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Television / Radio

World War II and cinema

I very much enjoyed this Sky Arts 3 part series on cinema and World War Two. They assembled most of their usual film historians – Ian Nathan, Bonnie Greer, Derek Malcolm, but right wing columnist Simon Heffer also contributed. War films are a genre I like and believe underrated. At their best [...]

October 10, 2020 // 0 Comments

World War One/PBS

There is a tendency in covering World War One to which I plead guilty of limiting our interest to the loss of young life in the trench warfare. This excellent series gave a much broader canvas and I was particularly interested in 1916-18. With war bogged down in the trenches of northern France and [...]

October 6, 2020 // 0 Comments

Flintoff & bulimia

This is something of a first for me as I’m not so much reviewing a programme I have seen but explaining why I will not be watching one. The editor was comfortable with this. As he put it: “On the Rust anything goes …” I cannot  imagine why the BBC should make a programme featuring [...]

October 1, 2020 // 0 Comments

My not-so sporting weekend (so far)

Come the weekend and no doubt like many sport (but not betting) obsessed Brits yesterday I set my cable television controls for the Sky and BT channels – and, to be fair, also for the BBC1’s Football Focus with  Dan Walker – in search of something entertaining and/or diverting to watch. [...]

September 27, 2020 // 0 Comments

Sue McGregor

Sue MacGregor  is a hero of mine so I listened avidly to the Archive on Four on Radio 4 last Saturday for her celebration of five decades as a broadcaster. It sums up her qualities that she treated the programme as a news broadcast. She was neither bitter nor boastful. She merely recounted how she [...]

September 25, 2020 // 0 Comments

Coming to terms with Tempus Fugit

There can scarcely be a Ruster alive who missed the big event of the weekend – the seismic, life-changing news that the BBC has axed chairperson of its iconic but safe and cuddly peak-time evening sports quiz programme A Question Of Sport (Sue Barker) and its two captains (Matt Dawson and Phil [...]

September 14, 2020 // 0 Comments

A farewell to two notables

At our stage of life – it comes with the territory – brushes with mortality in one form or another attend Rusters all too often but it is fitting that today we salute two Brits whose deaths were announced on Thursday. DAME DIANA RIGG Diana Rigg will remain an iconic figure in British [...]

September 11, 2020 // 0 Comments

Cezanne/Sky Arts

Last night  the Sky Arts series featured Cezanne and his portrait exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. Cezanne is renowned for his landscapes and still life and in art history – the bridge between nineteenth century Paysage together with Impressionism and the modernists. He is less [...]

September 8, 2020 // 0 Comments

The art of being paid your true worth

As preachers might say “My text for today is …” a report by Bhvishya Patel upon remarks chippy made by Sarah Sands, the departing editor of Radio 4’s Today programme, about the disparity in salaries between BBC presenters and other staff who contribute to programmes – see here, as appears [...]

September 7, 2020 // 0 Comments

The Truth about Franco/PBS

This PBS documentary on General Franco was thorough enough but you could see it was not made by Ken Burns as it was not nearly as even-handed as his work. The two experts most used were Franco’s biographer Paul Preston, who is resolutely anti-Franco, and the distinguished writer historian Anthony [...]

September 6, 2020 // 0 Comments

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