From now on I'll be restricting my reading in print to
the following journals – The Economist, New Scientist, Private Eye and The
Catholic Herald, where you find some of the best and most intelligent writing
and analysis. My daily news intake I will get online in future.
Similarly, I’m about to change habit of the past 30 years
and stop listening to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme each morning. I’m just not any
more sufficiently interested in its main ingredients …Westminister politics,
middle class “humour” and the literary pontificating of James Naughtie.
I think Naughtie is off to offer his tedious insights in the
Scottish referendum on independence soon. I won’t be listening to that, either.
And while the Today programme’s new presenter Mishal Husain is actually rather
good, her presence is not enough to save the show as a daily part of my life, Monday
to Saturdays.
Take this morning’s offering from Today (Monday 7 October 2013).
It was especially bad at the tail end. Shaun Keaveny made what was supposed to
be a wry, amusing plea for the Glastonbury music festival to be switched from
being a summer to a winter event.
The “peg” for that item was the likely move of the Qatar
football Word Cup 2022 from a summer event to a winter one. Pathetic. Almost as
pathetic as the main test for standing up a news story on BBC Radio 4, namely –
“errr, has it been in The Guardian?”
Keaveny’s piece made me cringe. It was pisspoor
colour-writing – formulaic and predictable. It even included a suck-up reference
to John Humphries, which Humphries wisely chose not to respond to.
The only thing that the Today programme is good at these
days is crashing the pips.
