The Joy of Six 1503

Marcus Hughes on the many problems the Welsh government must overcome in achieving its laudable aim of removing private profit from the care system. "The anxiety inducing question from those working in the sector is what happens if local authority and not-for-profit provision can’t replace that offered by the private sector in time? Finding places for some young people is already a challenge even with the current options available." 

"Could the bellicose, belligerent and braying Hegseth – with his Crusader tattoos, his disdain for diplomacy, and his evident taste for violent domination – have convinced Trump to start a war to complete the unfinished business of the Crusades?" Julia Carrie Wong reveals the militant Christian theology animating the US attack on Iran

Hannah Sharland reports on fears that the government's transport strategy will not see the improvements for disabled travellers that were promised.

"Standing at 6ft 2in, with an imposing physique and a razor-scarred face, she was a Black, gay multi-instrumentalist who refused to let a racist society or a rapacious industry confine her. Thornton should be ranked alongside the likes of Billie Holiday and Nina Simone, but instead she is little more than a footnote in the histories of Elvis Presley and Janis Joplin as the original voice behind songs they would make famous." Garth Cartwright celebrates Big Mama Thornton.

"For really I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he." A London Inheritance takes us to St Mary's, Putney, where the Putney Debates took place in 1647. 

Simon Hughes (not that one) remembers Channel 4's years of covering test cricket – they gave us Geoffrey Boycott without the tiresome public-school teasing of him by Jonathan Agnew: "Our principle aim was to make cricket coverage more interesting and informative: to tell ‘why’ as well as ‘what’. Part of our motivation came from people who said they often watched cricket on the TV but turned the sound off and listened to the radio commentary. We wanted our content to be so intriguing viewers would turn the sound up."

The Joy of Six 1417

"Muscular patriotism of the flag waving variety marries rather well with aggressive nationalism - and we’re seeing quite a bit of that all over the world. Neither impulse allows for complexity instead it demands loyalty of the 'for us or against us' variety." Ritula Shah explains why the aggressive flag flying of recent weeks has bothered her so much.

Carole Cadwalladr investigates the opaque workings of the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, its funding from friends of Israel – including billionaire Larry Ellison – and an emerging right-wing media takeover of the global information space.

Timothy Garton Ash talks to Catherine E. De Vries about writing, freedom and the lost art of disagreement.

"If the BBC had kept the Boat Race and paid more for the privilege, the Telegraph’s angle could well have been to talk about a waste of money on an event whose viewing figures have been in decline over the years. The key thing with any story about the BBC in the right-wing press is that the corporation must always be in the wrong." Mic Wright on the way the Boat Race's move to Channel 4 was used to attack the BBC.

In 1873, a choir of formerly enslaved African American students from the newly established Fisk University, Tennessee, embarked on a fundraising tour of the UK during which they sang for both Queen Victoria and Mr Gladstone. The National Archives tells the story of the Jubilee Singers.

Madeleine Brettingham discusses her favourite situation comedy: "The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin is an early crack in the post-war sitcom’s floral wallpaper. The protagonist, Reginald Iolanthe Perrin, is a restless, self-directed twenty-first century man trying to break out of a claustrophobic twentieth-century show."

Maybe the cancellation of Time Team is the event after which everything started going wrong

Time Team, Channel 4's (ahem) groundbreaking archaeology programme, ran for 20 years from 1994. At its best it was like a nonfiction version of Detectorists.

So Time Team's cancellation rivals the death of David Bowie as the event after which everything started going wrong.

This special programme celebrates those 20 years.

I've been watching old episodes of Time Team on YouTube recently and have noticed one way in which it changed over the years. In its final year or two, the programme included a montage of the best bits to come in that episode to dissuade people from changing channel.

That's life in a multimedia, multichannel world, but as my mother's second husband used to say, it was like unwrapping your presents before Christmas.

Russell Brand was a creation of television and the tabloids, not the comedy circuit

Until last night's Dispatches, I had never seen Russell Brand's comedy act. I now look back on those days with affection. 

But that doesn't mean I wasn't aware of him. As I complained in 2013:

Russell Brand turned up writing on football for the Guardian. He guest edits the New Statesman. He's interviewed on Newsnight. I can’t get away from him.

He wasn’t much of a sportswriter and his political views on Newsnight were ridiculous – a bunch of media-left slogans and a call for unelected officials to tax us all.

But then why should he be expected to be an expert on these things? He is a niche comedian.

Brand’s trouble is that he has become a symbol of youthful cool and everyone wants to be associated with him.

Jonathan Ross’s exit from the BBC arose from his inability to grow middle aged gracefully. He wanted to show how young and hip he still was. And the way to show that was to demonstrate to us that he knew all about Brand’s love life.

And two years later Owen Jones fell under Brand's spell too. And have a look at the Guardian's contributor page for Brand to see just how much the paper loved him.

The extent to which Brand was a media creation was brought home to me by something Simon Evans tweeted this afternoon:

Brand is not now and never was a comedian. He was never on the 'comedy circuit', which is now being traduced as an unreconstructed sewer of nodding, winking, pawing, leering predatory men, with a code of silence to match their coercive behaviour.

He's a TV/tabloid/PR construct and that is the sewer you need to navigate if you want to understand the culture that allowed him to thrive. Pretty much the exact same one that allowed his illustrious precursors in disgrace to thrive before him.

I was a stand up from 1996 and gigged hard on the circuit until 2010 or so. I didn’t see Brand on a bill once. I’ve been in multiple dressing rooms with everyone else from that era, however quickly they elevated to TV and tour shows. That’s how it works. I’ve never even met Brand. 

The only time I saw Brand at a show was  standing at the back of a one off gig being hosted by his friend Simon Amstell. I am not guilting Simon by association, I don’t know him. But that’s who he was there with. 

Brand is (or rather was in those years) 100 per cent the product of the very culture that C4 deliberately cultivated like a pseudo left wing Daily Mail sidebar of shame, with a dash of Eurotrash. I found it nauseating but they loved his bad boy shock factor.

My honest gut feeling was that he would have been despised in 90 per cent of 'dressing' rooms on the circuit. They were old fashioned enough on the whole and If nothing else he showed a good deal of self awareness in steering clear of the place and booking himself on the fast track to notoriety via Big Brother and Bizarre.

And for some sharp analysis of the way the media kowtowed to Brand, read Evans on his appearance on Newsnight in the video above.

He says of it:

It’s not a masterpiece (and I cringe at some of the boosted “laughter track”) but then it was written and performed in a 48-hour period. And the hat was misjudged. I did not quite understand the format. 

But I will assert that my chosen take on Brand was driven through against the prevailing perception of his having spoken truth to power in that Newsnight interview. Prevailing in the SUFTW offices at any rate. And particularly among… but no. I’ll leave it there.