Where you fall to if you’re not tied down

Imagine someone pays for you to go to the Antarctic and make a documentary. Dramatic, beautiful vistas, as pure as the mathematics of air flow and crystallization, which your viewers won’t have seen for themselves. Extraordinary cold. Cliffs of ice. Danger. Explorers enduring unimaginable hardship in the name of science. Penguins. What a nightmare. Where [...]

The Museum of Doubt

is the title story of a rather good collection by James Meek. It’s a phrase that runs around my head a lot these days. I’m married to a doubter: only a few decades ago, I guess, that would have evoked a scene between a wise old priest and a passionate young intellectual, in which one [...]

BBC values

A disheartened BBC employee told me that there is now no chance of getting a ‘factual’ programme commissioned unless:
it has a presenter dominating the screen, as if the audience will be uneasy watching the world outside their home without an implausibly friendly stranger – someone richer, or posher, or younger, or more attractive than them [...]

Spiritual Voices

Episode 1
How did contemporaries describe the composer whose music we are about to hear?
“Small and fussy, with a slightly stupid look in his eyes. All in all, an unprepossessing figure. Plumpish, just over five feet tall, always on the move, with a large head, a fleshy nose, and pock-marked skin – not very attractive to [...]