The Joy of Six 1484

"It’s easy to believe that this is all a blatant and shameful effort by Republicans to distract from the Epstein files, shift focus from ICE’s domestic terrorism, seize another massive cache of global oil production, and fuel the cancellation of an upcoming election reckoning. These would all be correct assessments, at least from Trump’s self-serving, narcissistic point of view, but there’s another, more alarming motivation for religious Conservatives dragging the planet into a self-destructive, full-scale bomb-a-thon: the second coming of Christ." John Pavlovitz takes us inside a scary place – the Republican-Evangelical mind.

Helen Amass talks to Uta Frith about her current understanding of autism. Professor Frith says: "People still hang on to the idea that there is something that unites all the people who are diagnosed as autistic. I don’t believe that any more."

Richard Toye warns against simplistic invocation of Winston Churchill's name as a way of supporting military action: "Churchill once observed that war, once unleashed, rarely follows the tidy paths imagined by those who start it. That warning may be as relevant as any of his more famous phrases."

A leading judge has as issued new guidance saying unregulated psychologists should not be called to give expert evidence in family courts, reports Hannah Summers.

"Both – and they were truly intertwined for decades – made their mark at Oxford University: Potter, the controversial working-class voice who shocked viewers on BBC Television’s Does Class Matter? (1958); Trodd, the provocative editor of university mag Isis who got removed from his post in favour of the milder-mannered David Dimbleby in 1959." Ian Greaves celebrates the career of Kenith Trodd, the television producer who worked closely with Dennis Potter.

Libby Brooks finds the children of Lanark enjoying Whuppity Scoorie.

Richard Dimbleby, David Dimbleby, Henry Dimbleby and the hereditary principle

David Dimbleby's current television series is questioning Britain's hereditary monarchy. So it's time for a thumping ad hominem argument and some fun with the Dimblebys and the hereditary principle.

Here's his father Richard Dimbleby in 1956. Because of his work as the BBC's war correspondent during World War II, including reports from newly liberated the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, he was Britain's most celebrated broadcaster and a significant public figure.

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Here's Richard's son David Dimbleby making his first broadcast for the BBC at the age of 12.

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And here's David's son Henry Dimbleby, at the age of 13, in one of the two BBC adaptions of Arthur Ransome books – Coot Club and The Bix Six – in which he played a leading role in 1984.

Nationwide from 1970: A haunted Sheffield nightclub

If you want a portrait of Britain in the Seventies, you can't beat Nationwide. This was a news magazine programme shown every weekday evening after the six o'clock news. It began with news from your region and then went national to tackle both serious and lighter subjects.

The regional presenters featured in the national segment too, and people of my generation will still recall nanes like Mike Neville in Newcastle, Bruce Parker in Southampton and Ian Masters in Norwich. And I think they were all men – very Seventies.

Nationwide covered the three-day week, the drought, the Silver Jubilee and so on through the decade. It also covered the rise of both consumerism and environmentalism.

And the programme had a fondness for supernatural stories like this one, which also gives you a picture of Sheffield people in 1970.

In 1982 David Dimbleby took over from Michael Barratt as the programme's main host, and his pomposity killed it off. But naybe something as Seventies as Nationwide was always going to struggle in the new decade.

So farewell then Andrew Neil and This Week

It was announced today that Andrew Neil is giving up presenting This Week and the BBC is taking the opportunity to scrap the programme.

There was a time when I never missed This Week. The problem, as a confirmed hater of Question Time, was how to fill the 20 minutes between Newsnight ended and it began.

Then I got older and realised that I could go to bed and watch it on iPlayer the next day.

Then I gave up watching it at all.

There were always too many "funny" items that weren't funny - step forward Kevin Maguire and Quentin Letts.

But Andrew Neil is a better broadcaster than the Dimblebys added to John Humphrys and multiplied several times over.

OK so he has run with the hare and hunted with the hounds too much recently, but at his best he is peerless. The BBC should have made better use of him.

I remember, in the days when he was seen as a meritocrat from a humble background, Neil's forensic politeness forcing from Michael Gove the admission that his adoptive parents had paid for him to attend one of Scotland's most expensive private schools.

