[Abernathy]

Dimbleby announced dramatically after the polls closed that “We’re out”. But we weren’t, yet, and would not be for another three and a half years. Jeremy Corbyn, of course, called for Article 50 to be triggered the next fucking day.

[kreuzberger]

Christ, that day was awful. We grabbed our swimmies and a bottle of vodka, and went to the pool. Had to buy a fresh bottle once we got there.

I wept all day long.

[Youngian]

Doubt Goldman Sachs are impressed by unnamed backers. There’s no commercial future in this dog turd of a product.

The former owners of The Daily Telegraph have lined up hundreds of millions of pounds from Middle Eastern investors in a bid to wrest back control of the newspaper from Britain's biggest high street bank.

This weekend, insiders said the Barclays had secured financing from unnamed Gulf backers who are said to be based in Abu Dhabi.

The bank is understood to have rejected the Barclays' bid, and intends to pursue a full auction of the daily newspaper, its Sunday sister title and The Spectator magazine, whose parent company was also placed into receivership. https://news.sky.com/story/barclays-lin ... LunKZm8_I4

[satnav]

Apparently disgraced former Tory cabinet minister Nadhim Zahawi is helping the Barclay's to find financial backers and if he is successful he is being tipped to be the next chairman of the Telegraph group. So that sounds like another ex-cabinet minister is too busy lining his own pocket rather serving his constituents.

[Youngian]

Nadhim Zahawi is helping the Barclay's to find financial backers

The only return is political favours to advance the potential investors or their sector. Or some Anglophile plutocrat snob wanting a foot into the British establishment. But they’d want their name and not the Barclays bros on the brass plate.

[Crabcakes]

Was surprised to see the Torygraph are belching out the japanese killer hornets story this year - that's usually the reserve of the Express (who have threatened it for about a decade or so). They really have slid downhill.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Spot the misdirection.

[Abernathy]

No, Ulez almost certainly will not do that. But that’s not what it’s for, of course.

[Tubby Isaacs]

And anyway, "how does "Sadiq Khan" have the power to bring about net zero anyway? "Sadiq Khan signs deal for nuclear plant" is a headline I've never seen.

[satnav]

More net zero bollox from the Telegraph

[The Weeping Angel]

[Killer Whale]

As 'obsessions' go, I would say that the continuance of human civilisation was among the most legitimate.

[Tubby Isaacs]

This looks like a long shot as a libel case to me. Nice free speech absolutism from Allison though.

[Watchman]

Wonder what “ freedoms” she’ll have as a woman journalist when the Arabs buy them out

[Youngian]

This looks like a long shot as a libel case to me. Nice free speech absolutism from Allison though.

Perhaps she’s become a radical litigator. Pearson isn’t far off being a far right fanatic.

[mattomac]

They are the top of the bill when it comes to “snowflakes”.

[The Weeping Angel]

Telegraph on the problems facing BBC Sport it's all down to Gary Linekar, Alex Scott and chasing the youth demographic.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/2024/ ... lex-scott/

The year 2024 is one that BBC Sport should be attacking with confidence and conviction. After all, the summer smorgasbord promises not just a European Championship, but a first Olympic Games in a proximate time zone since the giddy sugar rush of London 2012, when the department’s blanket coverage brought director Barbara Slater an OBE. Those golden 17 days, marked by teary video montages and the ubiquity of Clare Balding, feel as if they belong to another lifetime. For 12 years on from the biggest event in British broadcasting history, there are multiplying signs of a corporation that has lost its way.

It is not just that the store cupboard of live rights is now so bare that even the Paris Games will be restricted to one linear and one digital channel. It is not just that the BBC’s genuflecting to on-screen “talent” is so out of control that Gary Lineker, having triggered a full-systems crisis last March with his comments on the Government’s asylum policy, continues to send political tweets with impunity. It is that in its obsessive pursuit of the under-35 demographic, it appears to have lost all sense of how best to serve its core sports audience.

A Question of Sport, once appointment family viewing, has been mothballed. Sports Personality of the Year has been shunted from its prestige Sunday night slot to the midweek boondocks. Even Football Focus looks vulnerable, with its average viewing figures having fallen to just 564,000 since Alex Scott took over from Dan Walker in 2021. Across the board, the old flagships are listing badly. And if there is one recurrent theme, it is the BBC’s habit of taking tried-and-trusted formats and finding ways to make them worse – before eventually shelving them altogether on the pretext that tastes have changed.

Des Lynam, who as the BBC’s face of sport for decades combined journalistic rigour with a priceless levity, observes this trend with dismay. “I feel sorry for the department,” he says. “I gave my life to it. Sport needs someone who fights its corner. I had Jonathan Martin, my head of sport at one time, on the phone the other day. He was a strong man and whether you liked him or not he fought for Sport. The trouble now is getting money out of the BBC. Most departments fight like mad for it, but I don’t feel that sport has fought the battle strongly enough. Plus, they’ve made dreadful mistakes, like getting rid of Sue Barker.”

