Ozark review: Jason Bateman breaks bad in the mountains of Missouri
Bateman stars in the new Netflix series about a money laundering family man on the run, but can he match the brilliance of Bryan Cranston's Walter White?
Imagine a parallel-world Breaking Bad, where Walter’s family know what he’s up to. The ecstatically misanthropic Ozark has its own heroically resourceful, angry middle-class good/bad guy in Marty (Jason Bateman), a Chicago financial adviser whose sideline is laundering Mexican drug money. By the end of a twisting, pulsating first episode, Marty has relocated with his wife and kids to rural Missouri, where his trigger-happy boss has — not entirely plausibly, but never mind — given him a task. Marty must quickly “clean” $8m, or die. Specifically they’ve moved to the Lake of the Ozarks, a snaking body of water adorned with endless woody creeks, dotted with bars and holiday homes, and descended on in summer by tourists. But Malibu, it ain’t. Its rough, bored residents enjoy hustling visitors for cash; a clever city guy who’s oddly keen to invest in shorefront businesses is met with violent suspicion. Although he can, for instance, crack a strip-club safe when required, Marty’s key assets are knowledge, ingenuity and persuasion: the classic Ozark scene is him pulling off an outrageous one-on-one bluff that would have dire consequences if revealed. If he can keep coming up with schemes to fend off the FBI, the Mexicans and Ruth (Julia Garner), the wily teenaged leader of a family of redneck crooks, he might escape. View oEmbed on the source website But it’s no easier at home, where Marty’s 15-year-old daughter is restless, his younger son lacks guidance and his flinty wife, Wendy (Laura Linney), is adjusting to a life of constant peril in unusual ways. Extending its pitilessly observed vision of a world where everyone is selfish, cynical and alone to a family set-up gives Ozark added layers of blackness, beneath the addictive spectacle of Marty finding out just how bad he has to break to survive. You wouldn’t want to live in those shady Missouri creeks, but visiting is a dark thrill. Ozark is released on Netflix on Friday 21st July
Adapt or die: why big channels need to catch up with streaming
Many broadcasters still quaintly insist on airing at a specific time, rather than piling TV shows onto the internet’s infinite buffet
How we watch television changed on 1 February 2013. When Netflix released its first self-produced drama, House of Cards, for a moment the rest of the TV world wondered what these trendy young web-jockeys were playing at. You could stream it all in one go! The textbook approach of implanting each new episode in viewers’ weekly routines had been casually junked. But soon enough, the merits of letting us create our own TV schedules became clear, and the binge-watch was born. At first, although the way we devoured series like House of Cards was innovative (it’s not any more: season five just launched), the shows themselves weren’t. Cards was just a great import that would still have worked on the BBC or Sky. Netflix’s next hit, Orange Is the New Black (also back for a fifth season this Friday), might have fitted on C4. Streaming got exciting when we started seeing programmes that could only realistically exist online. Last year Amazon unleashed The Grand Tour, a bigger train set for Jeremy Clarkson and co that made you wonder how they’d stayed within the BBC’s taste and budget restraints for as long as they (more or less) did. Amazon got its money’s worth because it filled a niche and snared a new army of subscribers. Similarly, when Netflix offered period drama fans the royal family bio The Crown, it lured them with a painstaking, visibly expensive epic that would have been a colossal gamble for a regular channel. Two new, highly contrasting shows are now pushing streaming services further into offering a new kind of telly, not just more telly. Amazon’s velvet fantasy American Gods updates every Monday, but it’s such a vivid mood piece you need the flexibility of being able to drink it down when the peculiar fancy takes you. After five instalments we’ve barely touched on the central premise of ancient gods battling new ones; episodes often change tack halfway, sometimes hopping back several hundred years. Last week it was a cartoon for the first five minutes, then Gillian Anderson turned up dressed as David Bowie for reasons unclear. Amazon’s not fussed. Meanwhile, on Netflix, The Keepers is the latest true-crime documentary to take advantage of streaming telly’s theoretically endless running times. It examines the murder of a nun in Baltimore in 1969, finding that behind this mystery is a horrifying tale of child abuse and institutional cover-ups. It spans decades and lasts for seven admirably thorough hours – it needs that long to do everyone justice, and because it’s so impossibly detailed, the quest for truth becomes addictive. So where does this leave those dinosaurs who still quaintly insist on broadcasting at a specific time, rather than piling TV shows onto the internet’s infinite buffet? They’re not helpless: the BBC’s in on the mega-documentary act with OJ: Made in America, a profound treatise on racism that has aired on BBC4 but makes far more sense on iPlayer, where it premiered earlier this year. The Beeb’s streaming platform is also the answer if you’re thinking, “Pah! In my day, Kenneth Clark was allowed to go on about architecture and philosophy for 13 episodes. Remember that?” Yes we do, because Civilisation is available in full among iPlayer’s stash of archive gems. But iPlayer is still mostly for catch-up, and other mainstream broadcasters still use online entirely for showing you the same programmes in a different way. Increasingly, that means they’re only showing you half the picture.
Could Jennifer Aniston's amazing attack on body-shaming tabloids finally make us see sense?
Her comeback to pregnancy rumours was brilliantly articulate - and the uniquely awful treatment the former Friends star has suffered gives it extra signficance, says Jack Seale
Our media’s objectification and denigration of women is always there, a low hum we tut about occasionally but feel powerless to stop – and we perpetuate it, by collectively being unable to stop clicking on pics of celebs flashing their knickers or showing a bit of cellulite. When one of those celebrities pushes back and calls gutter journalism out, it can feel briefly satisfying but futile, a straw in the wind. But if ever there were an intervention that might tip the balance, it happened yesterday with the publication of an extraordinary essay written for The Huffington Post in the US. The author: former Friends star and Hollywood A-lister, Jennifer Aniston. “Jennifer Aniston is finally getting her happily ever after,” In Touch magazine had reported on 15 June, running paparazzi pictures of the actor in which her stomach looked fractionally larger than it had in previous paparazzi pictures. “The 47-year-old is pregnant.” After a few weeks of intense tabloid fever, Aniston spoke out. “For the record, I am not pregnant,” she wrote. “What I am is fed up.” Aniston went on to identify that the In Touch story had a significance beyond whether or not she is with child; that it speaks to the way the media judges female celebrities relentlessly on their bodies and what they do with them; and that this feeds into attitudes in wider society: “I used to tell myself that tabloids were like comic books, not to be taken seriously, just a soap opera for people to follow when they need a distraction. But I really can’t tell myself that anymore because the reality is the stalking and objectification I’ve experienced first-hand, going on decades now, reflects the warped way we calculate a woman’s worth.” This point’s been expressed before, by famous people and others – but never as well as in Aniston’s cool 900-word slapdown. And the righteousness feels more powerful coming from Aniston, because the battering she’s received from the press has been uniquely unpleasant. Perhaps there’s something going on with the way Aniston is seen (patronisingly) as a “girl next door” figure: more ordinary, because she made her name on Friends playing one of a group of ordinary people; there's the old lads-mag thing of imagining a certain type of star is someone you’d have a chance with if they walked into the local pub. It’s as if Aniston is seen as a punter who’s lucked her way in and is thus ours to speculate about and project onto, for ever, until she resumes her rightful place in obscurity. Whatever the reason, press coverage following her divorce from Brad Pitt in 2005 looked like a concerted campaign to portray her as a heartbroken failure, in the hope that it would come true. This successful actor, producer, philanthropist and model was surely having a terrible, torrid time of it because she couldn’t get a man. Her professional achievements meant nothing. Once she married Justin Theroux last year, the focus switched from her emotions to her body: her face, which was reportedly “looking more rounded than usual” after her honeymoon and, now, on the strength of some bikini shots taken at a mildly unflattering angle, her womb. No baby, no happiness. Poor Jen. What’s particularly brilliant about the Aniston article is how she sees through the idea that celebrities are distant and unreal, so we can say what we want about them without causing any real harm. She knows that the way she, as an A-lister, is portrayed doesn’t occur in isolation: “If I am some kind of symbol to some people out there, then clearly I am an example of the lens through which we, as a society, view our mothers, daughters, sisters, wives, female friends and colleagues. The objectification and scrutiny we put women through is absurd and disturbing. The way I am portrayed by the media is simply a reflection of how we see and portray women in general, measured against some warped standard of beauty. Sometimes cultural standards just need a different perspective so we can see them for what they really are — a collective acceptance... a subconscious agreement. “We are in charge of our agreement. Little girls everywhere are absorbing our agreement, passive or otherwise. And it begins early. The message that girls are not pretty unless they’re incredibly thin, that they’re not worthy of our attention unless they look like a supermodel or an actress on the cover of a magazine is something we’re all willingly buying into. This conditioning is something girls then carry into womanhood.” It’s cogently argued, sophisticated prose – her erudition surprised me for half a second, until I checked myself and realised I previously had no clue about how good or bad Aniston might be at making her case in writing. I'd gone along with Aniston only existing as a face and body on a screen rather than an intelligent human. Anyway, the piece is so strong it’s left almost no room for argument: “news” websites that ran a story every day for a fortnight after the In Touch piece, with blurry shots of Aniston’s allegedly convex stomach, have largely resisted the temptation to twist her words and have reported them sympathetically - albeit next to their sidebars sourly judging people in swimming costumes, a place Aniston will appear in again the next time she and Theroux hit the beach. Or at least, she will if there are still people willing to click. Those articles are sometimes defended on the grounds of free speech. But as well as the right of free speech not extending to simple untruths – such the “friend of the couple” quoted in the In Touch cover story as saying “She’s pregnant… she and Justin are ecstatic” – it doesn’t bring with it a right to be heard. Stop reading body-shaming in the press, and they’ll stop writing it. Aniston is on point about that, too: “From years of experience, I’ve learned tabloid practices, however dangerous, will not change, at least not any time soon. What can change is our awareness and reaction to the toxic messages buried within these seemingly harmless stories served up as truth and shaping our ideas of who we are. We get to decide how much we buy into what’s being served up, and maybe some day the tabloids will be forced to see the world through a different, more humanized lens because consumers have just stopped buying the bulls**t.” If a heartfelt cry from one of the biggest victims of the “bulls**t” doesn’t make a difference, nothing will.
Not long to wait - and look who's alive and well...