And This Week could be brilliant. I remember a riveting discussion of alcoholism with Shirley Williams and Rosie Boycott on the evening of the day that Charles Kennedy resigned as Liberal Democrat leader.

I used to grumble about its late-night slot, but maybe the BBC should have made a virtue of it and made it open ended - something along the lines of Channel 4's old After Dark.

If you keep politicians up late enough and lubricate them with Blue Nun, they start to tell the truth.

David Dimbleby has destroyed political debate in Britain

So I am not the only one who does refuses to buy the idea that David Dimbleby is some kind of broadcasting legend.

Nick Cohen writes for Standpoint:

The retirement of David Dimbleby from Question Time after a quarter of a century has  brought fears of cultural debasement to a head. Dimbleby will be remembered, if he is remembered at all, for fanning hysteria, and his departure provoked something close to disgust as broadcasters looked at their future and recoiled. 

Adam Boulton of Sky described Dimbleby’s complicity in Question Time’s drift towards "the ritual confrontation and humiliation of its guests". His and the BBC’s laziness and ugliness had led to a "coarsening of public discourse". 

Among my political allies Dimbleby and his producers are the first item of evidence used to prosecute the claim that the BBC has not merely covered populism but promoted it by putting Nigel Farage on Question Time more than any other guest this century.

Ouch. I just moan that he has turned being his father's son into a 50-year BBC career.

I have seen it suggested that Question Time has never recovered from the edition it broadcast immediately after the scandal over MPs' expenses broke.

The visceral anger the audience displayed that night has been seen, ever since, as the mood the programme should aim at.

Note that the anger was not aimed at any particular government or opposition policy but at the politicians as a class. They were all alike and all in it for themselves.

It is no wonder a programme that fosters such a few of politics has welcomed Nigel Farage and no-nothing commentmongers and think-tank monkeys. The introduction of a fifth seat on the panel has not helped either.

You may say that Dimbleby does not run the programme, but he could have walked away from it long before now.

Remember what happened when someone tried to interest Cliff Michelmore in a proto Question Time:

After Tonight, he and his colleague Kenneth Allsop started the 24 Hours programme. Editor Derrick Amoore, later the creator of the current affairs show Nationwide, asked him to do a debate with a studio audience that Michelmore considered a bad idea. 

He reportedly snapped ‘I will not be associated with a third-rate Palladium show,’ and nearly left.

Three encounters with Glyn Worsnip

Finding a book or piece of ephemera you wanted used to take hard work and lots of luck. Now you just go to eBay.

Sure enough, when I got it into my head to get a copy of the programme for the first pantomime I was taken to – Cinderella at the Watford Palace – it took seconds to find a copy for sale online.

It arrived today, so I can tell you that my first trip to the theatre took place between Boxing Day 1966 and 21 January 1967, so I would have been six years old.

Cinderella, it turns out, was directed by Giles Havergal, who later became famous as director of the Glasgow Citizens Theatre.

The star was David Kernan as Buttons, who had already appeared in Zulu and on television in That Was the Week That Was. He was later to become even more famous in Ned Sherrin’s Side by Side by Sondheim.

I can remember his last scene, singing a song called “I’m Going Away” because his friend Cinderella was marrying Prince Charming. How we loved him!

The Brokers’ Men turn out to have been pretty remarkable too. There was Peter Cleall, soon to be Eric Duffy in the television sit come Please Sir!, and William Simons. He was a child star through the 1950s and is now best known as Alf Ventriss in Heartbeat.

I can even remember one of their jokes more than half a century on:

There were three budgies in a cage. One on the top perch, one on the middle perch and one on the bottom perch. Which budgie owned the cage. 

I don’t know that. Which budgie owned the cage? 

The one on the bottom perch, because the other two were on higher perches.

I must see if I can get it into Lord Bonkers one day.

There is another name on the programme that was once famous. As I remember from the days before I threw my first copy of this programme away (I must have been going through a phase). One of the Ugly Sisters was played by Glyn Worsnip.

In the 1970s, Esther Rantzen’s That’s Life, an odd but successful combination of consumer journalism and light entertainment, was one of the BBC’s most popular programmes. We all moan about Rantzen now, but I remember rather enjoying That's Life at the time and it sometimes featured a topical song from Jake Thackray or Victoria Wood.

