Radio Times
type: channel
link: https://www.radiotimes.com
date: 2025-02-12T17:32:19.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: Justin Webb on how his grandfather became the first Radio Times editor
items: ‘Rugby is the new boxing’: why rugby is the new bad boy of sport
items: Is the era of the 'big beast' news anchor over?
items: Justin Webb: Broadcasters must stand up to the "keyboard warriors"
items: Army: Behind the New Frontlines – what's the point of the British Army?
items: Why the driverless car will change everything – forever
items: Bring on the single interview – the best way to get to know our politicians
items: Why journalists aren't as mean as they used to be
items: Why former CIA director John Brennan and President Trump are sworn enemies
items: Computerised news means the next John Humphrys could be a robot
items: What to expect from the aftermath of the US election
items: What to expect from the first US presidential debate
items: Brexit: did we get it wrong?
items: Do news broadcasters get paid too much?
items: Inside Obama's White House – what is life really like as President of the United States?
items: How much is your pet's life worth?
items: The importance of personality in sport
items: Why The Daily Show's Jon Stewart was a formidable news force
items: Reith lecturer and rock-star doctor Atul Gawande on life, death and how to cure the NHS
items: Why our relationship with Andy Murray is the essence of tennis
items: Spielberg’s film is about Lincoln, but it is also about now

Justin Webb on how his grandfather became the first Radio Times editor
type: item
date: 2023-09-20T14:29:34.000Z
creator: Justin Webb
subject: Current Affairs
subject: TV
subject: Interview
subject: Radio Times Centenary
description: "When Reith asked Leonard Crocombe to set up The Radio Times he was making quite a statement."
encoded: This interview was originally published in Radio Times magazine. He is one of the forgotten characters of British journalism. In his day he was a power in the nation, a fan of new media and a manipulator of the old. A friend of the BBC general manager John Reith (until the boss fired him) but a friend mostly of the reader, the listener, the folks at home. He was a popular journalist in the days when most journalism was still stuffy. In that respect, he set us all free. When Reith asked Leonard Crocombe to set up The Radio Times, he was making quite a statement. Crocombe was already a hugely successful editor of an outlet he was turning into one of the most recognisable brands on any pre-war news stand. Tit-Bits dealt in titbits; competitions, slices of life and contributions from readers for which they could be paid. There were adverts for life insurance, biscuits in those tins we now regard as collectors’ items and tonics with various supposed but unproven benefits. Crocombe brought this zest for real life and real people's concerns to the new magazine for radio listeners – from the outset, Radio Times was about you, the listener. He would have loved the magazine's adaptation to TV, just as he would have welcomed digital TV, podcasts and whatever comes next. In the photograph he might look a tad fusty for modern tastes, but that's how cutting-edge chaps dressed then. And he really was at the forefront of any innovation going. In October 1922, he became the first Fleet Street editor to make a gramophone record – as a stand-up comedian. To Make You Smile cost three shillings and sixpence. In March of the following year, he was the first editor to make a radio broadcast, from the London station of the Marconi Company. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2023/09/GettyImages-870101930-431a549-e1695219731219.jpg" width="4903" height="3272" alt="British politician, doctor and television executive Charles Hill, Baron Hill of Luton (1904 - 1…

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‘Rugby is the new boxing’: why rugby is the new bad boy of sport
type: item
date: 2018-08-19T08:43:10.000Z
creator: Justin Webb
subject: Formula-1
subject: News
subject: Rugby Union
subject: Sport
subject: TV
subject: Comment
description: The game is becoming too dangerous to play, Radio 4's Justin Webb warns
encoded: It was the winter of discontent: 1978, the fag end of that dark decade, long before we thought much about child safety, or in fact anyone’s safety. One weekend, I turned out to play rugby for Winscombe, a village club in Somerset that, when short of a few players, turned to the local school for help. I was told to play tight-head prop, a position, in those amateur days, given to psychopathic bricklayers. I was a 17-year-old hippy with shoulder-length hair and a liking for the Beach Boys. The only thing I remember about the game was that at half-time – as I spat blood into a bucket – my team-mates drank beer out of a watering can. I never played again. But I have watched rugby all my life. Watched as the appeal of the sport has grown as it embraced professionalism. When I went to see Bath (my home team) play in the 1970s, there were a few hundred stalwarts behind a rope. Now they are building a stadium for 18,000. Sport on TV 2018: how to watch the Premier League US PGA Championship 2018 and more What Premier League matches are live on TV this weekend? RadioTimes.com newsletter: get the latest TV and entertainment news direct to your inbox On TV, too, the game is booming. At the end of the month BT Sport will restart its schedule of live matches, all weekend, every weekend. BBC Wales will join the party with their own season of live matches. So what is the problem? The obvious stuff first: the England football team and their manager seem nicer than the England rugby folk. The World Cup football team’s captain Harry Kane is a clean-living role model sort of fellow; Dylan Hartley, the rugby captain, has been cited for biting, punching, eye gouging, and verbally abusing a referee. Whereas England’s footballers seemed so cheery on their Russian World Cup capers, the rugby players made a pig’s ear of a South African tour and ended up fighting with their own fans. All true. But if that were the only problem – the vulgarity, as one commentator put it – it could be easily fi…