With the third and final season of The Fall on its way before 2016 is out, BBC2 has released two new pictures... which don't tell us much. Or do they? Last time we saw DS Stella Gibson (Gillian Anderson) and terrifying serial killer Paul Spector (Jamie Dornan), the cop had her man quite literally in her clutches - he was dying in her arms, riddled with bullets. OK, so obviously he doesn't cark it, but a picture of him not apparently in custody or even handcuffed suggests the chase is somehow on again. Check out that photo of Stella once again making some kind of super-stressful phone call, too - shades of the season one final scene... The new run introduces Krister Henriksson (Wallander), Aidan McArdle (Mr Selfridge), Ruth Bradley (Humans), Aisling Bea (Trollied) and Richard Coyle (Crossbones), with existing cast members Colin Morgan, John Lynch, Valene Kane, Stuart Graham, Bronagh Waugh and Aisling Franciosi returning. http://www.youtube.com/v/0y4cH5JZGVE&hl=en&fs=1
The Bridge is back...so what other eerie offerings are there to get excited about?
As a new series of Scandi hit The Bridge begins, here are 12 more Scandi offerings coming your way... 1. FOLLOW THE MONEY BBC, EARLY 2016 Borgen introduced us to Danish politics, but taught us new things about the business of government. This series aims to do the same for high finance. The original title Bedraget translates as “Deceived”: this is a tale of speculators, swindlers and criminals, and the fraud squad detectives with the hopeless task of bringing them down. The head writer is Borgen co-creator Jeppe Gjervig Gram: “Like most people I was taken aback by the scale of the [2008] financial crisis,” he tells RT, “but what was most shocking was how little I knew about the mechanics of the global financial system. Borgen was the result of a feeling that politics was too important a subject to shy away from, even though it had been perceived as ‘boring’. In the wake of the crisis, the world of money was the perfect new challenge.” 2. DEUTSCHLAND 83 WALTER PRESENTS, JANUARY Channel 4’s new online foreign drama hub, Walter Presents, launches in the new year and will show series from across the world on a (free) streaming/download service. Potentially its most impressive acquisition is this eight-part northern-European noir spy thriller set in the 1980s, in which a young Stasi operative is sent under cover to West Germany. 3. A WAR IN CINEMAS, JANUARY Pilou Asbaek (below right), of Borgen, 1864 and (soon) Game of Thrones fame, takes the lead in an intense new movie directed by former Borgen writer Tobias Lindholm. Asbaek is the leader of a Danish troop of soldiers in Afghanistan. At first we cut between the horror of battle and the troubles of the family in Denmark; then a major incident leads to accusations of a war crime and a courtroom drama. 4. BLUE EYES. WALTER PRESENTS, EARLY 2016 Borgen meets The Bridge! This thriller begins near the climax of a general election campaign in Sweden, but regular campaigning isn’t enough for some political groups: the justice minister goes missing and a right-wing candidate is killed. The head of drama at Swedish broadcaster SVT says it’s “similar to House of Cards... but more violent”. 5. TRAPPED BBC4, 2016 At a port in Iceland, a ferry arrives from Denmark with 300 passengers on board. A snowstorm engulfs the town, preventing the ferry from leaving and blocking the roads in and out. Then a body washes ashore – which means the trapped passengers and town’s residents have a killer in their midst... 6. FINLANDIA RADIO 3, DECEMBER Radio gets in on the act, with Tim Pigott-Smith playing Finnish national hero Jean Sibelius. Pivoting around the composer’s decision in 1945 to burn his eighth symphony, to the horror his wife Aino (Barbara Flynn), the drama explores the psyche of Sibelius and the country that entwined its identity with his. Also in December, Radio 3 has Nordic Nights, three new dramas by writers from Sweden, Denmark and Iceland. 7. HEARTLESS WALTER PRESENTS, EARLY 2016 For a change, this Scandi series is aimed at a young-adult audience. It’s a supernatural drama set in a Danish boarding school, following twin vampires who are desperate to lift an ancient family curse. 8. FORTITUDE SKY ATLANTIC, 2016 The Sky crime drama’s first season starred Sofie Grabol (The Killing) and brought us deeply weird shocks in the Arctic Circle. There’s more icy eeriness next year. 9. THE TUNNEL SKY ATLANTIC, 2016 Sky’s remake of The Bridge, relocating it to the Channel Tunnel, was well made but slightly pointless if you’d seen the original – a problem solved, perhaps, by the fresh story to be told in the second season. Cops Stephen Dillane (British) and Clemence Poésy (French) investigate when an airliner crashes into the English Channel. 10. BECK BBC4 SPRING/ SUMMER 2016 The crime drama, based on Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo’s books, is back next year with a fresh batch of cases. 11. HINTERLAND BBC4, 2016 A new series is coming of the bilingual sleuther with a hint of Scandi chill. Richard Harrington is a brooding Ceredigion detective. 12. THE LEGACY SKY ARTS, 2016 Perhaps the subtlest Danish drama of all, this saga about an extended family squabbling over a will sounds abjectly dull... until you see it, and you instantly become pleasantly tangled in a web of grudges and secrets. The Danes are making season three as we speak. The Bridge begins on Saturday 21st November at 9pm on BBC4
A hip dotcomedy for the geek in all of us
Nobody knows anything. The writer William Goldman’s famous line about Hollywood having no clue which films will be hits is transferable to a lot of other industries — how about northern California, where everyone’s trying to start up the next Google, Twitter or YouTube? Almost. Although Silicon Valley — a sharp, hip but tender-hearted HBO comedy from Mike Judge, co-creator of King of the Hill — pitches us into an otherworldly bubble, where billions of dollars are thrown at companies that will burn out within weeks, our hero Richard (Thomas Middleditch) does know something. He knows how to code lossless compression algorithms. That’s about all he knows. In episode one he responds to being told he’s sitting on a gazillion-dollar idea by vomiting into a bin. He’s a cripplingly nervous nerd who wants to keep his gang of geeky friends together and not be a corporate sell-out, but who has no clue about even the basics of business. Can this minnow avoid being eaten by sharks? You’ll be willing Richard on as he makes a farcical hash of dealing with the cartoonish gurus who control the money. Chief among them is dotcom billionaire Peter Gregory, an unreadable, wildly capricious venture capitalist brilliantly played by Christopher Evan Welch. Silicon Valley is worth seeing just to pay tribute: Welch died of cancer during the filming of season one, aged 48. Welch was channelling the mercurial Peter Thiel, a major player in PayPal and Facebook, but you don’t need to know stuff like that because this is a comedy about coming of age. William Goldman, of course, was talking about adult life generally: Richard’s quest to find his own answers in a world full of scary nonsense is one we can all recognise.
Dapper Laughs is dead. But ITV2 still has questions to answer
The demise of comedy "character" Dapper Laughs in a car-crash Newsnight interview is good news, says Jack Seale - but how did this noxious sexism get onto mainstream TV in the first place?
Well, as the kids on the internet say: that escalated quickly. A week ago, comedy sexist Dapper Laughs was merrily flogging his awesomely bad Christmas album and looking forward to his 2015 live tour. His face, flanked by the lacy backsides of two models, smirked contentedly on the poster for his Christmas gig at Shepherd's Bush Empire. His ITV2 series, Dapper Laughs on the Pull, had just finished. Life was sweet. By last night, Dapper Laughs was dead. Or at least, the man who played him, Daniel O'Reilly, was on Newsnight – Newsnight! – retiring the character. The interview, in which O'Reilly was destroyed by a coldly furious Emily Maitlis and almost ended up crying on air, is a grimly compelling example of someone who knows they've been caught out, trying to minimise the damage but finding they've got nowhere to run. O'Reilly argued that Dapper Laughs was a comedy creation that was misunderstood. He didn't believe what Dapper was saying. He was satirising those attitudes. O'Reilly underlined this by presenting a new image for the interview: head to toe in Nigella-in-court beleaguered black, his quiff gone limp, Dapper's trademark cheeky beard shaved off. See? A totally different person. Nobody's buying it. Dapper Laughs was a stage name, not a comedy character. It's far too late for O'Reilly to try to distance himself. A quick recap for the uninitiated: Dapper Laughs rose to fame on Facebook and the video-sharing network Vine, peddling breathtakingly crude jokes about women and how to have sex with them. Dapper, with his large penis that he often mentioned, was the king of "banter", anonymous one-night stands and the idea that women who don't respond to quite aggressive propositioning are frigid, lesbians or both. Men who don't want to treat women in this way, including gay men, were targets too. Think of the worst preening, Lynx-doused sexist bore in the pub/office. (This might help: O'Reilly was formerly a lettings agent in Clapham.) Apart from being godawful comedy of a kind that would have looked creaky and old-fashioned in the 1970s, the serious side of Dapper Laughs was that his "comedy" fed a segment of society who are still, in 2014, viciously misogynist. Much of what Dapper said and did would constitute intimidation and harassment if repeated in the presence of women in real life. The phrase "rape culture" is not too strong, and Dapper Laughs was a part of it. O'Reilly's claim to be mocking those attitudes doesn't stand up. There simply wasn't any irony or satire. At no point was Dapper made the butt of the joke, instead of women and people who treat them respectfully. O'Reilly could not fail to see all along that the fans were laughing with Dapper, not at him. It's not even as if O'Reilly is some kind of Bernard Manning or Roy "Chubby" Brown figure: a skilled comic who can work a stage and construct a solid gag, but who uses those powers to say despicable things. His comedy was laughably poor. The leering hate was all there was. As someone on Twitter said: if this was his Alan Partridge, I don't want to see his Tony Ferrino. Towards the end of the Maitlis dismemberment, the mask slips and O'Reilly starts talking about "the media" and how the past week's bad headlines have "ruined everything". Angry as his fans might be at the news that Dapper has been taking them for a ride the whole time, O'Reilly is not really sorry for what he did. He's sorry he got found out. O'Reilly himself isn't the problem any more, since his 15 minutes is surely up. Which is fine, by the way: he's merely had his platform taken away. He's not been castrated or executed. He's not even been censored. Free speech doesn't extend as far as a divine right to a media career. But the mouth-breathers who followed him, and who have hurled the most rancid abuse at Dapper's critics in the past seven days, are still out there: fearful of women and gay men, tearfully furious at not getting enough sex, spewing bile at feminism and trying to convince themselves that women who don't want to sleep with them are just playing a malicious game, rather than wanting to get away from the angry moron. Those people need slow, compassionate education, not loud encouragement. This is where ITV2 comes in. ITV is in part a public broadcaster, with all the duties and responsibilities that status entails – that it chose to give Dapper Laughs a voice is what's really worrying here. The people who commissioned Dapper Laughs on the Pull knew who they were hiring. When I wrote about those Vines back in August, I didn't cherry-pick ten that made Dapper Laughs look bad. There were plenty that were much worse that I didn't want to share. Racism on TV has long since been radioactive, but it seems sexism is still not such a big deal. ITV2 stuck with Dapper Laughs for as long as it possibly could. It had actually got away with showing Dapper Laughs on the Pull, in which our hero gave shy men lessons on how to be more lecherous. The storm only came when Dapper publicly took exception to a review of his Christmas record on the Daily Mirror online offshoot UsVsTh3m, claiming the album had been made to raise money for the homeless (his record company confirmed that none of your £5.99 on iTunes actually went direct to any charity; Shelter stated that it wouldn't accept any donation Dapper might choose to make) before copying two UsVsTh3m journalists into a tweet, with the completely foreseeable result that they were deluged with vitriol – particularly the female one, Abi Wilkinson. What had happened was that people who never watch ITV2 and hadn't come across Dapper Laughs before had seen the hoo-hah on Twitter and started speaking up. Before then, ITV had quietly been using Dapper's mouth-breathers as a source of revenue. Initially, the channel batted away complaints. Then when footage emerged of rape jokes at a Dapper Laughs gig, the bad PR was stinking too much and ITV2 announced that there wouldn't be a second series of On the Pull. Its spokesperson trotted out the bogus "character" defence and carefully noted that the criticisms were about Dapper's behaviour outside his ITV2 show. This is true – actually, On the Pull was Dapper toned down slightly, and was more dull and tiresome than offensive –but it's just not good enough. You can't commission someone explicitly on the back of their online presence and then say that their online presence is not your concern. Giving someone a TV show is giving them approval. There's no hint of apology or contrition in anything ITV2 has said about the whole drab saga. Chasing the lowest common youth denominator has exploded in their faces this time. Whether they've really learned any lesson is still to be seen.
