Tag Archive: Newsnight


Not one to stay anonymous, Russell Brand mixes with the Occupy London protesters.

Not one to stay anonymous, Russell Brand mixes with the Occupy London protesters.

Up until now I’ve never been a massive fan of Russell Brand but he went way up in my estimation after making Jeremy Paxman look like a floundering twerp in the Newsnight Interview which has gone viral.

Brand has never made a secret of his serial addictions to drugs, sex and porn or that he is a shameless attention seeker. On the contrary, he has built his stage persona around these vices. He is only half joking when he says that he is going for a look that crosses Jack Sparrow with Spartacus.

It was clear that Paxman didn’t expect him to come up with such an articulate and forceful response to his usual sneery line of questioning.

For someone who has built his reputation on exposing the shameful lies and deceit that is the stock in trade of politicians, Paxman was put on the back foot by Brand’s entirely logical conclusion that voting changes nothing.

Now while Paxman blasts his peers for appearing on Strictly Come Dancing, Brand shows that his backing for people’s democracy by joining the massed ranks of the Occupy London protest.

As a multimillionaire comedian he makes an unlikely revolutionary but by bringing these issues back into the headlines  he’s doing far more good for Britain than David Cameron and his cronies ever will.

Removing the heads of the BBC is a Herculean task akin to fighting the Lernean Hydra.

The events leading up to the resignation of director general George Entwistle show the strengths and weaknesses of the BBC.

The shoddy journalism of the Newsnight team exemplified a woeful  lack of quality controls before running with a potentially sensational story.

By all accounts, they relied on the testimony of one man (Steve Messham) without doing the most basic of checks to verify its accuracy. Lord McAlpine, the politician at the heart of the fake scandal was given no opportunity to defend accusations that he was responsible for sexual abuse. Continue reading

There must be some worried star names at the BBC right now in the light of the ongoing crisis surrounding paedophile and rapist Jimmy Saville.

Another DJ who is being accused beyond the grave is John Peel but to imply that his past misdemeanours are comparable to the cynical abuse carried out by Savile is farcical.

Peel admitted that he had sex with young girls and joked fairly salaciously that he never asked for ID. This prompted Julie Burchill to write a savage article about him while he was still alive. I strongly disagree with Burchill on this but it has to be admitted her rage against the hypocrisies within male dominated institutions now sounds very topical. Continue reading