Impartial BBC v. Trump
After a rather gruelling day I went to bed and fell asleep with the radio on. I woke about 3am to the sound of an obvious criticism of (an un-named) Trump and praise (by name) of Obama on the BBC's World Service in what was clearly a drama, not a documentary. Irritated, I switched it off and went back to sleep.
In the morning I looked at the shedules and found that the story was
Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver. OK, so there is an American novelist out to damn Trump. But putting it on the BBC sounds rather like propaganda, especially on the World Service which is supposed to represent the UK to the world. Then I looked it up and found that it was first published on 16 October 2018.
The first episode was aired on 3 December, so the BBC had 48 days to buy the rights to the book, get it abridged and converted, hire actor/s and get a reading recorded and feed it into their system for broadcasting.
Can you imagine the BBC doing that for any other new work of fiction? Well, perhaps if you agree with the BBC and the Washington Post you might think it was important to make the exception.
Enough with the glancing references and coy allusions. Here comes the first major novel to tackle the Trump era straight on and place it in the larger chronicle of existential threats. Donald Trump’s name doesn’t appear in Barbara Kingsolver’s “Unsheltered,” but the president prowls all through these pages. He’s “the Bullhorn,” “the tyrant who promises to restore the old order,” the “billionaire running for president who’s never lifted a finger,” the candidate who brags that “he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and people would still vote for him.” He’s the animal spirit of a political movement that’s draining the middle class, breaking the joists of civil society and pushing the planet toward ecological calamity.
That may sound like the makings of a deadly polemical novel, a strident op-ed stretched out for more than 450 pages. But “Unsheltered” is not that — or it’s not just that — largely because Kingsolver has constructed this book as two interlaced stories, separated by more than a century. Her alternating structure suggests that Trump is not unique but merely the latest outbreak of a virus that periodically infects America.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertai ... e0fb28a7f6
I didn't hear enough to know whether I would otherwise have liked the story; I don't like Trump; but I loath the left-wing reptiles running the BBC.
I agree with columnist Rod Liddle, late of the BBC, whose column in yesterday's Sunday Times was headed
Wheel in the Daleks, Doctor — whatever it takes to exterminate the BBC’s bias
Well worth a read, if you can get past the paywall for the occasional article
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/whee ... -3hxpbz085
Grrrrr!
‘Hindus and Muslims belong to two different religious philosophies, social customs and literary traditions. They neither intermarry nor eat together, and indeed they belong to two different civilisations which are based mainly on conflicting ideas and conceptions.’ Muhammad Ali Jinnah