‘They hire sportspeople, not broadcasters’
There is abundant evidence to support Lynam’s thesis. In Slater’s 14-year tenure, the live BBC portfolio has been denuded at an alarming rate, with rights for Formula One, the Open Championship and the Grand National all surrendered. At last month’s Spoty ceremony, a look back at the year’s golf majors consumed a grand total of eight seconds. References to F1 were restricted to one shot from the grandstands of Max Verstappen rounding the final corner at Silverstone.

Barker’s soothing presence is also sorely missed. She combined the gravitas befitting a French Open champion with an inimitable on-screen warmth, interviewing Andy Murray after Wimbledon defeat in the manner of an indulgent mother whose son had just flunked his piano exam. But having developed a winning chemistry with Question of Sport captains Phil Tufnell and Matt Dawson, she found herself dropped.

She left as Wimbledon presenter a year later, with Barry Davies, another voice who represented the BBC at its best, convinced that even at 66 she had far more still to give. “She was very natural, very knowledgeable, and if I had been in charge, she would be going on,” Davies says. “Sue’s right when she says you want to go out at the top. But she certainly had a few more years.”

In Barker’s absence, A Question of Sport collapsed, with her replacement Paddy McGuinness displaying the same reverse-Midas touch he had shown on Top Gear. The role of lead female anchor at live spectaculars is likely to fall increasingly to Scott, 39, the ex-England women’s right-back tipped for a major role at the Paris Olympics. Scott’s own presenting style can be an acquired taste, and Lynam is not persuaded it works. “She’s able, but in my opinion, if she went in for an interview without the sports background, she wouldn’t pass it,” he says. “I wasn’t a sports person of any repute, I was a broadcaster. I think the BBC have moved away from broadcasting too much. They hire a lot of people who are excellent at sport but not at broadcasting.”

‘A lot of shouty stuff – a lot of ego’
One criticism levelled at Scott’s Football Focus is a perceived excess of earnestness. In the age of Bob Wilson, the programme’s longest-serving presenter, the live links to John Motson in the snow suggested all that mattered was the football. Today, there is the inelegant distraction of segments that serve only to emphasise the BBC’s immersion in fashionably worthy causes. In one episode, there was a poem from performance artist Bemz to highlight Black History Month, followed by an interview with Russell Martin that dwelt less on his achievements as Swansea City manager than on the fact he was a vegan who compelled his players to recycle and to turn off the tap while brushing their teeth.

The same shift can be glimpsed at the Sports Personality love-in. In 1988, a year dominated by Ben Johnson’s drugs disgrace in Seoul, Lynam opened the show by teasing a visibly nervous Linford Christie about serving him a cup of ginseng tea, on which the British sprinter had successfully blamed his own positive test. Fast-forward 35 years, and there was nothing so close to the bone, with Scott wrapping up a 12-minute panegyric to the Lionesses by reading from Maya Angelou.

“I always felt it was a bit tense,” Lynam reflects. “It was like sitting in the waiting room at the dentist’s. You had all the blazers who didn’t really want to be there, and then the sports personalities who were shy about taking part. So, we tried to inject some humour and lightness. Now they want to make it a showbizzy event. They have the orchestra playing for the first couple of minutes and you think, ‘Is this a sports show?’ It doesn’t work for me.”

Certain elements of the BBC Sport offering work brilliantly. Dan Roan is one of the finest sports editors the organisation has had, while several specialist radio correspondents, from Chris Jones in rugby to Iain Carter in golf, elevate their events with a lyrical touch. It is a point that Cornelius Lysaght, the BBC’s former racing correspondent, is at pains to make. Lysaght was deeply hurt at how he was let go in 2020, describing how he felt his insides had been torn out. But he acknowledges that on a frantic football afternoon, few places distil the action better than his old home of Radio Five Live.

“I believe Five Live’s core product of live sport is outstanding,” Lysaght says. “If you want to listen to very user-friendly, informative football commentary, Ian Dennis, Conor McNamara and John Murray are all superb. The phone-ins are rubbish, though. When that format started with Danny Baker in the Nineties, it was smart, intelligent. Now there’s a lot of shouty stuff, a lot of ego. It’s all very well catering for your younger audience, but you have to serve your established audience, too.” Echoing this concern, Lynam argues: “Phone-ins can be done by anybody. They have to avoid appealing to the lowest common denominator. They’re the BBC, for heaven’s sake.”

‘They’ll offload Lineker if he’s not careful’
In his era, Lynam was the undisputed doyen of sports presenters, heralded as such by his successor Lineker. But other than when he moved to ITV in 1999 – “wonderful for my bank balance, not so much for my career,” he jokes – his high profile never created a headache for the BBC. The same can hardly be said of Lineker, whose sallies into politics have continued in spite of the firestorm he unleashed by comparing Suella Braverman’s small boats crackdown to the language of 1930s Germany. Even after a toughening of social media guidelines, he has carried on undaunted, mocking Defence Secretary Grant Shapps and recommending a video from pro-Palestinian propagandist Owen Jones.