Glyn Wornsip was one of two young men in good suits (Kieran Prendiville was the other) who presented the show alongside her.

Move on to the summer of 1978 when I was about to go to university. My mother and I won BBC East’s quiz Joint Account, a show that is so obscure it is not on the BBC Genome site.

In the part of Market Harborough where I lived in those days, and where my mother still lives, you see, people receive East Anglian television and not Midlands.

We did a sort of audition at the BBC in Northampton and then won a heat and the final at the BBC studios in Norwich. It was a general knowledge quiz and I did a specialist round on cricket.

And the quizmaster? Glyn Worsnip.

Move on another six years to my first Liberal Party Assembly, Bournemouth 1984, and Worsnip was there as part of the BBC team.

I said hello and mentioned that I had met him when filming Joint Account in Norwich, but he did not seem keen to be reminded of his days scrabbling around doing minor TV quiz shows now he was a serious political reporter. It’s known in the literature as David Dimbleby Syndrome.

There is a sad postscript to these reminiscences. As Worsnip's Independent obituary (which finds room to mention Joint Account) recorded:

In 1986, he began to show symptoms of the brain disease cerebellar ataxia. His speech became slurred and walking difficult. He was working for BBC radio, presenting the news review Stop Press, Pick of the Week and schools programmes, as well as becoming host of a new series, The Press Gang. His behaviour led people to think he was drunk and, shortly before Christmas 1987, he was sacked from Stop Press after listeners' complaints. 

When cerebellar ataxia was diagnosed, Worsnip was encouraged by his colleagues to "come out'' and the result was A Lone Voice, broadcast on Radio 4 in March 1988. The response from listeners was overwhelming. "I heard from old school, college and university chums I had not seen in 30 years," Worsnip wrote in his autobiography, Up the Down Escalator (1990). "I heard from a mass of disabled people, offering solidarity.'' 

But there was no cure. In his one of his last programmes, for Horizon, he reported on illnesses such as his affecting the brain.

I heard that 1988 broadcast and it was immensely moving. Glyn Worsnip died in 1996.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: Not a member of the Dimbleby family in sight

And so another week with Lord Bonkers draws to a close. If I come across the notes from this discussion I shall certainly post them here.

Sunday

Yesterday evening we held a ‘Question Time’ at the village hall. (The building, complete with a library and billiards room, was erected by my grandfather and the front boasts a modest statue of him accepting the tribute of the grateful widows and orphans of Rutland.)

What a panel we had! There was our own Vince ‘High-Voltage’ Cable; the Wise Woman of Wing; the High Queen of the Elves of Rockingham Forest; and the Professor of Hard Sums from the University of Rutland at Belvoir.

I was prevailed upon to join the panel myself and, best of all, there was not a member of the Dimbleby family in sight. The Revd Hughes took the chair.

Enjoyable as the evening was, I feel that what happened next was the more important. I invited my fellow panellists back to the hall. There, over a snifter or two of Auld Johnston (the most prized of Highland malts), we put the world to rights and mapped a route back to power for the Liberal Democrats. I just hope someone was taking notes.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South-West 1906-10.

Previously in Lord Bonkers' Diary

• Instead of Big Ben
• Muhammad Ali vs Tubby Anstruther
• Night-time cricket against the Elves of Rockingham Forest
• Burying Matron in the sand
• The sycamores are looking distinctly nervous
• A chilled Don Foster sherry

This is Their Life by Jonathan Meades (1979)

Published in 1979 complete with a foreword by Mike Yarwood, this is a collection of brief pen portraits of television stars of the day.

Just to list those thought worthy of discussion brings back a lost era. James Galway, Wendy Craig, Ron Pickering, Dickie Henderson. Max Boyce, Pam Ayres, Brian Glover, Penelope Keith.

And because this is 1979 no one on television is gay and only Trevor McDonald is black.

But the real interest of This is Their Life lies in the identity of its author. It is Jonathan Meades.

Meades turned 32 in 1979 and fame was still some years away. So on first inspection this looks like hack work. But a bit of browsing reveals it is more interesting than that.