The Great British Bake Off 2014 - week six review
Willkommen au European cake week: Gugelhupf, dobos torte and... wait a sec, isn't that just a big trifle with marzipan on?
By week six on the Bake Off, you’re either winging it or bossing it. This year it’s consistently hard to tell who’s which, though. Usefully, in the new and exotic European cake week, some of the bakers announced it. Richard told Paul Hollywood straight up that he was winging it and had no idea whether he was going to ice or drizzle once his signature yeast cake was out of the oven. Martha confessed she'd been revising for her exams too much to practise the opening round at all – giving her next to no chance of surpassing Luis, who one suspects has an intensive daily Rocky-style training regime, but with the dawn eggs cracked into a mixing bowl instead of his mouth, and with pastry-rolling instead of chicken-chasing. Mary Berry was within an inch of asking Luis for advice rather than the other way round, as he patiently explained that his apple and cinnamon Kugelhopf would take longer to prove than it would to bake. Martha, on the other hand, was ignoring the warning from Mel or Sue on the voiceover that anything that flavoured the yeast was likely to retard the yeast. Retarding your yeast must be bad, yet Martha was whanging in chocolate chips and all sorts. Luis was so in control he started showboating in an effort to psych out his rivals. He loomed over Chetna, hopping insouciantly from foot to foot as she crouched by her proving drawer. "Looking good. Don't overprove, it'll sink again..." Two weeks ago Richard looked like a contender, but he's now collapsed like a bad sponge in a steam bath. His fruity Gugelhupf had crystallised on the top, split on the bottom and was generally brown, pointy and hard. It could have secured ropes on a yacht, but Mary and Paul said that at no stage had it been baked properly. More and more noticeable as the episodes go by is the way Richard lets nearly every sentence dissolve into a nervous giggle. Imagine if he did that with his building clients: “Your wall ties have corroded and I’m not sure if this lintel can take the weight of the bi-fold door-HO-HO-HO!” The technical bake was one gleaned from Mary's legendary inter-railing beano of 1936: Swedish princess cake, from a recipe with 14 stages that she urged the contestants to read at least twice before they embarked on it. A layer of sponge, jam, crème pâtissière, another layer of sponge, whipped cream, more sponge... wait a minute, that's a trifle! With a dome of green marzipan on top. So, a ruined trifle. Here was where we sensed tension rising in the tent, with the halfway point passed and the winning line almost in sight. Martha's hair became increasingly rebellious, a barometer of the stress of trying to achieve a uniform green top-sheet. Having had to re-do a couple of those 14 tasks, Chetna threw her arms in the air like she deeply cared when she miraculously managed to cream and marzipan her cake in two minutes flat right at the end - the marzipan thrown on, fire blanket-style, from one end of the worktop to the other. According to Mary, Richard's princess cake was fine apart from the wavy chocolate piping, too-thick sponge, uneven top, indistinct layers and inappropriate sugar dusting. "And the creaming looks terrible!" added Paul helpfully. Like most of the bakers, Richard had fallen foul of time pressure: "Another half-hour would have been brilliant for me-hee-hee!" "Please, come on, please!" mouthed Kate as the judges cut into her cake. They'd already easily rumbled her plan to cover up her slack cream-dome with two separate sheets of marzipan round the edge and another slapped on top. No luck. The inside collapsed like a custard deckchair. Kate was last, behind even Richard. The two technical backmarkers tried their best to front it out as the showstopper loomed. "I think two-tiered cakes look like hats," said Kate as she promised to add a non-compulsory third tier to her Hungarian dobos torte. Richard, looking at the two tiers and the many thin layers of sponge within them, sensed a chance to put his construction expertise to good use. "I'm not going to say I'm confident. I'm cautiously optimist-hee-hee-heek!" Baking up to 20 flat sponges meant another time scramble for everyone except Luis, who could be seen ostentatiously disinfecting his hob with five minutes of the challenge left, while all around him struggled to fix uncertainly conceived caramel sculptures to teetering tortes. Chetna, who has been flying under the radar in recent weeks, was again Luis' obvious rival, suddenly impressing the judges with her innovation: oiling grapes to create caramel hemispheres for what was required to be elaborate sponge-top decoration. "That's what I call a showstopper!" said Mary, surveying Luis' Haunted Caramel Prison on a Seaweed Island, pre-tasting. But maybe Luis should have spent that extra five minutes baking a proper cake to go inside his caramel railings: "It's quite washy, the flavour," said Paul, visibly enjoying himself as he reasserted his baking boss status. "It needs an identity." "Far too sweet," agreed Mary, puckering. No star baker award for Luis this week, then: that was clinched by Chetna and her triumphant Baby Dalek with Caramel Barbed-Wire Skirting. So who was going? The prime candidate was surely Richard and his Child's Drawing of Two Flood-Damaged Cakes with Caramel Spider-Web Topping. "The cakes look a bit sad," said Paul cheerily. Martha's Sticky Chequered Sinkhole was a mess too, and if you're going to make caramel chess pieces using a shop-bought mould you might as well squirt crème pat onto Mary Berry's best floral blazer and be done with it - but Martha had actually aced the first round and comfortably survived the second, so she was safe. She’s winging it magnificently. Could it really be the end for last week's star baker, Kate? A middling, three-stars-out-of-five, wait-for-the-DVD review of her Triple Chocolate Pork Pie with Alarming Caramel Attack Spikes meant she'd more or less ballsed up the entire weekend. But to her and Richard's hugging relief, the judges couldn't decide who was worse so they utilised the free pass they'd been given by Diana's withdrawal and let them both come back next week to have another go-ho-ho... >> Week five: Mmmmmmmm... lavender meringue!
The Great British Bake Off 2014 - week five review
No Diana and no ice cream hurled into bins... let's all relax and enjoy some delicious lavender meringue
Farewell, then, Diana. The fallout from BeardedManThrowsAwayACakeGate, as it soon became known, was tripled last Thursday when it was SENSATIONALLY revealed that Diana had QUIT the competition. The perfectly reasonable assumption that she'd hopped in a time machine, travelled forward to the day after the broadcast, then gone back again to a few months ago when the show was filmed to resign in disgust, actually turned out to be wrong. As announced by Mel Giedroyc at the start of this episode, illness/injury was the real reason. Just one of those things, and so, after a few tributes from the other bakers, we were back in the tent and Diana was mercilessly forgotten. No time for mourning. Not with a massive custard tart to cook. But it was a shame to lose Diana's jolly WI blather and her big, earthy, misshapen cakes, as well as the possibility of further ambiguous controversy. The thought that she might "accidentally" hack off Richard's left hand with a bread knife just as he tried to knead his showstopper dough would have given pie and tart week more pep. In the absence of fury, sabotage and murder, this week was all about dead-eye pastry acumen. Martha worried that she hadn't had enough time on the planet to acquire the skills. "If you're a bit older, I think you make it a lot. People like Nancy make pastry." While Martha was revealing a major weakness for the first time, Kate continued to look confident. This year the tent isn't thrumming with sexual tension as it was in the heady days of Cathryn and Ruby, but charming, expressive Kate is still the natural enemy of Paul Hollywood's slathering army of jealous fans. They'll have tensely frozen mid-muffin and studied the screen as Kate announced her tart. Paul chose to remain stern, not reacting as Kate swung her cupped hands to demonstrate her planned rhubarb swirl. Yet there was an unmistakable flick of the tongue after he enquired after her progress, and was that a note of gruff compassion as he disagreed with her coy description of the recipe as "simple"? Actually keeping it simple was Norman, who tried flamboyantly promising to conjure a Tarte au Citron. He was immediately shot down by Paul, who knows a plain lemon tart with a fancy French name when he sees one. Custard tarts, it turns out, offer a series of technical bear traps. The egg to flavour ratio has to be right, to avoid both an escaped filling and a congealed sweet quiche. Edging off the surplus from the top of the tart was a particularly stiff test. Luis danced round, wielding his knife like Michaelangelo. Norman was more like Jacko from Brush Strokes. A more surprising fail came when fillings were added: Richard the Sensitive Builder was the only contestant not to realise that pouring in the liquid with the pastry case still in the oven was the way to avoid spillage. With Mel hovering unhelpfully four inches away ("Well done, well done… DON'T SPILL IT!"), Richard slopped his figgy egg all down his tart. The judging was largely a massacre, with Norman's effort to cover his wonky crust with a kilo of icing sugar unsuccessful, and Richard and Kate's fruit flavours failing to cut through the custard. Martha's apricot and pistachio creation was sour, soggy and lacking shine. She looked slightly upset when talking to Paul and Mary, then very upset when the camera cut to her during the song of praise for Luis' elegant tropical tart. The same editors who had made Diana look like a master criminal now rammed it home by interrupting Paul's raptures a second time to confirm poor Martha was in tears, before rounding off with a post-match interview where she definitely was. Lovely. Pear pies formed a particularly horrid technical bake: pears (obviously), poached and then wrapped in swirls of puff pastry. Uncertainty was rife. Martha, trying to recover from her tart collapse, admitted sneaking a peek at her rivals to get a steer on when to stop poaching. Even Mel was affected, holding up two of Luis' fruits and saying "I've got a nice pair" before visibly regretting having made a pun too thunderingly awful even for Bake Off. In adversity, and with us now fully behind her, Martha started to fight back. Having cannily realised that the pears needed to be chilled if the pastry was going to stick, she also clocked that everyone was running out of time and put each wrapped pear in the oven as soon as it was ready, instead of faffing over all six together. That was enough to win the round. The showstopper, a minimum of three tiered pies with themed fillings, was where Norman promised to aim "a wee bit higher". His more adventurous flavours included an Italian meringue topping, graced with the delicate aroma of lavender… With hot-water-crust pastry tending to be thick and burnt across the tent, Martha was again winging it successfully, earning gasps of approval for some sort of paprika and chorizo anvil, which survived a small bursting that forced her to catch hot red fat in a jug. Also flying, and securing star baker status for the week, was Kate. Of course Bake Off doesn't need to have something as reductive and demeaning as a sex symbol. However, a woman who chooses to cook three giant pork pies? Nnng. Sue Perkins pretty much confirmed that Norman would be eliminated when she tasted his lavender meringue. The look on her face told us he'd hugely overdone the lavender, going past "delicate waft" and into "Frish waterboarding". Paul Hollywood looked like he didn't know whether to laugh or vomit - and Norman's big savoury wasn't much better. "It's an interesting idea," said Mary Berry, forking tentatively through a pile of dour, Chum-like meat. Follow @jackseale // >> Week four: if you've been affected by any of the issues raised...