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Is the era of the 'big beast' news anchor over?
type: item
date: 2018-04-04T09:42:52.000Z
creator: Justin Webb
subject: Current Affairs
subject: News
subject: Radio
subject: TV
subject: audio
description: In light of US anchors losing their shows with little impact on viewing figures, BBC Radio 4's Today programme presenter Justin Webb wonders what the future holds for British broadcasters
encoded: I’m still scarred by that morning. The usual early start. The frantic reading of briefs. Then into the studio a few seconds before the start of the Today programme at 6am – the sound of the pips. I look down at the script: “Good morning and welcome to Today. With John Humphrys and John Humphrys.” Oh yes: I know all about being airbrushed. About the power of the big beast anchor. Who sucks up all the attention. And money. Huw Edwards presented the News at Ten the wrong way round and people couldn't handle it Huw Edwards deals with BBC News at 10 technical glitch like an absolute pro So imagine how closely I’ve been following the news from America. The news is this. Someone has finally said it: the emperor has no clothes. At times that wasn’t a figure of speech. Some of the self-styled emperors we’re talking about didn’t have clothes at the time of their misdeeds, or wore only those towelling wraps provided by hotels for men (so some of them apparently thought) conducting business with women guests. But now they are gone. It hasn’t made big news here, compared with the Hollywood trainwreck, but it should because in one important respect it might be showing us the future for news programmes. What has happened in America in the past six months is the self-destruction of the network anchor. Bill O’Reilly of Fox News, Matt Lauer, who hosted NBC’s long-running morning show Today, and Charlie Rose of CBS’s morning show weren’t just kings, they were titans. O’Reilly and Lauer were paid $25 million each. Rose survived on only $8 million but had his own franchise on another channel, so we’re given to understand he didn’t have to queue for a bus. All three have been credibly accused of varying degrees of sexual misconduct, and all have gone. But here is what happened next. The ratings for their shows stayed the same, or actually rose. As Vanity Fair magazine put it, in a headline that only slightly jumped the gun: “Today and CBS This Morning Prove They Never Needed Matt Lauer o…

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Justin Webb: Broadcasters must stand up to the "keyboard warriors"
type: item
date: 2018-03-05T13:50:15.000Z
creator: Justin Webb
subject: News
subject: Radio
subject: audio
description: The BBC Radio 4 Today presenter says that the idea that the BBC is part of some national conspiracy is "actually barmy"
encoded: The BBC’s entertainment correspondent Colin Patterson was in a state of high excitement the other day. Just as the Baftas were winding up he managed to fight his way to the front of a gaggle of hangers-on and came face to face with Winston Churchill or, as he is sometimes known, Gary Oldman. The Bafta-winner had made a sweet but conventional speech about Churchill. But our man Colin was having none of it. Faced with Oldman, he posed a killer question: what would Churchill have made of the Time’s Up campaign against workplace sexual harassment? Justin Webb: Why the driverless car will change everything – forever Why journalists aren’t as mean as they used to be Colin told me, in his early morning interview for Today, that Oldman had been forced to think quite hard before suggesting that the great man, “was fascinated by the new. I’d like to believe he’d have supported it.” Oh, pull the other one, Gary. And Colin: nice question – a real gotcha moment – which made for a lively segment on Today. But really? What are we all on? Where does the politicisation of everything end? The answer is, in a generalised madness that subsumes us all. Here’s an example. Shortly after I had announced the latest twist in the Oxfam saga the other day I received a message from a listener. “How convenient that all this Oxfam publicity comes just as Brexit is going wrong,” she suggested. “Were The Times and the BBC keeping it up their sleeve?” Here’s the reason the message was so concerning: it was written not by some fanboy or fangirl of some “ism” that might change the world. Her online profile seemed to describe a thoughtful person living a moderate life with a non-political hinterland; actually it reminded me rather of my late mum. I think the writer keeps bees. Loves people. Travels. But she seriously thinks that the BBC is attacking Oxfam in order to cover up the government’s troubles over Brexit. We spend a good deal of time discussing online abuse. But we spend less time worrying abo…

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Army: Behind the New Frontlines – what's the point of the British Army?
type: item
date: 2017-10-18T15:02:33.000Z
creator: Justin Webb
subject: Documentaries
subject: News
subject: TV
description: As a new documentary on BBC2 examines the role of the British Army post-Iraq, Major General Rupert Jones tells broadcaster Justin Webb how serving in the Armed Forces has changed
encoded: Major General Rupert Jones doesn’t want to talk about himself. “I have this all the time, and I would rather not say any more.” Fair enough. The General is the son of a famous and much respected father, Colonel H Jones, who died in the Falklands during a one-man charge on an Argentine trench in the Battle of Goose Green. He was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross. Rupert was 13 at the time. He mentions his father in his contributions to this series – points out that he understands very well the cost of war - so naturally, the question arises, did you think twice before signing up for your own army career? Did you do it because of your father, or perhaps in spite of him? In his pre-broadcast interview with me the General will say only this: “I never made a conscious decision to join the army, it’s in my blood. I care passionately about the British Army and the soldiers in it.” His mother’s view of his career choice? “Like all parents my mother supported me in what I wanted to do.” And you see what he does in this compelling set of programmes, along with what the junior ranks do, and get to make up your own mind about whether the tasks we set our army in 2017 are right and fair and whether the soldiers seem up to the job. An army smaller than at any time since the days of Cromwell is being asked to do everything now, but fight. In 2016 no British soldiers died in combat, the first year with no loss of life since 1968. Post Afghanistan, post Iraq: what is the point of the army? What do we want them to do? Let’s start at the top with General Jones himself, the man we see in charge in the first programme of the series on the ground in Iraq: steady, practical, thoughtful, open, with enough of that stiff upper lip to prevent him talking about his father but not so much to make him insensitive about the complex job he needs his troops to achieve. It’s tough work and he is open about the frustrations: “The days of the clean-cut war, the clean-cut battle, the Union Jack f…