There is the choice of subjects. I doubt any other young television journalist would have included Ian Nairn and W.G. Hoskins in his list.

Look for it, and the acerbic comment is there too. David Hamilton, for instance, is “the lowbrow’s Michael Aspel”.

The gruesome Ted Rogers is suitably dealt with:

Most of his material is written in conjunction with Wally Malston, who is apparently known as ‘King of the One-Liners’, and says that Rogers is ‘a barometer of what the public is thinking’. 

So be it, but he is hardly a barometer of what the public is doing. His passion is polo – he has four ponies and plays at Cowdray Park, which is also a regular haunt of Prince Charles. 

Meades gets his Foxes right too:

Described by his mother – herself an actress and the widow of the theatrical agent, Robin Fox – as ‘the world’s worst actor’, Edward Fox was for years overshadowed by his younger brother, James, who was arguably the world’s best actor, at least in certain roles. 

But the neatest digs are aimed at two targets who are still very much with us 38 years on – the Dimbleboys, as Meades says Bernard Levin used to call them.

Their father, as everyone would have known in 1979, was Richard Dimbleby, who had been the most famous broadcaster of his day.

Here he is on David Dimbleby:

Even before he became a professional journalist, he had to learn to live with accusations of privilege. At Oxford, where he took a third in PPE, his appointment as editor of Isis was opposed by the outgoing editor Kenith Trodd, who is now a noted drama producer, and his staff. Dimbleby countered with a swingeing attack on ‘the left-wing clique’. 

A couple of years later, some journalists took it upon themselves to advise him publicly not to attempt to follow in his father’s footsteps at the BBC.

On the face of it it might appear that he has done just that, but, of course, his route and approach have been very different from Richard Dimbleby's. Whereas the father was ever reverential, the son - despite his looks and his smooth cap of hair - is rather an abrasive fellow.

 Jonathan, meanwhile, had:

wanted to be a farmer, and his father succeeded in getting him a job on the Royal farm at Windsor, where he trained to be a showjumper. 

You can find This is Their Life on Amazon for a penny, which represents good value for students of popular entertainment and Meades enthusiasts.

Six of the Best 697

Cicero's Songs says "Watching the UK election from afar has been a sad and chastening experience. The fact is that neither the Prime Minister nor the Leader of HM Opposition are fit for office,"

"Knowing when to quit is important in politics, as we’ll discover in the aftermath of this general election. But it’s true in political broadcasting too; and this election is likely to see the last outing for David Dimbleby as anchor of the BBC's results programme." So says Roger Mosey in an overkind piece, but Dimbleby will probably have other ideas.

"Emily Davidson’s death moved the public in a way that astonished the Government and probably did much to change the public’s attitude to women having the vote." Sal Brinton shares an account of Davidson's funeral by Mary Stocks. Stocks was Sal's cousin and also the cousin of the late David Rendel.

Kevin Munger programmed bots to fight racism on Twitter and it worked.

Tom Marshall heard Mark Gatiss speak at the Oxford Union.

"Over here there’s a huge emphasis on skills and just picking up a rugby ball and playing rugby as opposed to going to the gym to do squats or bench presses. People are far more excited about playing a game of tag or touch rather than seeing how much they can bench press." Piers Francis has been playing rugby union in New Zealand, Interviewed by the Telegraph, he offers a telling contrast between attitudes to training there and in Britain.

Whoever you vote for, David Dimbleby gets in

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Review: A History of Television in 100 Programmes by Phil Norman

Phil Norman does not set out to choose his 100 greatest television programmes. Rather, in this collection of short essays, he seeks to reproduce the strange juxtapositions and serendipitous discoveries that characterised the medium in the days before the proliferation of channels.

So World in Action sits next to Playschool, Blankety Blank next to Life on Earth, and Twin Peaks next to Jonathan Meades.

Forgotten programmes that were important, or seemed important, in their day are brought back into the daylight. There are essays on Roots, Max Headroom and The Strange World of Gurney Slade. And it is good to see Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? given its due as both comedy and social history.