MU are ya? Official Manchester United channel in epic teamsheet fail
MUTV scores a viral hit by failing to identify 9 out of 11 players in United's line-up this morning against Inter
Wholesale changes are expected this season as Dutch enforcer Louis van Gaal brutally remodels Manchester United – but surely the new gaffer isn't going to make his players swap faces. That was the nightmare scenario foreseen this morning by a hilariously inaccurate TV teamsheet for the United v Inter friendly, put up by none other than MUTV, Man U's own channel. Only Ashley Young and Danny Welbeck emerged with their identities intact, as the in-house propaganda machine merrily confused Anders Lindegaard and David de Gea, replaced the likeness of Luis Antonio Valencia with the quite different mug of Luke Shaw, and lumbered Spanish pretty-boy playmaker Juan Mata with the hairy potato face of Wayne Rooney. Social media users were quick to spot the error: You can knock MUTV's £6 monthly fee all you like, but you can't argue with its knowledge of the club... pic.twitter.com/yGz3o94l9a — Martin (@himartinhere) July 29, 2014 Mutv has been dropping acid pic.twitter.com/HrrKakugwY — Gareth Bale (@GarethBale22) July 29, 2014 EPIC FAIL: MUTV with a brand new Manchester United Starting XI. pic.twitter.com/TxcVkn4az3 — BBC Sporf (@BBCSporf) July 30, 2014 Staff at the FedEx Field in Washington, DC joined in with the fun, bafflingly re-labelling their stadium – because United were nominally the home team – as "Old Traddord". Oops! FedEx Field welcomes #MUFC: pic.twitter.com/0GGDxYGqsB — Steven Goff (@SoccerInsider) July 29, 2014 Manchester United won the match on penalties after a 0-0 draw, with the winning kick struck by Darren Fletcher. Or as MUTV know him, Ander Herrera.
Black is the new orange: Michigan jail junks its "cool" OITNB-style jumpsuits
In Saginaw County, inmates are to switch to black and white stripes to avoid looking like characters from the hit Netflix drama
How cool is Orange Is the New Black? Too cool for the sheriff of Saginaw County in Michigan, USA – so he's changed the colour of the county jail inmates' jumpsuits from orange to black and white. "The name of the show, Orange is the New Black, is saying it's cool to wear orange, and the show is enormously popular in Michigan," Saginaw County Sheriff William Federspiel said, adding that OITNB "lends empathy to inmates". Federspiel also claimed that, with members of the public increasingly wearing orange in order to ape characters on the show, the real orange jumpsuits posed a security risk. "Some people think it's cool to look like an inmate of the Saginaw County Jail with wearing all-orange jumpsuits out at the mall or in public," he said. "It's a concern because we do have our inmates out sometimes doing work in the public, and I don't want anyone to confuse them or have them walk away. "We haven't had any escapes, and I don't want any escapes." Federspiel added: "We decided that the black-and-white stripes would be the best way to go because it signifies 'jail inmate', and I don't see people out there wanting to wear black-and-white stripes." The Sheriff admitted that the move has not been popular with prisoners: "They think it makes them look like criminals."
The Mimic: Terry Mynott on impressions, failure and being the Muppets for a whole year
We talk to the star of Channel 4's beautifully understated sitcom about how he found his voice, and how not to impersonate Nicolas Cage
The Mimic was last year’s comedy sleeper hit. Arriving quietly on C4 on Wednesdays, it was a downbeat sitcom - yes, another one - starring the second most famous impressionist from celebrity take-off show VIP, which itself hadn't been a huge hit. Tough pitch. But slowly an audience arrived, drawn by the tired, gentle travails of sighing maintenance man Martin Hurdle, a deadbeat hiding an extraordinary talent for impersonations. Terry Mynott downplayed the role beautifully, in brave contrast to his work on the brash VIP. Martin is more interesting than a showbiz wannabe struggling to get onto the bottom rung of the fame ladder. He doesn’t know if he even wants to climb out of his feeble existence. Series one ends with him finally scoring an appearance on a TV show, having gone viral on YouTube by mistake – an opportunity the fatally self-effacing Martin blows by losing his nerve and refusing to go on. Penned by VIP’s head writer and Russell Brand’s old radio sidekick Matt Morgan – also stepping sideways from his previous work to deliver something with soul – The Mimic meditates bittersweetly on inhibition, self-destruction, English embarrassment, wasted potential and Eeyoreish pessimism. It’s comfortingly sad. “We had this way before VIP,” says Mynott who, at 39 and with more than one showbiz false start in his past, has a healthily self-deprecating attitude to his new success. “We built it very slowly. We did a four-minute one, we did an 11-minute episode, we even got a pilot, so it’s always been on the back burner. Matt said, why not do something not a million miles from what you’re like? “We didn’t want Martin to be a go-getter. We didn’t want him to get dinner at The Ivy through his impressions. We wanted him to try to get dinner at The Ivy, but end up washing dishes.” The Mimic isn’t a laugh-free bleak-com. Martin’s only friends, ditsy soulmate Jean (Jo Hartley) and rampantly paranoid Neil (Neil Maskell) – Martin is a lot smarter than either, but too polite to think he might outgrow them – are funny every time they appear. Martin’s performances, normally delivered just to Jean or to nobody at all, are often uproarious, showing a scything satirical wit that he always, always keeps under wraps when talking in his own voice. Yet at heart it’s a show about those old staples of great literature and film: loneliness and failure. Somehow, this awkward-sounding mix has broad appeal. “I can’t get my head round the age range,” Mynott says. “I thought people my age would like it. But it’s all over the place: 14-year-old girls - most of them can’t get who I’m doing - to people well into their 60s and 70s. And I love this new world where people can find you when they want, online. Last night I had a message from an American who’d seen it on a cruise in the Antarctic.” Aside from improvisations that are later reworked as part of the final scripts, Mynott doesn’t contribute to writing the show. “It’s Matt’s baby. As an ac-tor” – he adds a camp, la-di-dah “hmm hmm!” to underline that he doesn’t see himself as a proper actor – “I’m a slave to his words.” Yet it's one of those performances that makes you wonder to what extent it's actually acting, and to what extent Martin and Mynott are the same person: pleased with their weird talent but profoundly unshowbizzy, with no craving for attention. “When people asked me that last year I fought it, but: yes. I will push on a door for hours when it quite clearly says pull. I will trip up in front of everybody. I will be the quietest person on set. But I’ve got much more tenacity than Martin to have got where I am now, to keep throwing myself against the wall of showbusiness, until finally I made it through. He’s like me if I’d not had all the drive I’ve got.” Mynott also does not hide behind his impressions as Martin does, using them as a means to avoid revealing a real self he fears won't interest anyone. After filming he is not to be found in the pub, entertaining his friends by doing voices. “No, never! I’d be the last person to do that. I’m not intellectually funny, and I abandoned the hope of being cool a long time ago. I am quite happy talking about Romans or Neolithic mounds. I’m a very silly person, but you have to know me before I’ll open up. “But put a camera on me, if I know there’s lots of money invested, and people expect me to be funny - then I’ll be very funny.” View oEmbed on the source website “I like listening to other people because I have to walk around practising voices all the time, so by the time I’ve finished with work I’m very much a listener. I get bored of the sound of my own voice.” Mynott isn’t Martin because, while they share a talent, Martin has perfected his voices through lack of anything to do or anyone to talk to. Mynott is a professional with a plan. Nailing a new impression is a process that takes weeks, stretching into months. “I will listen to that person solidly for a week. I will not try to recreate them until I can hear them in my head. Then I’ll take one thing, one word or phrase. With Morgan Freeman it was 'The first time I saw Andy…' [a slight misquote from The Shawshank Redemption]. I worked with nothing larger than that. Don’t run before you can walk.” Series 2’s new impressions include the cast of Game of Thrones, and a brilliant take on Aaron Paul and Bryan Cranston as Jesse and Walter in Breaking Bad. “It was the same with Walter White, it was: “I am, I am the one who knocks. I AM the one who knocks. I am the one who KNOCKS.” The impersonation is spookily, delightfully accurate. “You just keep going, until you get closer to it. Then I was walking around saying, ‘Who do you think you’re talking to right now? Do you even know how much money I make in a year?’ for ever and ever. The writing in Breaking Bad was amazing. That’s when it's a dream job, when you get handed something like that.” Sometimes, an awful lot of work goes into discovering that a particular celebrity won’t be joining the repertoire. “I convinced myself I could do Tom Hanks. I spent six months chasing it down and I couldn’t do it at all. And Nicolas Cage. I couldn’t get past “Oh”. [in a very recognisable Cage voice] Ohhh! Urrgh. Ohhh. Oh. Ugh. Ahhhh. Oh. That’s all I could do. You grab onto that little word and you slowly try to make it into a sentence. You craft it like a big bit of wood. Sometimes you’re just left with sawdust. And you won’t know until a month down the line that you can’t do it.” View oEmbed on the source website Mynott came to professional impressions and comic acting late, but had been performing on the quiet, a bit like Martin, since childhood. “I lived in the middle of nowhere, in a tiny village on the border of the Fens. I wasn’t lonely, I was very happy, but I literally would wander the fields. I would do characters. I’ve always enjoyed my ability to shut my brain off and just let myself talk, and I might come up with something funny, just for my entertainment.” The classic story is of a kid who impersonates the teachers at school. “Yes, I did! Mrs Jeffries, that’s the start. My maths teacher. She strangely sounded like Julian Clary, and that was when I was about 13, and Julian was quite shocking then. Also I had this staple remover, and I used to walk around being in a Spaghetti Western, saying to every kid, ‘Maybe. Maybe