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Why the driverless car will change everything – forever
type: item
date: 2017-06-29T09:50:00.000Z
creator: Justin Webb
subject: Documentaries
subject: News
subject: TV
description: As new a Horizon documentary explores, computerised vehicles are the future – but where will this road lead us?
encoded: I am cruising down the middle lane of the M4, doing a nice relaxed 50mph or so. Up behind me comes a white van. Flash, flash, go the headlamps, as he edges ever closer. Me, I just keep on tooling along. White van man flips, overtakes on the inside, and as he passes makes a gesture too rude to be shared with readers of RT. You’re thinking, “Serves you right, I’m with the van driver on this.” Ah, but here’s the point of this story. I was not in control! It wasn’t me, officer (or white van man) – it was the vehicle that had taken the decision to hog the middle lane. I was driving the latest Tesla sports car and – as I showed the white van man before he sped off with a look of confusion and fear in his eyes – I didn’t even have my hands on the wheel. Yes: in traffic, on the M4, somewhere close to Slough. That’s motoring. Or at least, that’s the future of motoring. The car is taking over. Like a gathering wave, it begins with my fancy Tesla (borrowed for the day) and nervous company representatives saying, “We recommend you keep your hands on the wheel,” but it ends with what the boffins call “Level Five” – full automation. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p056jxyw/player

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Bring on the single interview – the best way to get to know our politicians
type: item
date: 2017-05-22T14:59:29.000Z
creator: Justin Webb
subject: Current Affairs
subject: News
subject: TV
description: Andrew Neil's one-to-ones will provide enough time for foolish soundbites to be exposed and for coherent points to be made, says Justin Webb
encoded: Vladimir Putin holds press conferences. Hassan Rouhani has a Twitter account. Robert Mugabe might reply to politely worded letters. You can ask these gentlemen things. But don’t try to follow up. That’s what lands you in jail in Russia, Iran or Zimbabwe. That’s where the club of world leaders willing to be properly open with their citizens gets way, way smaller. And that is where Britain can be justly proud of broadcasters still powerful enough to force politicians in the direction of openness, even if their natural instinct, or those of their spin doctors, is to run a mile from real interactions. When the party leaders sit down this week with Andrew Neil for their primetime grillings, the initial questions he asks are pretty obvious. He will certainly ask Tim Fallon about his Brexit plans. He will ask Jeremy Corbyn about nuclear weapons and Theresa May about fixing the energy market and 'dementia tax'. But the crunch comes after the initial questions are answered or batted away or evaded. Politicians look visibly queasy when you say – as the great Brian Walden used to during his Weekend World interviews back in the 1980s – “Ah, now that is a fascinating answer...” You don’t even need to say it. Relatively long interviews with highly informed and quick-witted interviewers are still, in my view, the best way to get to the essence of our politicians. Andrew Neil True, there was criticism of the Prime Minister’s decision not to debate face-to-face with other party leaders, and of Corbyn’s subsequent decision not to appear in that format if May was staying out. It’s also true that the appearances of Corbyn and May with live Question Time audiences in York on 2 June will be gripping and quite possibly headline-making. But if we are really interested in getting to the bottom of what these people really think and how consistent they are in that thinking, bring on the single interview. And give it time. John Major tells the story of visiting the then Russian President Boris…

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Why journalists aren't as mean as they used to be
type: item
date: 2017-05-04T04:30:00.000Z
creator: Justin Webb
subject: Current Affairs
subject: News
subject: TV
description: Empathy is at the heart of the modern reporter’s craft, argues Radio 4's Today host Justin Webb
encoded: What do you do when a report is being played on the radio or TV? You listen attentively. You silence the dog with a juicy bone. You concentrate. You shush the kids. No, me neither. Sometimes of course your attention is caught. You are genuinely interested or genuinely shocked. But often, let us be frank, the mind wanders. The opportunity is there for conversation until something better comes along. This happens, too, when your job is to present the stuff. Sometimes in the morning the news is so gripping and the need to keep abreast of what people are saying is so obviously huge that we sit for three hours in the Today studio without saying a stray word. But that’s not always the case. And one of the great pleasures when a slow Bank Holiday programme is unfolding on your shift is that you have a chance to chew the cud with your fellow presenter. And while I was chatting to John Humphrys the other day, we agreed on a Big Idea: that we are not as unpleasant as we used to be. To explain. One of the great journalistic books of the 1970s was entitled “Anyone Here Been Raped and Speaks English?”. You get the picture: the manly thing, when I was a young reporter, and certainly when John was in the late 1960s and early 70s, was to be brusque and brash and care little about the suffering you saw. Or at least to pretend that this was the case. Nowadays that approach would make you look like a monster and an idiot. When the late tabloid journalist and all-round good egg Chris Buckland wrote, “The first casualty of war is room service”, he got away with it because he was charming and well liked and it was a typically funny and mildly ironic line. But even he would be hard pressed to use those words from Syria today and keep the respect of his peers. And this is not the result of any directives imposed from above: it is the impact of societal changes that have put empathy at the heart of the reporter's craft. It’s a commonplace observation these days that empathy is on the wane. …

