.

★★★★

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Arts, Books, Britain, Government, History, NATO, Society

The Labour Party, Soviet intelligence and the Cold War

BRITAIN: LABOUR & THE COLD WAR

THE postwar government of Clement Atlee was instrumental in the founding and formation of NATO, which binds together the defence of North America and Europe. Attlee’s successors as leader of the Labour Party have not all been as staunch as he was in the national interest. Amid the Cold War tensions of the early 1980s, for example, Labour’s candidate as a potential prime minister was a man who had willingly taken money from the Kremlin. Michael Foot, a hero of the Labour left who served as party leader from 1980 to 1983, was paid the equivalent of £37,000 in today’s money from the KGB, the Soviet intelligence agency, while he was a backbencher in the 1960s.

A new book, The Spy and the Traitor by Ben Mcintyre, recounts the remarkable public service of Oleg Gordievsky, a senior KGB officer who was a double agent for MI6. Gordievsky was recalled from the Soviet embassy in London when his cover was blown in 1985. In peril, and with the help of western intelligence, he escaped the Soviet Union. Macintyre’s book details evidence that Gordievsky gave to his British spymasters. It includes the revelation that Foot was paid as being a KGB contact.

The information has topicality as well as historical significance. Every British government since Attlee’s has treated the transatlantic alliance as the bedrock of defence policy. The current Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, claimed in 2014 that NATO had been “set up to promote a Cold War with the Soviet Union”. This is nonsense. NATO was created in 1949 as an alliance of free nations to deter Soviet expansionism and aggression.

Communism collapsed a generation ago having turned the former Soviet Union and its satellite states into lands of penury and oppression. And the current regime in the Kremlin likewise threatens western interests, alters internationally recognised borders by force and pursues lethal violence against its critics at home and abroad. In the nerve agent attack in Salisbury on Sergei and Yulia Skripal, which has left one British woman dead and three people seriously injured, the prime suspects were recently disclosed as officers of Russian military intelligence (the GRU).

Any government faced with an attack on British soil ought to be able to count on bipartisan support. Yet, affecting a façade of continued open-mindedness, Mr Corbyn at every stage cast doubt on Russian culpability for the crime, despite the circumstantial evidence that was overwhelming. It also emerged earlier this month that two Russian agents were expelled from the Netherlands this year for spying on a laboratory where samples of the poison used on the Skripals were being tested.

Michael Foot was on the left of the party and advocated an irresponsible policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament by Britain. Paradoxically, however, he has never been widely regarded as being sympathetic to communist autocracy. He denounced the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. When a British newspaper published Gordievsky’s claims in 1995 that the KGB held a file on him, Foot successfully sued for libel and was awarded substantial damages.

Inconsistencies do, however, remain. Whilst is known that Foot served as a confidential contact for the KGB, had Labour won the general election of 1983, Gordievsky would have been faced with the bewildering task of serving a prime minister who he knew to have taken money from Soviet intelligence. There is also the point of Gordievsky’s testimony which shows that Jack Jones, leader of the transport workers’ union in the 1970s, was regarded by the KGB as a disciplined agent, whom the spy agency had paid until 1968.

In explaining why he had not shared information about Britain’s nuclear deterrent with any but a few trusted cabinet colleagues, Atlee said bluntly: “I thought that some of them were not fit to be trusted with secrets of this kind.” His judgment of senior Labour figures was acute and accurate, and resonates today.

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