not.’” As an adult who’d done various menial jobs before deciding he did want to perform, Mynott at first was a musician, with some success. “But it stopped quite abruptly. I got dropped from my publishing deal and nobody wanted to work with me. I was just... out.” Then another disappointment, as a stand-up comic: “I was rubbish, I just didn’t have the showmanship that stand-ups have.” But performing on stage was where Mynott found his voice and, indeed, his voices. “I started to incorporate them slowly into the act until eventually they absorbed it and I gave up stand-up altogether.” Surely a failed singer-songwriter who's now found fame somewhere else won't be able to resist whipping out his guitar soon? "Nah. I got to a certain age where I realised I wasn’t an amazing songwriter. I had a nice voice but I never was a true musician. We toured with Faithless, and Rollo was a fan, he championed me. But I was always just being stupid in the studio, so when I started doing comedy and cartoons and stuff, it was like seeing The Matrix. I could create whole worlds." The problem, for a man who now makes a living pretending to be other people, was that his music had no identity of its own. Even now, when asked which famous artist he sounds like, Mynott claims not to know. "I liked all sorts of music and I wrote with all sorts of people. I wrote with Chaz Jankel from the Blockheads and Mike Pickering from M People. I was a chameleon. That’s why I was destined not to make it – I was always everybody else, I was never really me." Mynott is a fan of The Trip ("I love it"), but the scenes that appeal to him are Coogan and Brydon bantering - he avidly quotes the "Gentlemen! To bed!" routine - rather than the impressions. He's not taking notes, wondering if Steve and Rob's Michael Caines are better than his. "I never sit in judgment and I always enjoy other’s people’s impersonations more than my own. I’ve surrendered my ego.” This sounds odd coming from someone who spent several weeks of his life trying and failing to sound like Nicolas Cage, but Mynott insists: “I don’t care if I don’t do a good one, I’m gonna be silly with it, and I’m gonna have fun, and I’m gonna overdo the intonation, ramp it up. These people already exist, they already have that voice. So to be uppity about how good it is, I think that's pretty mental." Much of Mynott's work, in fact, is never heard by more than a handful of people. Welcome to the strange, lucrative but glory-free world of impersonating superstars for adverts. Not ads where we hear a soundalike voiceover sneakily reading the script in the style of Benedict Cumberbatch or Chris Evans - "No! I won’t do that. They always want me to do Matt Berry, but I’m good friends with Matt Berry, so I will not do that" - but placeholder narration, put in by an ad agency at the pitching stage, to illustrate how the spot might work with a certain voice on it. "I’m the guy they get before they get the star in. The brand will give several companies money to come up with an idea. I did the Muppets all last year for Lipton Ice. Solidly for a year. I did all of them, Gonzo and everyone. I sang, it was so much fun. "I did the Jean Claude van Damme Coors adverts before him, and then I did them all again as Steven Seagal, while they approached those people. Then they etched me out." It's work that's destined to be deleted and forgotten? "Don’t care. Got paid, brilliant. As long as you’re being creative, and you’re in a room and everybody’s having fun and you’ve got access to a kettle, it’s great. You’ve got to remember I started out on the road – my dad was a lorry driver, and I drove lorries. I jet-washed trucks. I worked in the freezing cold on a building site. So to stand in a room and pretend to be someone and be nice and warm is bliss." The Mimic returns tonight at 10pm on C4 Follow @jackseale
Germany v Argentina - World Cup final preview
Can Messi finally do the business against the mighty Germans? It's live on BBC1 and ITV from Rio tonight
Germany v Argentina, 7pm BBC1/ITV (kick-off 8pm) This feels like the most appropriate final, in a tournament that might be the greatest ever for goals and excitement but turned out not to be for quality: the best team against (arguably) the best player. Argentina's slow progress to the Maracana has been all about whether the opposition can stop Messi - that's still a big question as they face Germany in Rio, but it's not clear that the Germans will lose even if they let Messi run free. Germany's 7-1 win over Brazil is the most extraordinary in World Cup history, and it's still hard to compute. Even that margin of victory, perhaps especially that margin of victory, doesn't quite tell us how good the Germans are. The game was mostly about Brazil being bad. No team on Earth should be able, for instance, to steal the ball five seconds after you've kicked off, then calmly sidefoot it home five seconds later. Argentina's Marcos Rojo is unlikely to ape Brazilian left-back Marcelo and keep charging up the pitch to attack, no matter how many times Thomas Müller sprints in behind to set up attacks. Nor do the Albiceleste have a defender like David Luiz who can lose a game on his own when he's on top form. The scary flipside of that is this: Germany destroyed the hosts in half an hour without even using their top gear. They simply pressed the Brazilians hard in midfield, funnelled possession down the right (or straight down the middle as Brazil lost heart), and scored without having to expend much effort. Miroslav Klose scored his historic goal but was allowed two goes at it and was otherwise ineffective; Mesut Özil did very little and really ought to be replaced here by André Schürrle, who won the second half for Germany against a Brazil side that was patched up and much improved. Germany are fresh, too. They played their semi on Tuesday and were cruising after 30 minutes. Argentina played on Wednesday and had to scrap for two hours plus penalties. At the end of a draining tournament, this gives the Germans a large advantage that the conditions in Rio - quite humid, not particularly hot - won't cancel out. Argentina's approach is still: give it to Messi. As the tournament has gone on, they've not found another reliable route to goal. Instead they've kept either sneaking through narrowly with his help - Messi assisted their late goal against Switzerland, and half-assisted their rather streaky early goal against Belgium - or in the case of the deathly semi-final against Holland, have found that with Messi neutralised, they have nothing. How good Messi has been at Brazil 2014 will be decided tonight, along with a large part of his lasting reputation. Has he been brilliant in the circumstances, triple-marked by most opponents and unable to rely on his team-mates to provide their own attacking spark? Or does he need to do much more to make this his tournament? The good news for Messi is that Germany are unlikely to fear him enough to sacrifice their shape by surrounding him at all times. If he can outwit Bastian Schweinsteiger, or drift right and take on Germany's weakest player, left-back Benedikt Höwedes, the ultimate glory could still be his. Yet if Argentina are to win, the real star could be further back: as they sit deep to avoid German counter-attacks, and in the hope of releasing Gonzalo Higuain or Ezequiel Lavezzi behind the pushed-up German defence, midfield patroller Javier Mascherano will be a key man. Not just for his reading of the game and beautifully timed tackles, but for his will to win: against the Netherlands, he overcame a concussion and indeed a torn anus - sustained making a game-saving challenge in the box on Arjen Robben - to see his side through. For Argentina to stop this potentially unstoppable German side, they need a hero or two.
Netherlands v Argentina - World Cup preview
It's Lionel v Louis and it's live from Sao Paulo on ITV
Netherlands v Argentina (semi-final), 8.30pm ITV (kick-off 9pm) First to 7 wins, right lads? OK, so nothing - surely - can compete with the most extraordinary result in World Cup history, but this second semi-final is still worth a good anticipatory drool. The tournament's biggest star still standing takes on a side managed by Brazil 2014's most impressive coach. It's Lionel v Louis. Argentina arrive in the semi-final having won every single game so far by a single goal. Predictions that their four-pronged attack (Messi, Higuain, Aguero, di Maria) would be so overwhelmingly powerful that their weak defence wouldn't be a problem have proved to be wrong on both fronts. Their gameplan: give it to Lionel Messi until he gets you a goal. If you do score, kill the game. Alejandro Sabella, the Argentine coach who always looks like he'd rather be at home with a cocoa and a sudoku, has one big personnel problem: Angel di Maria, whose endless charging from midfield to attack provides both a separate threat to Messi's dribbling and the only regularly effective link with Messi, is out injured. Sergio Aguero could return, but in the group stages he merely got in the way of Messi and the stuttering Gonzalo Higuain. Alternatively, Sabella could stick with lightning-quick but extravagantly wasteful left-sided forward Ezequiel Lavezzi, but he's not a player to frighten quality opposition. That means Dutch coach Louis van Gaal has to place even more emphasis on stopping Messi, since if he does that, the Netherlands ought to win. Talk from the camp is that holding midfielder Nigel de Jong is fit again, in which case Messi faces being hustled, muscled or simply face-kicked out of the game. Failing that, a feature of the Dutch march to the semi-final has been Van Gaal's flexibility at the back: whether there are three, four or (most likely) five there, he'll have a scheme. Up front, Holland's answer to Messi is Arjen Robben, careering down the right where he'll face Argentine left-back Marcos Rojo, who returns from a ban. If Robben drifts into a more central position and ends up running at Martin Demichelis, that could be hilarious, although not if you're Argentinian. Robben's regular partner Robin van Persie has the squits and might not be able to play, but he's been fairly quiet anyway since the opening game against Spain, and the raw pace of likely replacement Jeremain Lens will frighten Argentina just as much. So for master tactician Van Gaal, the plan is clear: man-mark Messi and indeed the rest of the Argentina midfield, then hit them quickly and directly with the sprinting Oranje forwards. Except, this game - and the final on Sunday - might just be Lionel Messi's footballing destiny. Nobody's totally shut him down so far, no matter how many men they've put on him. The best coach in the world can't stop a moment of genius. Does Lionel have one in him?