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Why former CIA director John Brennan and President Trump are sworn enemies
type: item
date: 2017-04-04T11:13:00.000Z
creator: Justin Webb
subject: Current Affairs
subject: News
subject: TV
description: The “spy who hates Trump” will be giving this year’s Dimbleby Lecture
encoded: When I was 16, I told my uncle Oliver that I wanted to be a spy. He looked at me with kindly concern. “Not sure you’re cut out for it really,” he said. “It’s rather private work, and they tend to look for people who are, well, discreet. And able to look after themselves.” Oliver was right: I was not obviously cut out for, ahem, “government service”. But he was. Oliver was a former soldier who spoke fluent Arabic and travelled round the Middle East before working for a time for GCHQ in Cheltenham and at various dingy Government buildings in London. That was what spies did in the Cold War. They kept an eye on people. Fast-forward to the modern era, to the world of digital communications. A world of metadata. Or fake news. Of Edward Snowden and Wikileaks. A world in which Russia, which my uncle and his pals kept in check, is able to seize territory in Europe and employ people to muddy online waters. A world in which spy agencies and the President of the United States are at war: a direct, loud, aggressive open war. A world, in other words, in which intelligence gathering is in quite a mess. And if one man above all others knows the size and shape and smell of that mess, it is John Brennan. There have been some wonderful Dimbleby Lectures down the ages, and some very august speakers. But never in its history has there been such a perfect matching of man and moment. John Brennan has worked for three US administrations, rising to be Barack Obama’s CIA director in 2013, and one of his closest and most trusted aides. Brennan is the man who organised the targeted killing of terrorists using drones – a highly controversial policy that has led to the deaths of thousands of people, at least four of them US citizens. He is no softy. But John Brennan is Donald Trump’s least favourite spy. And Donald Trump is John Brennan’s least favourite president. This is a Dimbleby Lecture with an edge. To a fastidious career spy like Brennan, the coming of Donald Trump feels like a moment of …

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Computerised news means the next John Humphrys could be a robot
type: item
date: 2016-11-28T09:54:00.000Z
creator: Justin Webb
subject: Current Affairs
subject: News
subject: TV
description: Today presenter Justin Webb investigates how computers are generating our news and invading our Facebook streams
encoded: Picture the scene: I’m sitting in the Today studio next to John Humphrys, who has just begun an interview about rural buses. A pleasant-sounding man is complaining that he can’t get one home from the pub and John has seized on this thought: “You spend a lot of time in the pub, then?!” To the casual listener nothing untoward has happened. But I’m thinking this is unusual levity at an early hour and once John and I have a chance to talk he confesses: “I’ve been recording Celebrity Mastermind interviews and we have to get them to say something funny and I think I was trying to do the same with that chap…” Ah, we are only human. Even John, whose focus and tenaciousness are justly the stuff of legend, can veer off-piste now and then. That, of course, is why live radio broadcasting still has such a place in people’s lives. Anything can happen. (Even at ten past seven on a drizzly Saturday morning.) And that is why no machine, no artificial intelligence can be better than the real beating heart of a live broadcaster. Because, like it or not, the world of news is changing and the ability of machines to take over is being researched and discussed as never before. Tuesday was a great day for W Roberts, as the junior pitcher threw a perfect game to carry Virginia to a 2-0 victory over George Washington at Davenport Field. That was a report last year (reproduced by the website Copyblogger) of a kind that is now commonplace on some web platforms. It was entirely written by a machine, based on inputs of the scores and “knowledge” of the way sport is covered. The Associated Press use the same type of computer inputs to “write” financial stories where data is turned into prose. When I began in journalism the people who decided what was important were elderly white dipsomaniacs who had left school at 14 and commuted into London from saloon bars in the Home Counties. They knew what was what. Middle East at the top, motorway accident in the middle: skateboarding duck to finish. And ho…