Phil Norman agrees with Meades in identifying Double Dare as a key play in Dennis Potter’s work, and he writes well on the appeal of I, Claudius:

Patrick Stewart commanded the Praetorian Guard. Bernard Hill identified Jacobi as the new emperor. Ian Oglivy fell off his horse. Peter Bowles was an unusual choice for an ancient British chieftain; Christopher Biggins – soon to appear as Mother Goose at Darlington’s Civic Theatre – a surprisingly appropriate Nero.  

There was even a mini Z-Cars reunion as Inspector Barlow (Stratford Johns, aka Gnaeus Calpurnius Piso) was put on trial for treason against the stepson of PC Fancy Smith (Brian Blessed, the Emperor Augustus). Quentin Crisp was assassinated by George and Mildred’s uppity next-door neighbour, who in turn was grandson of the Emperor Inspector Wexford. 

It was also good to be reminded that David Dimbleby’s pomposity did for Nationwide and that Gillian Hills came to The Owl Service right after cavorting with David Hemmings in Blow-Up.

The essay on The Magic Roundabout called to mind the family legend that my father was a school friend of Eric Thompson. My mother says he would occasionally smile at the airs Thompson later gave himself, given the humble home he came from. Goodness knows what he made of Emma.

If you are looking for a Christmas present for a lover of television – particularly one, like me, old enough to have hazy memories of some of the earlier programmes discussed – do not look further than this book.

David bloody Dimbleby has been at it since 1950

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If you work with the media, come across someone with a familiar name and think "I wonder if he is related to...", the answer is always yes.

School milk can turn sour for politicians

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The last time school milk was a live political issue I blogged:

One of the factors behind Mrs Thatcher's election victory was her act of abolishing free milk in schools. 

Some people hated her for it and dubbed her the "milk snatcher". But they didn't have to drink the stuff. The crates were not kept in a refrigerator, so on a hot day it was already halfway to going sour by the time mid-morning break came. The trick then was to avoid drinking the stuff. 

Yes, Mrs Thatcher was swept to power by a generation of grateful first-time voters who wanted to thank her for delivering them from the horrors of school milk.

I went on to quote some more arguments against the idea of subsidising milk for schoolchildren - the most powerful of which was that you could buy the stuff more cheaply from a supermarket even after it had been subsidised.

Milk is in the news again because the new standards announced this week oblige schools to make semi-skimmed milk available to all pupils at least once a day. They will still have to pay for it though.

For some reason best known to Michael Gove, the standards have been drawn up by Henry bloody Dimbleby and his business partner.

I suppose we just have to be grateful that he did not ask Gregg Wallace.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: Behind the scenes at Clegg vs Farage

Wednesday

Last week’s debate with M. Farage, the Frenchman who leads the UKIP Party, went tolerably well for our own Nick Clegg, but I am called in this morning to help brief him for this evening’s second contest. I come armed with a particularly fine specimen of the orchard doughty – the sturdy, rugged staffs which I issue to my gamekeepers (for dealing with poachers) and tenant farmers (so that, red-faced and panting, they can wave them whist ineffectually chasing scrumpers).

“The very first time he tries to be clever,” I tell Clegg, “give him one across the snoot with this”. “Oh, I don’t think Nick should attack his opponent,” sneers one of the 12-year-old PPE graduates with whom our leader insists on surrounding himself these days. “I don’t mean Farage, you booby,” I return shortly, “I mean Dimbleby.”

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South-West 1906-10.

Previously in Lord Bonkers' Diary...

• Floreat Estonia
• The disappearance of the 11:15 from Nottingham London Road Lower Level

On the Record: The best opening titles for a political programme ever

On the Record was broadcast at Sunday lunchtime between 1988 and 2002.

You cannot beat Big Ben* turning into a crocodile and laying waste the country as a symbol of the political process.

The only thing wrong with these titles is that a member of the Dimbleby family turns up when they are over. And On the Record replaced an earlier programme in this slot, This Week, Next Week, which was introduced by the other brother.

Lord Bonkers writes exclusively for Liberal England: Long ago, the negatives of certain incriminating photographs of Lord Reith fell into the hands of Richard Dimbleby. We are still paying the price for his indiscretions almost 80 years later.

* I know, I know.

David Dimbleby’s bladder revisited

Continuing the trawl through the archives of this blog following its 10th birthday, we come to June 2005 and this assault on David Dimbleby. Much good did it do.