The semi-final in Belo Horizonte is live on BBC1
Brazil v Germany (semi-final), 8.30pm BBC1 (kick-off 9pm) Some of the spectacle's gone from this game, and Fifa can only blame themselves. They're responsible for the tone and quality of the officiating at their garlanded cash cow of a tournament and, in Brazil's quarter-final against Colombia, poor refereeing had serious consequences. Tackle after dirty tackle by Brazil on the more skilful, less commercially viable Colombians went unpunished until, with brutal irony, it was Brazilian superstar Neymar who became the victim of a much too physical game. Now, Neymar has a broken back (!) and Brazil have to soldier on without their poster boy and major attacking weapon. Oscar or Willian are the obvious candidates for the new creative number ten, but they'll have to suddenly cope with a new kind of pressure - nervelessly performing with flair under intense scrutiny was Neymar's most valuable skill. If Brazil end up relying on the footwork of Hulk or the dynamic directness of Fred, they are in trouble. Luis Felipe Scolari might prefer to bring in Ramires along with the returning Luis Gustavo, and turn this into a streetfight. There's another key absentee at the other end of the pitch: when the referee of the Colombia match belatedly found his yellow cards he showed one to Thiago Silva, perhaps the world's best centre-back, who is now suspended. As Brazil start to limp, Germany are inching carefully forward. Switching Philipp Lahm from holding midfielder to right-back seems to have solved their problems in both positions, with the recalled Bastian Schweinsteiger and the recuperated Sami Khedira now forming a reliable central fulcrum, leading to an alarmingly routine quarter-final win against France. Weighing on the Germans' minds will be recent international tournaments in which the "Golden Generation" have torn apart their early opponents, only to crumble in the later knockout stages. In 2014 the progress is more measured, perhaps because players like Özil, Kroos and the Golden Boot-chasing Müller now have experience to go with their talent. Jogi Löw has to get his selection right, though: fans and hacks back home are clamouring for the increasingly anonymous Mesut Özil to be benched. Here and now is the time for this German side to prove itself, facing a home team riddled with weaknesses, but with overwhelming support from the Belo Horizonte crowd. One footballing giant or another is about to be humbled.
The quarter-final in Brasilia is live on ITV
Argentina v Belgium, quarter-final, 4.30pm ITV (kick-off 5pm) Watching Argentina in this World Cup has been a brutal, downbeat psycho-drama. Whether Lionel Messi could win them the trophy was the question before the tournament kicked off, but nobody expected him to be so dominant, or his team-mates to be so pathetically dependent. Not only has Messi scored virtually all Argentina's goals; he's scored them virtually unaided. Players who fetch tens of millions at club level, like Gonzalo Higuain, Sergio Aguero and Angel di Maria, have been tense and useless, as if they daren't upstage the lead actor in their play. The astoundingly poor match against Switzerland was like watching a Millwall v Reading clash in the relegation marshes of the Championship, but one in which Reading have inexplicably signed the best player in the world. Even the last-minute winner was only stroked home by Di Maria after a brilliant run by Messi had placed the ball inch-perfectly on his boot. There are strong rumours that Argentina coach Alejandro Sabella is a patsy, with Messi really running the tactical show. Pablo Zabaleta has admitted that the entire Argentina game plan is: give it to Messi. So can he beat Belgium on his own? If the Belgians can shackle Messi - other teams have surrounded him with three men at all times, almost successfully - they look far superior elsewhere. Hazard, Mertens and de Bruyne are starting to purr as an attacking-midfield trio, Romelu Lukaku's goal against USA might be a sign that he's shaken off his World Cup nerves, Thibaut Courtois is commanding in goal, and Vincent Kompany has the look of a man who has simply decided his team shall win the cup. That attitude is starting to pervade the squad. None of them has any previous tournament experience but, in that game-of-the-tournament against the Americans, they won as much through grit and pragmatism as youthful flair, refusing to lose faith even when it looked like their nervous finishing might see them eliminated. Messi is still the problem. Other opponents have freely admitted they fear him, and have abandoned their own attacking ambitions. If the Belgians are too confident and try to go toe to toe, man to man, they could be undone. There's also the question of who marks him: Axel Witsel might be OK but Eden Hazard won't naturally track back to help, and the player who normally patrols that zone is the tree-like Marouane Fellaini. Messi v Fellaini would only have one winner.
The quarter-final in Rio de Janeiro is live on BBC1 on Friday 4 July
France v Germany, quarter-final, 4.30pm BBC1 (kick-off 5pm) In a World Cup full of big names struggling against upstarts, now two of those limping giants face off. If both teams play as well as they can… it's hard to know what would happen, since we've not seen that yet from either. In fairness, for France the issue is that they still have not really been tested. After an easy group phase - the Switzerland we saw against Argentina were yet to arrive in Brazil when France thrashed them 5-2 - they laboured against Nigeria in their first knockout game, but never really looked like losing. Much of the strain was caused by attempting to field Olivier Giroud up front, pushing star striker Karim Benzema to the left. This never threatened to produce a goal, and it'll be a major surprise if Giroud starts again here. Germany's famous weakness is at full-back. They don't really have any full-backs. Well they do, Philipp Lahm is one of the best of all time on either flank, but he's been converted to a holding midfielder now, so there we are. Jerome Boateng will probably be all right against Griezmann and Evra - the zone in which Germany could lose the game is left-back, where Benedikt Höwedes has to contain Valbuena and Debuchy. France are cohesive, on the up, young, hungry and possibly have more gas in the tank. They didn't play extra time against Nigeria, whereas Germany battled for every one of the 120 minutes against Algeria. The flu bug romping through the German camp won't help Jogi Löw's men either. Yet particularly in midfield, the Germans are stronger and wiser man to man. Are they gradually being found out, or judiciously doing just enough to keep reaching the next stage? Today we'll see. Exuberance and potential versus years of match-winning nous. It could go either way and will be fascinating.
Five ways the USA can beat Belgium in the World Cup
Saddle up, soccer fans - we preview tonight's epic encounter in Salvador (9pm BBC1) with five ways that America can conquer the Belgians
1. ATTACK! Belgium have started every game slowly, like a pub team who are still running off a full English and have no idea who that Dave bloke is who's turned up to play down the left wing. They went a goal down to Algeria (although in the light of last night's epic Germany v Algeria war, perhaps that was fair enough) and were stuck at 0-0 for far too long against boring Russia and soppy South Korea. They've been probably as bad as you possibly can be while still, er, winning all three games and topping your group. The Americans are naturally defensive, but should forget that and get at the inexperienced Mitteleuropans immediately. Belgium literally do not have any full-backs – even with a fully fit squad they make do with centre-backs out wide – and now face a defensive injury crisis. Kompany, Vanden Borre, Ciman and Vermaelen are all either doubtful or definitely absent. The plan for Team America? Get it to the wings and cross it in for indestructible T-1000 poly-alloy attack-droid Clint Dempsey to score with his head, chest, face or testicles against the Belgians' banged-up rearguard. If he can repeat his trick from the Ghana match and get a goal before the opposition have finished counting their money and putting their shin-pads on, all the better. View oEmbed on the source website 2. ATTACK! ATTACK! ATTACK! OK, so the USA are 1-0 up, that's the easy part. What they mustn't then do is retreat to their own 18-yard line, closing their eyes and holding hands, as they have in every match so far. The USA easily had the beating of Portugal and Ghana, but they squeezed luckily past Ghana and didn't prevail against the Portuguese at all because they stopped playing once they'd scored and let the other team have a turn. This should not be the American way. No mercy. No surrender. No hilarious cheerleader high-kicks that give the ball to the other team in the middle of your foul box. No Sir. The States have already emerged triumphant from Group G, the official Group of Death, with the battle scars and Clint Dempsey's molten nose a testament to their grit. If you can beat Death itself, you can have a bash at Belgium. Surely. Come on. View oEmbed on the source website 3. GET JOZY ALTIDORE FIT For anyone who saw Sunderland struggle in the Barclays British Premier MoneyBowl last season, the importance of Jozy Altidore to the USMNT, as it insists on calling itself, is hard to fathom. On Wearside, Altidore bundled in two goals in 38 appearances, playing an integral part in Sunderland's descent to the bottom of the standings and often looking surprised or frightened by the ball. But for USA, Dozy Jozy's bulk and pace are vital: when Yankee backs are slammed against the goal-wall, they can hoof it up to the big man and escape. Altidore looked to have fatally twanged a hamstring during the Ghana match but is now "ready and available" to play. Hell and, to an extent, yeah. View oEmbed on the source website 4. IDENTIFY THE HAZARD. NEUTRALIZE THE HAZARD Belgium have talented players all over the pitch, from giant-afro'd battering ram Marouane Fellaini and tiny, ginger schoolboy Kevin de Bruyne, to giant-afro'd playmaker Axel Witsel and goaltending beanpole Thibaut Courtois. But their key offender is Eden Hazard, the diminutive Chelsea Londoners winger. He unlocked the Russian defensive fortress and has caused bedlam among much better defences than America's during his two seasons in English Soccer League Time. Right-back Fabian Johnson has been one of the stars of the tournament for USMNT, Inc but will need all his wits about him if he's to shackle Hazard. Perhaps a man-marking job by Graham "Zeus" Zusi, Jermaine "Hammerboot" Jones or Kyle "Quietly Effective Deep-Lying Ball-Winner" Beckerman would suit – especially as this would allow Johnson more licence to contribute to counter-attacks by sprinting past Hazard, who considers himself simply too sexy to track back and defend. View oEmbed on the source website 5. TRUST IN JÜRGEN Soccer fans spat out their weak, tasteless beer in alarm when the noticeably non-American Jürgen Klinsmann was appointed as the Stars 'n' Stripes head coach. They lost their shizzle completely when the power-mad German declined to enlist record goal-achiever Landon Donovan in his Brazil 2014 army. But in a World Cup where substitutions have been crucial, Klinsi has outdone all his fellow managers with a series of brilliant swapsies. The winning goal against Ghana – by far the greatest moment in American soccer history – was scored by John Brooks and assisted by Graham Zusi, both of whom had been de-benched by the Jürg. Then against Portugal, Klinsmann struck again, not only sending rookie defender DeAndre Yedlin into the fray ahead of his more grizzled colleagues, but playing him out of position in right midfield. Yedlin was brilliant, breaking to the byline to spark a move that climaxed with Clint Dempsey balling it in. If there's further Fussballgenie from Klinsmann tonight, Team USA might just advance from the eighth-finals for the third time in their history. U! S! Of A!