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What to expect from the aftermath of the US election
type: item
date: 2016-11-08T12:00:00.000Z
creator: Justin Webb
subject: Current Affairs
subject: News
subject: TV
description: It’s been a gaudy, freakish circus of an election but the result affects us all – if Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump win
encoded: It’s not fair, is it? Whether we like it or not, the choice Americans make in the Presidential election on 8 November affects all of us: rich and poor, north and south, give-a-damn or couldn’t-give-a-damn. The American economy is huge and vibrant, they spend more on their military than the next eight countries combined and US popular culture and technical prowess seep into all our lives. Yet when it comes to selecting the boss of all of this, we don’t get a vote. Instead, someone who might never have been out of Ohio, or a Harvard professor, or a 25-year-old Silicon Valley billionaire, or a hippy in Oregon, spaced out on recently legalised marijuana, get to choose for us. They are among the millions of Americans who will go to the polls this week and, at least partly, decide the fate of much of the world over the next four years. Nice folks, many of them – but not all of them folks who see the world through our eyes. Still, the good news is that you can watch it all unfold. Even better than that, they have put on quite a show this year. This election has been as gaudy and freakish as any circus the world has ever seen. In fact, in these tremulous, safe-spacey times, if this election were a circus, the acts would have been banned. It has pitted two of the least popular candidates in modern American history against each other and the result has been suitably horrifying. A poll last summer asked Americans to give their appraisal of Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. The Russian leader came first. To take a positive view, Trump is an outsider with a business brain and a message that appeals to people for whom life has been disappointing of late. He has energised parts of the electorate other candidates could not reach. And Hillary Clinton is a woman who has dealt with the tough business of wielding American power during her time as Secretary of State. She would also be, of course, the first woman president. Actually, the president isn’t quite the boss tha…

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What to expect from the first US presidential debate
type: item
date: 2016-09-26T11:15:00.000Z
creator: Justin Webb
subject: Current Affairs
subject: News
subject: TV
description: The grudge match to end all grudge matches: Hillary Clinton versus Donald Trump. Who will come out on top?
encoded: Ronald Reagan was behind in the polls before the televised debates of the 1980 presidential election. People thought he was an extremist. That he might start the third world war. That he was nothing but a two-bit actor, an unserious man. Remind you of anyone? Make no mistake: the TV debates of the 2016 election are Donald Trump’s last remaining opportunity to put his madcap campaign on the road to victory. He must convince Americans that he has what it takes to be president. He must charm and persuade. Or blow up. Hit out. Amaze and horrify a nation already reeling from a presidential campaign like none in recent times. He could do that too – he could effectively end the thing weeks before the poll. There is talk of him being more interested in starting a TV network than solving the Syrian civil war. If so, this could be where he goes for that option: all guns blazing. Or does he see a real chance of being president now, courtesy of Clinton’s pneumonia? What effect will her health have on his behaviour? Let us be clear: of all the live TV debates in US election history this is the one to watch. Indeed, in all the live TV events in the history of mankind, you could argue that none has been bigger than this. “Box Office” doesn’t begin to describe it: 26 September 2016 will go down in broadcasting history. It’s worth noting that the importance of the three presidential debates this year is itself unusual; yet another manifestation of the weirdness of 2016. That Reagan election aside, the televised debates are not the deciders in American presidential battles. Mitt Romney wiped the floor with Barack Obama in their first encounter in 2012 but – as predicted – was swept aside in the election. View oEmbed on the source website John Kerry damaged George W Bush in 2004 (Bush looked so wooden in the debate I attended at Miami that people wondered if he was wearing an earpiece and having the answers fed into it) but again the loser of the debate won the election. View oEmbed o…

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Brexit: did we get it wrong?
type: item
date: 2016-07-10T06:26:00.000Z
creator: Justin Webb
subject: Current Affairs
subject: News
subject: TV
description: Justin Webb explores the role of broadcasters in politics
encoded: Never, since those eerie days after 9/11, has the news mattered so much. For political reporters and presenters, these are the days you live for: you are experiencing history, communicating change. Sleep is for losers. And yet being in the spotlight puts you, potentially, in the firing line. Amid the shock of the referendum result – and the many aftershocks – is the question: “Did we get this right?” Were the tools there for the nation to make sense of the decision it faced? One of the clearest messages during the referendum campaign was that audiences were hungry for real knowledge. People wanted to go beyond claim and counter-claim so that they could work out what was true. And some of those on the losing side think they were let down. The Oscar-winning film producer Lord Puttnam is among those who wonder if impartiality rules torpedoed the search for truth: he accused the BBC in particular of providing “constipated” coverage. The impartiality question is a reasonable one to raise – and it is one the BBC has grappled with on subjects such as climate change, where most scientists are on one side of the argument but some very feisty campaigners think they’re wrong. But the question has to be part of a wider debate. We tend to regard campaigning as promising policies or aspirations that can be tested against the facts of the real world. A combination of forensic interviewing and zealous fact-checking strips away the nonsense and allows the public to make a balanced choice. Seriously? In the modern world, this is not necessarily what happens. It is a truism to say we’re postideological: we don’t vote tribally for “the workers” or “toffs”, based on a love for socialism or capitalism. It is equally clichéd to talk of post-factual debate, where no one accepts the version of reality presented by anyone but their own side. Our real problem might be that we are entering, as the Americans seem to have entered, an era of identity politics where the politicians, the campaigner…