David Dimbleby’s bladder

Some broadcasters are so bland and inoffensive that it’s offensive. Nick Ross is one such. I remember a magazine article that featured photographs of celebrities as children and invited you to guess who they grew up to become. It was somehow inevitable that the young Nick Ross should look exactly like the older Nick Ross.

Two more such creatures are the Dimblebys. The first part of David Dimbleby’s new series A Picture of Britain, which looks at British landscape and its effect on British painting and other arts, was shown on BBC1 this evening.

Inevitably the pictures were beautiful, though when you see clouds racing over an otherwise still landscape for the tenth time it ceases to impress. And there was someone with a terribly literal mind at work too. When Dimbleby mentioned Wuthering Heights, Kate Bush swelled up on the soundtrack at once. Yorkshire as a whole was introduced by a brass band. Playing “On Ilkley Moor Baht ’At”. On Ilkley Moor.

What was most striking, though, was an extract from David Dimbleby’s first television film. He made it with his younger brother Jonathan. At the age of 17.

No doubt it does your career little harm if your father is the most famous broadcaster in the land,* but this film crystallised what is objectionable about David Dimbleby. He is a public school boy of no great imagination or ability, projected on to the national stage by television fame and family connections.

Though his performance on election night this year was not his worst, his occasional misunderstanding of the statistics or miscalling of results reveal someone with no great passion for psephology. You feel he would be just as happy covering ballroom dancing or show jumping.

It has been suggested to me that Dimbleby has made election night his own because he possesses a bladder of iron and has no need to nip away from the camera in the small hours. If so, this lucky heredity may be the real reason the Dimbleby family has made our state occasions its own.

It’s not talent. It’s not nepotism. It’s urology.

* In his latest diary Lord Bonkers suggests that Richard Dimbleby “commentated upon every state occasion from the launch of the Queen Mary to the conception of Princess Anne”.

Later I was to discover this video. It shows David Dimbleby, down from Oxford and the Bullingdon Club for the summer vacation, working for the infant Anglia Television.

Doctor Who and Arthur Ransome

I am not a huge fan of the recent revival of Doctor Who, but I have fond memories of the early years of the show and of the actors who played the hero.

My favourite among them is Patrick Troughton, who we have seen as the murderous Tyrell in Richard III and as Cole Hawlings in The Box of Delights.

A few days ago across a post on the blog sophieneville which tells us that Troughton played The Eel Man in the BBC's adaptation of Arthur Ransome's The Big Six: that was filmed in 1983 and screened the following year:

He had lead the most fascinating life. A Naval Officer during World War II, and the first actor to play Robin Hood on television, Patrick Troughton played The Doctor in 128 episodes of Doctor Who. 

But would he be drawn? If we asked him about his life he just started talking about eels in a broad Norfolk accent. He’d worked for our Director Andrew Morgan on Kings Royal and for Joe Water’s on Z Cars, but for us, in the summer of 1983, he was the eel man.

I have borrowed this photo from sophieneville - and Whovians will be interested to learn that The Big Six also featured Colin Baker.

Earlier year Henry Dimbleby and John Vincent.published a government-commissioned report on school meals. If Henry's name seemed familiar it may be because he also appeared in The Big Six as a boy.

And, since you ask... yes, he is from that family. He is David Dimbleby's son. The BBC Charter requires that the Dimbleby family be employed in perpetuity. This is believed to date from the time that certain photographs of Sir John Reith came into the possession of Richard Dimbleby.

Still, Henry's employment as a child actor is nothing. His father and uncle were allowed to make travel films for the BBC while they were still young teenagers.

Incidentally, I never warmed to Arthur Ransome as a child. I think too many people recommended him to me as a child, with the result that I clung even more firmly to my beloved Malcolm Saville Lone Pine stories.

Later I realised that both Ransome and Saville were heavily influenced by Richard Jefferies' Bevis: The Story of a Boy. That was one of the three Jefferies books (along with Wood Magic and After London) that was the subject of my MA dissertation some 20 years ago.

David Dimbleby keeps it in the family

Four years ago, along with many other bloggers, I criticised the BBC's coverage of the USA Presidential election result in general and the choice of David Dimbleby as anchorman in particular.