The last-16 clash in Salvador is live on BBC1
Belgium v USA, 8.30pm BBC1 (kick-off 9pm) We're used to the USA being gritty underdogs in football, a feeling previously heightened by the sense that nobody back home cared much. That's changed for Brazil 2014: TV ratings, column inches and social media activity are all through the roof in the States. If the team can pull off an upset here, soccer's breakthrough in the US will step up another couple of gears. They certainly can win this. Punters who saw Belgium's potential four years ago and backed them to lift the trophy at 300-1 were right to think that the youngsters would be a real force in international football by now. Yet so far in Brazil, Belgium have been about as unconvincing as you possibly can be while winning all three games. The USA can be buoyed by Belgium's slow starts - the Red Devils have relied on substitutes to win two out of their three matches - and by an injury crisis in the Belgium defence. Vincent Kompany and Thomas Vermaelen are doubts, while Laurent Ciman and Anthony Vanden Borre are definitely out. With Belgium already weak in both full-back areas - they don't have any full-backs - the US have a chance to get it wide and get on the front foot early on. If they don't, then the longer the game goes on, the more likely Belgium are to gel and the more chance there is of Eden Hazard or Dries Mertens producing a piece of skill that the spirited but limited Americans cannot handle. It could go either way.
The last-16 clash from Brasilia is live on BBC1
France v Nigeria, 4.30pm BBC1 (kick-off 5pm) A France side with no obvious weakness face their first test. Group games against Honduras (agricultural), Switzerland (confused) and Ecuador (passive) have hinted that this team might be very good indeed, but you need a competitive fixture to know for certain. After the second-gear 0-0 draw with Ecuador, right-sided imp Mathieu Valbuena is likely to return from being rested, with Yohan Cabaye once again levering that powerful midfield from deep following a one-match ban. Injured centre-back Mamadou Sakho is still out, however, so Laurent Koscielny - not a bad reserve! - continues. Manager Didier Deschamps' main concern is how to get the best from Karim Benzema, since only a hiccup in France's flow of goalscoring can stop them winning this. Deschamps paired his star striker very effectively with Olivier Giroud against Switzerland, although Benzema surely prefers playing centrally and alone. Right-back might be another selection headache, since Nigeria's main threat is from the frighteningly pacy, left-sided Ahmed Musa. He made a mug of Pablo Zabaleta last time out. Indeed, the wily Peter Odemwingie on the right and the imposing Emmanuel Emenike down the middle also found some joy against Argentina, albeit in a dead fixture. Sort out those little problems and France ought to be fine, since in midfield Cabaye, Blaise Matuidi and Paul Pogba ought to be far too good for Nigeria's disorganised trio. The weather in Brasilia: 27C, not hot enough for Nigeria to have an advantage.
Fresh Meat's Zawe Ashton leads cast of C4 comedy drama Cut
Ashton will play a civil servant forced to relocate to Northampton
Fresh Meat star Zawe Ashton is to take the lead in Cut, a new Channel 4 comedy drama created by acclaimed playwright DC Moore. The six-part workplace "dramedy" follows the personal and professional lives of a dysfunctional group of civil servants, forced to relocate from London to Northampton – Moore's home town – following government cuts. Co-starring with Ashton, who plays frustrated recent divorcee Katherine, are Sacha Dhawan (An Adventure in Space and Time, Line of Duty), Tom Weston Jones (Spooks), Sophie Rundle (Peaky Blinders, Happy Valley), Anastasia Hille (The Fear, Utopia), Jo Hartley (The Mimic, This Is England) and Samuel Barnett (Twenty Twelve). Cut is described by Channel 4 as "both a deft portrait of a generation struggling with the realities of 21st-century work life, and a warm exploration of the camaraderie and friendships that can bloom in times of difficulty". The series films in Glasgow this summer for transmission in the autumn.
The hit comedy from the stars of Horrible Histories will return to Sky1 next year
Yonderland has been recommissioned by Sky1 for a second series, to air in 2015. The family comedy, by and with the stars of CBBC's Horrible Histories, will re-commence filming in the autumn for transmission next year. Series one of the show, which stars Martha Howe-Douglas as a bored housewife who discovers a portal to another realm in her kitchen cupboard, aired last year on Sky1 to ecstatic reviews. Yonderland has been nominated for a 2014 Rose d'Or award in the sitcom category. The Yonderland writing/acting team - Mathew Baynton, Simon Farnaby, Martha Howe-Douglas, Jim Howick, Laurence Rickard and Ben Willbond - recently completed filming on Bill, a feature film fictionalising William Shakespeare's "lost years" before he found fame as a playwright. It's released in cinemas in February 2015. Baynton is also working on a second series of The Wrong Mans, the BBC2 comedy thriller he writes and stars in with James Corden.
Netherlands v Mexico - World Cup preview
The last-16 clash in Fortaleza is live on ITV on Sunday 29 June
Netherlands v Mexico, 4pm ITV (kick-off 5pm) Like Brazil v Chile yesterday, this is a last-16 tie where it's a real shame to lose either team from the competition. That was an attacking slugfest; this is a battle between Brazil 2014's two most tactically astute sides, both of whom excel at measuring up the opposition, neutralising them, then picking them off. Mexico's main threat comes from their wing-backs, so the Dutch might continue with the five-man defence that so effectively shut Chile down in the last group game. Liverpool fans will raise a nostalgic eyebrow at the sight of Dirk Kuyt playing left-back. Apart from Carlos Salcido replacing the suspended Jose Vasquez as the midfield holder, Mexico are likely to be unchanged - which might be a relief for the Holland defence, who'll be nervously waiting for Javier Hernandez to come off the bench and replace the much slower Oscar Peralta. At the other end of the pitch, Robin van Persie is back from a one-match ban and could be the difference between the two teams. Holland's spectacular win over Spain showed that, even if most of the other nine players are functional drones, van Persie and the blazing Arjen Robben are powerful enough to do the match-winning by themselves. Don't forget, however, something that wasn't a factor in either of the knockout games so far: the conditions. Mexico will be vastly more comfortable in the 29C heat of Fortaleza. Can Robin and Robben run for 90 minutes - or 120?
World Cup 2014: stop getting Brazil players' names wrong
Can Fraijee, Hamires and Hoolky win the World Cup? Impress your friends by being the only person using the correct pronunciation of all the Brazil stars
As Brazil take on Chile in the last 16 of the 2014 World Cup, no doubt you'll be avidly discussing tactics with your football-loving friends. Is Fred useless up front? Should Hulk make way for a more defensive-minded player, Ramires perhaps? Well, beware. As you sip your Brahma and hold forth, you're almost certainly saying all the players' names completely wrongly. Even speaking Portuguese is no help unless you've done that in Brazil. "Brazilian Portuguese is very different from Portuguese Portuguese," says Tim Vickery, the BBC's South American football correspondent. "Some people would argue that they’re different languages." Even BBC commentators regularly use Anglicised pronunciations, although Vickery says this isn't an editorial guideline aimed at not confusing the viewers. "I just think they don't know. But some of [the BBC commentators] have done their homework. Whereas I watched the last Uruguay game on ITV and they massacred the Uruguayan names. Massacred them." Here's our guide to going one better than Clive Tyldesley and Jonathan Pearce... JULIO CESAR Wrong: "Hoolio Says Arr" Right: "ZHOO-lio SEZZ-uh" Tim Vickery: "Usually the stress is on the penultimate vowel, but there’s an accent on Júlio." MARCELO Wrong: "Marchello" Right: "Mar-SELL-uh" Tim Vickery: "The 'o' at the end is kind of swallowed, but it’s there. 'Marchello' is an outrage." RAMIRES Wrong: "Ram E Rez" Right: "HAM-ee-rez" Tim Vickery: "The R at the start is always an H sound. So the striker you know as Ronaldo is 'Honaldo'." FRED Wrong: "Fred" Right: "FRAY-zhee" Tim Vickery: "Also, [for Hulk] 'HOO-lky'. In Brazil, 'Wayne Rooney' becomes 'Wayney Rooney'. But sometimes if a vowel is there, they remove it, so Nigerian coach Stephen Keshi is 'Ketch'." WILLIAN Wrong: "Willy Anne" Right: "oo-ILL-yan" Tim Vickery: "They don’t really have a W, so the W is a kind of 'ui' sound."
The last-16 clash in Rio de Janeiro is live on ITV on Saturday 28 June
Colombia v Uruguay, 8.30pm ITV (kick-off 9pm) Who are the teams of the tournament so far? Holland, certainly. France, maybe. Mexico or Costa Rica, perhaps. But with nine points out of nine in the group stages, Colombia definitely have a shout. Their powerful, pacy, sexy football really ought to be too much for the Uruguayans. A delicious quarter-final, again versus South American opposition, awaits them. The star of the side is James Rodriguez, the 22-year-old Monaco midfielder who was previously stuck out on the left wing for his country to accommodate striker Radamel Falcao. With Colombia's most famous player injured, Rodriguez has moved into the hole and played superbly, dropping deep to build attacks when necessary or getting forward to score goals himself. His jink, shimmy and chip against Japan is one of the competition's finest goals so far. Rodriguez will seek to spray balls into the channels behind the Uruguayan full-backs, particularly looking for the exciting and very quick Juan Cuadrado, of Fiorentina, on the right. He can be virtually unplayable. Uruguay will have to rely on their organisation, stubborn determination and aggression. Will they acquire a galvanising siege mentality in the absence of their talisman and biggest attacking threat Luis Suarez, or will they just be toothless?