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Do news broadcasters get paid too much?
type: item
date: 2016-06-02T08:31:00.000Z
creator: Justin Webb
subject: Current Affairs
subject: News
subject: Radio
subject: TV
subject: audio
description: "For all the American obsession with classlessness, the big money at the top of journalism has cut off the commentariat from the rest of society," says Justin Webb
encoded: My daughter is outraged at the suggestion that I might earn more than the Prime Minister, who is paid £143,462. She has read my name on a list on the internet (do they not have bike sheds to smoke behind in modern schools?) and is quizzing me on the way home. “But you don’t do anything.” “Er, well, actually, I get up very early in the morning for the Today programme and...” She cuts me off with one of those withering putdowns that all dads of daughters will recognise. “But you just read things out. Literally, Daddy, you read for a living. And you pick me up every day.” Hey-ho. And thanks a lot to whoever it was who put me on that list. If I had a few bob and the time to spare I might approach a top lawyer and make a claim that my human rights have been abused. Oh wait: I have (allegedly) got a few bob and time to spare. Well, never mind. The fact is, being on the list – painful as it was during that journey home – is probably better than not being on it. But of course it’s all rubbish. People inflate their own salaries and deflate their rivals’. As the great Gore Vidal once said: “It’s not enough to succeed; friends must fail.” In this spirit I make an attempt, when a newspaper calls, to suggest that Jeremy Vine is probably not earning quite as much as reported. But my heart’s not in it. Still, there is a good reason to suggest that the pay of news broadcasters should be a national concern. The inflation of salaries at the top end of US journalism has led to a genuine divide between the journalists and those Americans on whose behalf the journalists are meant to be working. David Gregory, an acquaintance when I worked in Washington DC, was reportedly paid $5 million a year to present a Sunday morning politics show and then $4 million when he was fired. Exactly: even more than Robert Peston, and in a nation where 47 per cent of people in a survey conducted by the Federal Reserve Bank in 2013 said they would be unable to find a spare $400 (£300) to cover a family emer…

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Inside Obama's White House – what is life really like as President of the United States?
type: item
date: 2016-03-15T10:00:00.000Z
creator: Justin Webb
subject: Documentaries
subject: News
subject: TV
description: Eight years in the making, Today presenter Justin Webb introduces a new four-part BBC2 series revealing the inside story of President Barack Obama's time in office
encoded: I began day one of the Obama presidency on my knees. It seemed only polite: a BBC producer and I had invited ourselves in to see the newly installed White House press people, and arrived in the West Wing to find a scene that would not have been out of place in, well, The West Wing. It was chaos. Cheerful chaos to be sure, but still chaos. People say, “The White House has changed hands” as if the new president’s team just takes over the existing kit. They don’t. Everything is stripped out and everything brought in afresh. I remember in particular the marks on the wall on the corridor that leads from the press room to the Oval Office where the photos of President Bush had been. Why not put up Obama shots? Because the White House photographer has also gone with the change of ownership. A new one has to be vetted and given a camera. Until then: empty spaces. And we were on our knees because the head of communications had no communications. She had a desk and a chair and a rather nice office but she couldn’t make the phone work and she was trying to plug in a fax machine. Amid the chaos I brought my young daughter in, invited by a staffer almost giddy with the wonder of having this gift to give. Martha stood at the press room podium amid the pandemonium – nobody really noticed or cared. The Obama administration began as all administrations begin: wide-eyed and cheerful, plugging in the kit, changing the wallpaper and the photographs and, like a dog that has caught up with the car it was chasing, thinking “Yikes, what now?” A new four-part BBC series captures that moment, the actual meeting where the fresh-faced Obama team sit around a table and try to suppress giggles of excitement and nerves as they wonder what to try to do first. Remember, this was a terrible moment to be taking over the White House. The financial crisis was in full swing and the whole edifice of global capitalism seemed about to collapse. As The Onion – the satirical website – put it in a mock headlin…

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How much is your pet's life worth?
type: item
date: 2016-03-11T16:18:00.000Z
creator: Justin Webb
subject: Entertainment
subject: News
subject: TV
description: After his dog nearly died, Radio 4 announcer Justin Webb saved it at a high cost. But was it worth it?
encoded: Thanks, dog lovers. Your good wishes are much appreciated. Toffee is fine now. Our sock-eating labradoodle is home, minus a bit of his tummy, and his treatment is paid for – at least I think it is: we filled in the forms and the insur- ance company don’t seem to have complained, so rather than bothering them, I am, as they say, letting sleeping dogs lie. We can celebrate Crufts this week in good order. A month ago things were not nearly so rosy. Toffee was close to breathing his last in the Queen Mother Hospital for Animals in Potters Bar and the sadness and the costs were mount- ing. In these pages I asked the question, how much is a dog’s life worth? Were we really right to spend thousands of pounds saving Toffee when his appetite got the better of him? With so many good causes with better calls on our cash and our concern? The answer came back so emphatically that I – a late-in-life dog lover – was genuinely shocked. You are suspicious of the insurance companies that fund this business, and slightly suspicious of vets who charge ever greater fees for ever more ambitious treatments (I will return to them later), but overall you are clear: a dog’s life is worth saving. Even if it costs an eye-watering sum. I say “you” – actually, there’s quite a division between “you”, when you’re listeners to the Jeremy Vine show on Radio 2, and “you”, when you’re listeners to my own programme: Today on Radio 4. Jeremy tweeted news of Toffee’s appearance in Radio Times to his countless online followers and hundreds of thousands of them (well, quite a few) got in touch. The gist: it’s your money, mate. Do what you want. Dogs are worth spending as much as you want to spend on them: end of story. Today listeners were a little less sure. We took Toffee’s story and turned it into An Issue, because that’s what we do on Radio 4. The issue was the cost, of course, but also the ethics of providing ever more invasive treatments for sick animals in order, basically, that their sentimental ow…