The problem is not so much the content of these messages as the reality that nobody else could post them and stay employed by the BBC. And not just employed, but lionised, paid £1.35 million for fronting a football highlights show, a salary six times that of political editor Chris Mason. “We love Gary and Gary loves us,” Slater told MPs last November, disregarding how Lineker had lit the fuse on one of the BBC’s most tumultuous sagas.

Slater retires from her role this spring, and Lynam is doubtful, irrespective of his personal friendship with Lineker, whether the slavish deference to a star name can last. “I’ve always got on well with him, but there needs to be a little bit of caution,” he says. “He gets himself into trouble. They’ll offload him if he’s not careful.”

As it stands, Match of the Day will endure on the BBC until at least 2029. But resentments over how Lineker’s heedless tweeting has been handled still simmer. On the radio side in particular, there was anger at how presenters were called “scabs” for not joining the celebrity pundits’ decision to withdraw their labour in protest at Lineker’s exile. “I’ve had the same conversations you’ve had,” Lysaght says. “And there was a slight feeling by some of ‘I’m damned if I’m going to go out for Gary Lineker, I know perfectly well he wouldn’t go out for me’. It does seem an amazing scenario. There are people who have been very big at the BBC in the past, but this…” He opts against saying any more, knowing how incendiary the subject of Lineker has become.

‘No evidence the youth policy works’
Lysaght does not hold back, however, in railing against the ever-expanding layer of middle-management. “There are a lot of people at the BBC who come along with marketing or promotional backgrounds, and who talk about chasing the youth audience,” he explains. “It’s a W1A situation. They decide to have a youth policy, and it looks so good on paper and they think everyone will be terribly impressed. But there’s no evidence to indicate it works.”

You can detect this youth focus even in such cherished staples as Ski Sunday. At its inception in 1978, held together by the smooth baritone of David Vine, the show became unmissable for winter sports enthusiasts, glamorising the daredevil antics of Franz Klammer and the playboy charm of Alberto Tomba. Ever since, it has gone downhill faster than Hermann Maier, with the skiing squeezed out by low-budget travelogues and bleeding-heart lifestyle items. For many loyal viewers, the last straw was when one show posed the question: “How do you solve snowsport’s diversity problem?”

This trumpeting of inclusion at all costs has invited concerns in other areas, especially the coverage of sport’s transgender debate. In April 2022, Catherine Leng, a senior journalist on the BBC News Channel, wrote to Stephen Mawhinney, the head of sports journalism: “It has been a really enormous issue in the last month or so, and our coverage has all been from the point of view of trans inclusion, rather than the impact of women’s sport.” Mawhinney responded robustly, stressing that the BBC had, for instance, carried the testimonies of female swimmers concerned about the US collegiate title won by Lia Thomas, a biological male.

But Leng’s overarching point is difficult to contest. When Austin Killips last year became the first trans-identifying male to win a UCI stage race for women, the BBC tweeted the news with the words, “History made!” The post was subsequently deleted.

It is just one example of tensions complicating the immediate future at BBC Sport, a place that can often appear too beholden to the forces of political correctness. “On the one hand, people will say, ‘Look at sport on the BBC, it’s a disaster,’” Lysaght says. “But on the other, it’s a really interesting challenge for someone to take on, to ensure that it remains relevant. One thing I do know, though. There’s no point shooting yourselves in the foot by infuriating your core audience – the people who really want to love you.” It is a cri de coeur his embattled former employers would do well to heed.

[Dalem Lake]

A Question of Sport was dire and was honestly surprised to find out that it was still on. I remember it being overshadowed 30 years ago by the much more entertaining They Think Its All Over.

[Youngian]

Did Fast Show’s Ron Manager write this?

In the age of Bob Wilson, the programme’s longest-serving presenter, the live links to John Motson in the snow suggested all that mattered was the football.

Lynam was the undisputed doyen of sports presenters, his high profile never created a headache for the BBC. The same can hardly be said of Lineker, whose sallies into politics have continued in spite of the firestorm he unleashed by comparing Suella Braverman’s small boats crackdown to the language of 1930s Germany.

Kipper Des

Veteran TV presenter Des Lynam is the latest celebrity to publicly back the UK Independence Party.
Lynam, famed for his unruffled style on camera, said he voted for the Eurosceptic party in last week's local elections.
He has also rewritten the lyrics of Stephen Sondheim's Send in the Clowns in a tongue-in-cheek retort to Ken Clarke's description of UKIP members.

[Andy McDandy]

Same Des Lynam who buggered off to ITV to present "The Premiership", a big glitzy Saturday night show that wasn't in any way gimmicky or trivialising? And which tanked rapidly?