The Group G finale is live on the Red Button and the BBC Sport website
Portugal v Ghana (Group G), Red Button/BBC Sport website (kick-off 5pm) It will be a great shame if this is the last we see of Ghana. Infuriating in their 1-2 loss to the USA, exhilarating in their 2-2 draw with Germany, it's almost impossible not to support them as a neutral. But they do need to win one. Both their games so far have seen them play in an almost self-parodically wasteful and heedless manner, despite having easily enough talent and expertise to deserve a place in the last 16. Ghana are certainly without Sulley Muntari, who they normally rely on to bind the team together, and probably star playmaker Kevin-Prince Boateng too. Why? Muntari was suspended for this match anyway but both players have reportedly been expelled from the team camp, in Muntari's case because he allegedly slapped a member of the Ghanaian equivalent of the FA. Oh, Ghana. Portugal are lacking Fabio Coentrao and have decisions to make over Hugo Almeida and Helder Postiga. Pepe returns from suspension to bolster the defence. The only question with regard to Portugal, however, is the fitness of Cristiano Ronaldo. Amid reports that he is risking his career by playing on with an unhealed injury, he hauled himself through the thriller against the USA and was almost hopping on one leg by the end, making no effort at all to track back and leaving his team, as they so often have been in recent years, vulnerable down their left flank. (Ghana, ominously, have been strong down their right in both games so far.) Yet it was Ronaldo who found half a yard with seconds to go and then delivered the perfect cross for Portugal to equalise and keep their hopes dimly alive. Ronaldo didn't celebrate, perhaps because he knows he can't now be the star of the tournament. At this stage, getting them out of the group is a Herculean task: Portugal might need to win big here.
The Group G finale is live on BBC1 today
USA v Germany (Group G), 4.30pm BBC1 (kick-off 5pm) Oh Group G, you mad and lovely kitten, how we'll miss you. Germany and the USA both have 4 points but neither can relax, with the result of Ghana v Portugal as wonderfully unpredictable as every game in this pool has been. Germany were flattered by the Portuguese self-disembowelling in front of them in their opening game. As they cruised to a 4-0 win against ten men, whispers began about them winning the tournament, and about hat-trick hero Thomas Mueller once again topping the tournament goals chart. Then enter Ghana in the heat of Fortaleza, carving open that all-centre-back German defence at will, and throwing away two chances to win 3-2 in one of Brazil 2014's most thrilling matches. To make sure of qualification, Germany now have to steady the ship, again in warm conditions at lunchtime in Brasilia, against a superbly spirited USA side. The Americans have to assume that a broken Portugal team can't hold the Ghanians, which means they need at least a draw today. Their increasingly talismanic coach, Jürgen Klinsmann, has set them up as narrow, compact, hard to beat, dangerous on the break. He's been bold in his squad selection and his in-game substitutions. The question is, how aware are he and the German coach, Klinsmann's friend and former assistant Jogi Löw, that a draw puts both teams through to the last 16?
Peston is right: left-wing bias at the BBC is a myth
The economics editor has highlighted the real problem at the Beeb, argues Jack Seale
“Bollocks.” As counter-arguments go, it was a succinct one. BBC economics editor Robert Peston had been asked whether former business editor Jeff Randall was correct to say the Beeb is institutionally biased to the left. This idea never goes away. Any publicly funded organisation will always have the accusation hurled at it by those who see such bodies as a curb on their freedoms, and the political climate in this country has recently swung still further in that direction, so the attacks on the BBC for being overtly lefty have increased. But the evidence says otherwise. If the BBC is institutionally left-wing, its key personnel should be too. Yet the recently departed chairman Chris Patten is a former Conservative cabinet minister. Veteran newspaper editor Andrew Neil, presenter of two high-profile political shows, is quite openly right-wing. Making the case that Andrew Marr and former national Young Conservatives chairman Nick Robinson, two of BBC TV’s other leading political broadcasters, are rabid pinkos is a hopeless task. You’d also expect to see a flow of top staff leaving the bike-riding, kale-chewing Beeb to join revealingly right-on organisations. But successful BBC journalists have gone on to work as advisers for David Cameron, George Osborne and Boris Johnson (twice). Peston himself got his current job when Stephanie Flanders left to work at JP Morgan Asset Management. This is all very curious. Perhaps the BBC’s output can be found to skew left? Studies from Cardiff University, based on simple counts of who appears and how often, have found the reverse. Analysis of the airtime given to different political parties found that, while the government of the day is always favoured on the BBC, that dominance increased twofold after the Conservatives took power in 2010. The BBC is much more likely than other broadcasters to turn to right-wing politicians or business leaders, Cardiff Uni says – a thesis borne out by totting up the number of appearances by business representatives and right-wing journalists on Question Time, as compared to union leaders or environmentalists. The BBC’s most august political forum is moderated by David Dimbleby, another face of the Corporation who probably doesn't secretly hanker for a workers’ uprising. Peston’s response, however, was more interesting than simply denying that the Beeb is as left-wing as claimed. He said this: “Because the BBC's routinely so anxious about being accused of being left-wing, it quite often veers in what you might call a very pro-establishment, rather right-wing direction, so that it's not accused of that." He added: "If I'm honest, the thing that's most frustrating is... the BBC is completely obsessed with the agenda set by newspapers. There's a slightly 'safety first' thing at the BBC - if we think the Mail or the Telegraph is gonna lead with it, then we should lead with it. I happen to think that's mad. But it does exist." Here is the real problem: the BBC’s mounting fear of criticism and loss of bottle. Right-wing papers like the Mail try to set the agenda by shouting the loudest, daring everyone else to risk looking wishy-washy by disagreeing. Peston’s only one voice claiming that individual programme editors at the BBC tend to limply follow their lead, but he’s a very well-placed source, and if he’s right it might explain why, for instance, Nigel Farage – the human embodiment of that loudhailer, fact-averse strand of hardline politics – finds a home on the BBC so bewilderingly often, including being Question Time’s most-used guest. It might explain how hollow scare stories such as Bulgarian and Romanian immigrants imminently flooding the UK can end up leading the BBC1 evening news, or how the privatisation of the NHS doesn’t. Newspapers are dominated by plutocrat proprietors and corporate advertisers. They are themselves businesses. The BBC is, or should be, uniquely free of such taints. It’s natural that it be to the left of its print rivals (although a study by the Media Standards Trust of which think tanks get exposure in which outlets placed the Beeb pretty squarely in the centre) – as indeed are the public, according to numerous polls. For those of us who believe the BBC is currently gravely under threat, a supine news agenda is a loud alarm bell. The Beeb’s enemies will keep hitting it, whatever it does. Letting them set the parameters of debate is, like Ed Miliband awkwardly holding up a copy of The Sun, a futile and self-destructive gesture. There's a huge audience out there for a sober, fact-based antidote, not a tail-chasing imitation. Right now, the Beeb needs those people on its side to fight for its future. The recent uproar about the BBC's non-coverage of the People's Assembly anti-austerity demo in London might not have been too heavy an indictment on its own terms - it's likely that the demo didn't have the 50,000 attendees its organisers claimed, and wasn't particularly noteworthy - but the anger came from a feeling of having been repeatedly let down. In 2003, the attack on Iraq – the major political event of my and many other people’s lifetimes, and a moment when unbiased reporting could scarcely have been more crucial - was instructive. Knowing that the BBC was the public’s most trusted source of news and therefore key to the push towards invasion, the government and warmongers in the media hammered it for what was supposed to be an anti-war stance. The hoo-hah about a single Today programme report claiming a WMD dossier had been “sexed up” led to the resignation of the director-general and the chairman. The BBC’s spirit of robust inquiry has never recovered. Yet a Cardiff study showed that the BBC had in fact been the most pro-war broadcaster, less likely than anyone to quote critics of the invasion or to mention Iraqi casualties. Its critics were demanding that the BBC be something it shouldn’t be, but already was. Lose your editorial independence and you lose the ability to deal properly with stories of fundamental importance. At the moment, the obvious example is climate change: repeatedly the BBC ropes in unqualified "skeptics" to talk against experts. The scientific consensus is overwhelming, so this "false balance", to use the phrase from a critical March report from the Science & Technology Select Committee, can only be an attempt to avoid flak: there's a large overlap between those who believe the BBC is too left-wing and those who think decades of rigorously cross-checked and peer-reviewed climate science are an outlandish hoax. The BBC urgently needs to stop listening to those people. The stakes are too high. Follow @jackseale
Ecuador v France (Group E), 8.30pm BBC1 (kick-off 9pm) One of the three most impressive teams in the tournament so far - France can duke it out with Holland and Mexico - plays out what's almost a meaningless fixture for them against Ecuador. Only a big win for Ecuador, and another for Switzerland against Honduras, can send France home. Pushing for a third straight start and a fourth goal will be Karim Benzema, for whom no game is meaningless since he's chasing the Golden Boot. Neymar has a one-goal advantage over the Frenchman, but the Real Madrid marksman will fancy himself to score here, even if he's once again pushed wider to accommodate Olivier Giroud. Can he produce a finish as brilliant as the one he delivered two agonising seconds after the final whistle blew against Switzerland? Ecuador are a functional but occasionally effective side, with Enner Valencia having so far matched Benzema with three goals against the same opposition. They have to beat France or be at the mercy of Switzerland's winning margin against Honduras. On recent form, a French lapse looks unlikely. Some hope for Ecuador: deep-lying France playmaker Yohan Cabaye is suspended, while both centre-backs are probably out. Mamadou Sakho is injured and Raphael Varane is sick.
Honduras v Switzerland - World Cup preview
Honduras v Switzerland (Group E), 8.30pm BBC3 (kick-off 9pm) Switzerland's flukey win against Ecuador means they're still alive in the competition, despite terribly disappointing performances in that game and particularly against France. The Swiss rolled over completely to hand the impressive French a 5-0 lead, with their inability to regain any control of the game after conceding making them look particularly naive. But the two late consolation goals, admittedly scored long after France had mentally started celebrating, were glimmers of what this talented young Swiss squad can do. Honduras were also roundly outclassed by France but will hope to build on their 1-2 loss to Ecuador, when they were in the game for long periods. Their scrappy, physical, old-fashioned approach might rattle the fragile Switzerland midfield a little. Plus Wilson Palacios is back in central midfield for Honduras, while the Swiss have a problem at centre-back: Steve von Bergen has gone home after being kicked in the face by Olivier Giroud but his replacement partway through the game against France, Philippe Senderos, was a disaster. Expect third choice Fabian Schaer to step in, and look out: he scored a few goals in qualifying.