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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favorite tales on this weekly publication.
The flagship information and present affairs programme Today was first broadcast in 1957. Nearly 70 years later it is nonetheless thought of a pillar of the BBC, transmitting Monday to Saturday on the wi-fi, or your smartphone, below the aegis of Radio 4. According to the newest figures by RAJAR, the programme has a weekly attain of 5.6mn. So deep is it embedded in the public lifetime of the nation that the Royal Navy submarines that maintain the UK’s nuclear deterrent are suggested to hear out for the Today programme as certainly one of the official measures to show the UK nonetheless exists.
I’ve been a each day listener since I used to be in the womb. The Today programme has accompanied me from infancy and its idiosyncratic options (sport at 7.30am, a bizarre little religious reflection, “Thought for the Day”, at 7.45am, some information “lite” earlier than the closing pips at 9am) are as ingrained in my morning ritual as consuming espresso. Today is not solely a cultural establishment, it’s a part of the circadian move.
Nevertheless, the present we tune in to from below eiderdown or deep in inky waters is far faraway from what it as soon as was. Increasingly, my circadian rhythms are being disrupted by its tsunami of banal. News, politics and overseas coverage is being consumed by an odd obsession with the arts. The National Year of Reading 2026, a marketing campaign led by the Department for Education and the National Literacy Trust, has prompted a fixation with kids’s books. Every different merchandise appears to be a narrative about some Edwardian basic now became a movie. The tone of the present has advanced additionally. The pugnacious political interrogation as soon as deployed has been changed by chummy dialog and presenters choking on their very own empathy. Instead of spicy debate and provocation it’s all windy chit-chat with thought leaders, and interviews that sound like quasi remedy.
I need headlines. I don’t need a newsreader with feels. Or a private life. I don’t care what soccer staff they comply with or something in any way about their households. It’s not as if we’re trapped in a sluggish information cycle. But all the severe stuff will get handled glancingly, as the present rushes to introduce . . . Michael Morpurgo wanging on about one other kids’s basic. Or some tiny aspect about Tolkien.
My despair at this predicament is compounded by the truth there is no first rate substitute. The BBC’s two different flagships, World at One and PM, are mercifully unpolluted, however they air throughout delinquent, workplace hours. The nice viewers migration to podcast codecs has inevitably left many conventional information broadcasters chasing futile objectives. The Today programme has misplaced 2mn listeners in recent times as its market share dissolves. Six presenters have left Today since 2014: as an alternative of serving information, the present has develop into a tepid taster of the carvery of podcasts every presenter is making an attempt to shill. It’s a toothless simulacrum of its cantankerous former self.
Of course, I may learn this paper. But I need aural satisfaction after I’m on the transfer. Other recommendations sound both too robotic and perfunctory, or too chatty. With the exception of The Private Eye Podcast, which is manner too rare however fairly sensible, nothing but has hit the spot.
The Today makers shouldn’t be blamed fully for making an attempt to homicide information. It follows the pattern, felt all through the business, that “serious” information dialogue has develop into too nice a threat. Stories have develop into too controversial. People get upset. Factual commissioning is in a state of disaster. One documentary maker, whose credit embody movies about Lockerbie and Dunblane, instructed me the style is going through an extinction disaster. Commissioning editors nowadays are solely all in favour of true-crime documentaries or reveals about “aliens, Katie Price or Simon Cowell . . .”
“The documentary industry looks for upsides amid decimation at Sundance 2026,” wrote the journalist Anthony Kaufman in a dispatch from the Utah-based movie competition this month. The competition has lengthy been a launch pad for documentary makers, however this 12 months acquisitions have been vanishingly uncommon. Kaufman’s piece pointed to an aversion to something too political, particularly amongst the greater streamers who don’t need to rile the US administration with something that may mess with the manufacturing of their greater, extra business movies. As one filmmaker instructed him: “It’s the political calculation that’s slowing the demand . . . especially for social justice work and human rights films.”
Our cultural leaders are being neutered by a system too scared to air controversial, or delicate, factors of view. And so the information agenda will get neutered additionally. No one desires to speak to the Palestinian filmmaker. It’s too inflammatory. They’d favor to prattle on about Paddington “the stage sensation” or some Orwellian adaptation that may tease at relevance with allegory as an alternative.
The entire sorry scenario got here full circle this week as the Baftas celebrated I Swear. A movie about John Davidson, a Tourette’s sufferer who first grew to become well-known as the topic of a landmark 1989 documentary John’s Not Mad, it was lauded for serving to open a dialogue about the stigma surrounding the dysfunction. A non-Tourette’s sufferer took the appearing trophy whereas Davidson interrupted the ceremony with involuntary vocal tics, together with obscenities and a racial slur, which have been then broadcast round the world.
Another headline information merchandise. The BBC have been pressured to carry out a ghastly mea culpa for making a hames of a broadcast for which the headline ought to have been “don’t put someone with Tourette’s syndrome in a wildly stressful situation and wish their symptoms go away”. Today has performed no less than 10 minutes of hand-wringing about it as I sort this piece, in mattress. No doubt the “institutional” disaster will lead the bulletins for days. And I’ll nonetheless be tuning in and hoping to listen to some precise information.
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