We need not have bothered. Tomorrow night he will be doing the same job.

Back in 2005 I summed David Dimbleby up:

He is a public school boy of no great imagination or ability, projected on to the national stage by television fame and family connections.

In that post I mentioned that he made his first film for the BBC at the age of 17. His younger brother Jonathan was in it too.

Here he is a few years later, down for the summer vacation from Oxford and the Bullingdon Club, reporting for the newly launched Anglia TV.

And if you wonder what I mean by "family connections", read about his father Richard Dimbleby - "widely acknowledged as one of the greatest figures in British broadcasting history".

But should the BBC still be relying upon the hereditary principle?

The February 1974 general election campaign

Jeremy Thorpe, Edward Heath, Harold Wilson, a butcher from Kingstanding, Margaret Thatcher, Cyril Smith, Hester Smallbone, David Steel, Enoch Powell...

And proof it was true even 38 years ago that, whoever you vote for, David bloody Dimbleby gets in.

Why I am not a republican: Thoughts after the Jubilee

When the Queen chose Leicester to begin her Jubilee tour I wrote:

To me the great virtues of having a monarchy are that it separates the office of head of state from party politics and makes it possible to have as little reverence for the position as I do.

I shall return to that in a moment, but first a few thoughts on the events of the past few days.

Heresy Corner is right: the Thames pageant was a wash out, but no one had the courage to say so. As he put it:

Yet how typically British that we should celebrate the longevity of an 86 year old woman and her 91 year old husband by making them stand for five hours, in inadequate clothing, getting wet. How even more typically British that no-one is allowed to suggest that the soggy spectacle was anything other than a triumph. 

I suppose this is what is meant when people praise the Queen's sense of "duty". It means standing in the rain, peering through the mist at a whole lot of boats passing by, affecting enjoyment. (At least we were told that she was enjoying it; she looked pretty grim-faced to me most of the time, but not being a BBC commentator I wouldn't know.) It means reinforcing the self-delusion of the crowd that this was a sensible way of spending an afternoon.

And the critics of the BBC's coverage of the event were correct - it was pretty awful. I soon turned over to Sky, who at least showed you what was going on, before giving up on the event altogether.

This should not be such a surprise, because the idea that the BBC's coverage will automatically be the best is becoming harder to sustain (despite the best efforts of ITV's football pundits and commentators). When Channel 4 won the rights to show test cricket, its approach showed you how formulaic the BBC had come.

Who, too, could forget the mess that was the BBC's coverage of the last election? I for one am still trying. That mess, incidentally, proved that sending for a Dimbleby does not automatically solve your problems.

What the coverage of the pageant and of election night had in common was an unwillingness to trust the event or to trust the viewers. We had to be constantly diverted by celebrities, so the BBC thought, or we would not watch. There was also an element of the New Labour spirit that wanted to mark the anniversary of D-Day with spam fritter contests.

And a third point on the events of the last few days - one I also made myself on Twitter - comes from Liberal Burblings:

we expect an 86-year-old woman to sit through the most terrible pile of tosh (which included three American artistes who were under the illusion it was her birthday) while her 91-year-old husband is in hospital as a result of an emergency admission a few hours earlier. Shame on us, I say for devising a system which visits such inhuman stupidity on one family.

So why don't I want to see the monarchy abolished?

Most of those who do cite the foolish attitudes that many people hold towards the Royal Family. But no one is forced to do this - many people will have avoided the Jubilee altogether.

More importantly, if we did do away with the monarchy and have a republic instead, we would probably find that there was more pressure to revere the head of state, not less. New constitutional arrangements are less able to tolerate public indifference than establish ones.

We saw a little of this in New Labour's introduction of citizenship ceremonies, and think of the Americans and their hands on their hearts during the Star-Spangled Banner.

And in the end we spent the past few days celebrating, not the monarchy, but ourselves and our national history. Again, a president could make any national celebrations less inclusive than at present. He or she would lack the historical continuity that the Queen gives and would probably be hated by half the nation.

Besides what could be more radical than closing the streets to cars and having a party? Sous les pavés, la plage.