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The importance of personality in sport
type: item
date: 2015-12-20T14:00:00.000Z
creator: Justin Webb
subject: News
subject: Sport
subject: TV
description: As the BBC seeks out its Sports Personality of the year, Justin Webb takes a look at the elusive quality - and why the All Blacks have it while England do not
encoded: In my whole life I have never, not even once, employed anyone. OK, the odd electrician and plumber has come and gone from the house, but I have never had what you would call “a relationship” where I was the boss. So I am supremely badly qualified to talk about motivation and team building and project leading. Or am I? Doesn’t it strike you that we are facing, in the modern world, a perfect storm of myopic rudderless leadership? Endless awaydays (the England rugby team for the recent World Cup learnt how to guide horses round a field!). Fatuous mission statements. And yet, buried in the pile of piffle, a deep-seated lack of self-belief and self-discipline. As the BBC turns its attention once again to the search for the Sports Personality of the Year it’s time to speak up for the individual, for magic that cannot be taught, talent that cannot be tamed. In fact: to speak up for personality itself. It’s time to misquote Pink Floyd: coaches, leave those kids alone. For the England rugby team, of course, it’s too late. Never in human history has a group of men been so over-hyped and over-trained and over-managed. Once the World Cup started back in the autumn the poor lads looked utterly shell-shocked, and no wonder. View oEmbed on the source website “Strength does not come from winning. Your struggles develop your strengths.” Those are the ruminations of Arnold Schwarzenegger and they were among the many Big Thoughts plastered on the walls at England’s £3 million, luxurious HQ at Pennyhill Park Hotel in Bagshot, Surrey. But statements exhorting you to be strong and to learn from life’s adversities are not the same thing as actually being strong and being resilient. In sport, in business, in life: you have to live this way, not read it on the wall. Success and resilience come from individuality and self-motivation. In public life we are on the road, perhaps, to understanding this. We all know there is a rebellion against machine politicians and a zest for “authenticity”. I…

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Why The Daily Show's Jon Stewart was a formidable news force
type: item
date: 2015-02-26T14:52:00.000Z
creator: Justin Webb
subject: Entertainment
subject: News
subject: TV
description: The comedian has changed America more than Obama or Reagan, says Justin Webb
encoded: Let me tell it straight. Straight to camera, as he does: Jon Stewart, who announced this month that he is retiring as the host of The Daily Show on America’s Comedy Central, is the most influential American since Ronald Reagan. Yep, sorry Messrs Bush (presidents 41 and 43) and Clinton and Obama. Y’all did your best to transform the nation but really, when it comes to shifting a culture, none of you came close. Mr Stewart (and perhaps the writers of Modern Family might get a mention here as well) made America different. He started presenting The Daily Show 16 years ago. His work is done: he has used his immense talent, his quick wits, his painstaking research, his command of language, to move young Americans to a different place – in many respects a more European place, with less religion, more gay rights, fewer hang-ups, more tolerance. Where Ronnie shifted them right, Jonnie shifted them back again. Not that everyone is on board for the reverse Reagan. Plenty of Americans cannot stand Stewart, but all Americans have seen the power of a comedian telling them the news every night. And although he is socially liberal – more so than his nation – he is not a partisan ranter. He can kick Obama, and has. So he has real clout: a few years ago he was voted America’s most trusted news source, and that is no joke. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KM_kGxVUJw Brian Williams, on the other hand, is widely regarded as a joke and not a very funny one. His departure from the NBC Nightly News (for six months, with no pay) is a punishment for embellishing stories about his war reporting. Few think he will be back, and, few are mourning his departure. It’s nothing personal. And that is the point. His demise signals the end of an era whose sell-by date passed a decade ago. Ah, the network anchors! Those chiselled jaws, gimlet eyes, and improbably dark hair. A report on a million dying of starvation? They could channel your horror. A duck? Skateboarding? In Wisconsin? Their eyes could me…

