When he's not investigating terrorism and the security services, Peter Taylor can usually be found probing into the tar-dripping innards of the tobacco industry. He's made a string of documentaries about it since the 1970s, as well as writing the book Smoke Ring: The Politics of Tobacco.
Last year, the German artist Georg Baselitz told Der Spiegel: “Women don't paint very well. It's a fact,” citing as evidence the failure of works by female artists to sell for the massive sums raised by their male counterparts. The amusing punchline to that story is that shortly afterwards a Berthe Morisot painting sold at auction for more than double the amount ever achieved by Baselitz himself. But be honest - come on, use your fingers - how many women artists can you think of?
Remember that classic moment from the 1984 sitcom starring the chaps from Madness when their mate suddenly appears and makes them jump? No, of course you don’t, it was never shown, and what a blessing that was judging by a glimpse of it from BBC Two's documentary celebrating 50 years of its own comedy output.
Almost 45 years after the publication of The Female Eunuch, Germaine Greer - now 75 years old and working on a rainforest conservation project in her native Australia, but still “full of bile” - thinks that it is time for a new analysis; a go-to feminist text as succinct and divisive as the one that she created in 1970.
It’s a misnomer, of course. Water. It’s not even a prissy misnomer as in “when did you last pass water?” It’s more categorical than that: solids rather than liquids are our subject here. This is essentially a show about shit. Shit and all who sail in her.
BBC channels One and Two currently present such different sides of Ian Hislop that his appearances should by now be required watching for trainee psychologists. As a founding team captain on Have I Got News For You, his knuckles have left a lasting impression on panellists including Jimmy Savile, Piers Morgan and Neil Hamilton; but switch over to one of his documentaries, which have graced all of the more thoughtful channels, and we find a wryly avuncular character. Sometimes he’s even cosy, and that’s something a satirist never should.
Hang about with estate agents (for the only reason that anyone would) and you notice the men among them often stand with their hands clasped pliantly in front of them, with their shoulders bent slightly inwards. The pose semaphores trustworthiness, humility and the morals of a choirboy. Uriah Heep, ever so ‘umble, would have made a fine addition to the trade.
As Gyles Brandreth pointed out, before the advent of breakfast television in 1983, Britain was a civilised country in which people ate breakfast while browsing through a newspaper. Then the BBC cheekily nipped in with its new Breakfast Time programme, a fortnight ahead of the much-hyped all-star TV-am project, and the nation has been going to hell in a handbasket ever since.
Perhaps the BBC didn't need to make W1A, its new self-satirising sitcom. In the clerical comedy Rev, the Church of England could be considered a very serviceable metaphor for the Corporation, with its unfathomable layers of bureaucracy, well-meaning but slightly pitiable niceness, a self-image that belongs to a forgotten century, and self-flagellation before other cultures. Though the BBC does have rather more money to spend.
In the same week that ITV was rounding up Britain's dangerous dogs, the Beeb aired Louis Theroux's report [****] on the unwanted canines roaming the streets of gang-infested South Los Angeles. LA has six dog pounds (we learned), through which 35,000 ownerless dogs pass annually. A lot of them, even healthy ones, end up being euthanised because it's impossible to find homes for them all.