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Reith lecturer and rock-star doctor Atul Gawande on life, death and how to cure the NHS
type: item
date: 2014-11-25T14:52:35.000Z
creator: Justin Webb
subject: audio
subject: News
subject: Radio
description: The Today programme's Justin Webb talks to the US cancer surgeon about the terminal condition of living...
encoded: Face it: we are all suckers for a rock-star doctor. Prime ministers and presidents come and go. Film stars fade. Scientists seem sometimes to live in another world, or wish that they did. But oh, the lure of a man or woman in a white coat who has also written an opera, been to the Moon, run a small country, published an important novel, farmed a hundred acres and can take one look at your stubbed toe and say, with a smile revealing perfect teeth, “You’ll be fine.” Atul Gawande has not quite done these things, at least not yet. But he is a rock star for sure; one of an elite group of American doctors who has thought seriously about medicine and society and is helping us to think again about the whole idea of health. Born in Brooklyn, now 49, he’s a cancer surgeon, but among his extracurricular achievements, he’s a staff writer on The New Yorker, America’s highbrow magazine of ideas. In other words, he can’t only walk the walk as a physician, he can also write, communicate, influence. He’s a handsome fellow too, but understated: where last year’s Reith lecturer (Grayson Perry) was all out there with his women’s clothes and stage make-up, Dr Gawande is a little more buttoned down, more med school than art school. But meet him for ten minutes and you’re left in no doubt that Gawande, while unlikely to dress in women’s clothes and do anything vibrant and shocking with clay, is nonetheless the ideal Reith lecturer for our times. We’re entering a moment of neuralgia over health. It will be a huge issue at the general election next year. Hardly a day goes by without the news that the NHS is in trouble and must be rescued with this remedy or that. We are – rightly – intensely interested in the debate about how health services are delivered, how much it costs and how good the care can be. We’re worried, too, about how the health service treats us in our declining years. In other words we’re trying to be healthy and not thinking enough about what happens to us when, inevitably…

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Why our relationship with Andy Murray is the essence of tennis
type: item
date: 2013-06-28T10:33:00.000Z
creator: Justin Webb
subject: News
subject: Sport
subject: TV
description: Like the news, sport is as much about stories as it is hard facts, says Justin Webb
encoded: Many Wimbledons ago, when the BBC still held corporate lunches, and I was hoping for a career as a C-list celebrity, I spent a well-oiled few hours in a hospitality tent in SW19. It was the usual crowd you would ask round for lunch in the garden on an average summer’s day: a European Commissioner; a playwright; an international fashion icon; a Conservative MP; a footballer. John Birt was the host. Linen suits were the uniform. After pudding and cheese, someone suggested that we might wander through and watch the tennis. It was like a Bateman cartoon. People looked horrified, then amused, then made themselves scarce. They had not come for the sport. In the end, three of us took our seats on Centre Court and watched a few games, but our hearts weren’t in it. We had come late to the action and we didn’t really know what the action was: we could see who was winning and who was losing, we could see good shots and close shots and good calls and bad calls, but there was something missing. We were not invested. We were watching the match, not living it. With a football match or a rugby match it would not have mattered. But tennis is different. As Wimbledon hits its stride, we celebrate a sport that – when properly watched – is about so much more than volleys and smashes. Tennis is all-encompassing. Tennis is life, on a court. Sometimes five sets, going on into the evening, magnificent and life-affirming. Sometimes brutal and short, a few games and a hasty exit. And we know what the players are facing when they first come out and acknowledge the royal box and fiddle with their racquets. We can see their faces in close-up on the TV. We know about them – or know enough about them – to have an idea of how they might react if things go badly or well. And we know, as they do, that they are alone. Doubles is great fun, but can never have the psychological power of singles. The loneliness of the challenger as he or she double-faults at match point cannot be replicated in any other …

Spielberg’s film is about Lincoln, but it is also about now
type: item
date: 2013-02-12T11:30:00.000Z
creator: Justin Webb
subject: Movies
subject: News
description: Barack Obama could not, as a man of mixed race, have become president without Lincoln’s efforts and Lincoln’s success. So what will he do with that gift?
encoded: How did Daniel Day-Lewis become Abraham Lincoln? How does a Millwall-supporting lad from Greenwich, south London, take possession of America’s most famous son and do it in a manner that leaves Yankee jaws dropped to the floor? Hard work, of course. Study. All the obsessive effort for which Day-Lewis is famous. And then some more. And eventually the accent, the reedy, high-pitched voice, the walk; all of it, he says, came together in a whole. The accent he worked on at his home in Ireland (he’s a British and Irish citizen), where he listened to early recordings from the areas of the United States where Lincoln had lived, in particular from Kentucky, where the politician was born in 1809. “At a certain moment I begin to hear a voice in my inner ear,” Day-Lewis says. “If I am still pleased with it, I try to reproduce it.” And that is what he did. He recorded his efforts on micro-cassettes and sent them in manila envelopes to director Steven Spielberg in Los Angeles. Spielberg’s reaction? “On the second tape I heard Abraham Lincoln talking to me. It was a privileged moment. Nobody had heard his voice since he died.” And what is that voice saying? One of the most famous self-deprecating comments in American politics was uttered in 1973 by newly installed Vice President Gerald Ford. Ford was brought in to replace disgraced incumbent Spiro Agnew and would soon, everyone suspected, have to take over Richard Nixon’s presidency, too. It was a moment of national calamity. Gerald Ford needed to point out to people that he, an unelected stopgap, would do his best, but expectations should not be too high. So he put it like this: “I am a Ford, not a Lincoln.” And everyone in America knew instantly what he meant and warmed to him because they too were Fords, not Lincolns. America is a Ford nation. Its greatest contribution to humanity – in my humble view – is the offer of material progress and a sense of purpose and worth to the greatest number of people possible. American heroes t…