135: Reform, The Beeb and The House Of Saud

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Page 94, The Private Eye Podcast.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of Page 94.

My name is Andrew Hunter Murray, and I'm here in the Private Eye Office with Helen Lewis and Adam McQueen.

The three of us have gathered.

We are at slightly like a coven this week, actually.

We all sit around our radiator.

There's a radiator in between all of us because it's unseasonably cold in this room.

Do you know what I worked out this week?

I was speculating about our colleague Helen and how she finds time to do everything that she's up to at the moment.

And I thought she must have a time turner.

And I suddenly thought, my god, she is from mine.

And then very rapidly, I thought, oh my god, I'm Ron Weasley.

You're the Ron Weasley

who is not present this week is definitely Dumbledore, isn't he?

You are the boy that lived.

I think I'm Neville.

That's very nice to hear, but I'm pretty sure I'm Neville Longbossum.

I did.

It was a thing that came up a lot during my adolescence.

I used to hang out at this lovely tattoo shop in Worcester run by Americans, and they went, oh my God, you're so like Hermione,

which was adorable.

So you used to hang around a tattoo shop in your adolescence.

Nice.

I had, at one point, nearly 20 piercings.

We can really deal with this on a later and a later podcast.

I think this is a post-credits thing rather than an introductory section.

So let me just wrestle us back on course.

And so we're here to talk about everything that's happened since the last edition of the magazine came out.

One thing that has broken out that we like to keep an eye on is the Reform Party, which completely unaccountably and unpredictably has fallen into a bout of infighting couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of ladders.

It's a bit like we said it was going to

in that podcast episode back in July, straight after the the general election.

I think at that point, maybe I said I reckon probably six months.

They managed to seven and a half nearly.

I'm really surprised.

When I saw those rats trooping into that sack, I thought harmony is bound to ensue, and I'm gutted.

So, the ultimate cause of this is Rupert Lowe, who is the MP for Great Yarmouth and former chairman of Southampton Football Club, who was elected as a reform MP.

He gave an interview to Andrew Pierce of the Daily Mail, in which he said a series of slightly mad things: like, I'm the one-eyed man, and he's the one who comes out on top in the kingdom of the blind.

And you sort of thought, Where are we going with this?

But among them, he also said, We don't want to be a quotes protest party led by a messiah.

And if Nigel Farage wants to succeed, he needs some good people around him.

And oh, fireo, fire.

I know people are talking about me as a potential prime minister, but it's far too early to be talking about that sort of thing.

And someone who thought it was far too early to be talking about that sort of thing was Nigel Farage, because the day after the interview came out,

Lee Anderson, 30 P.

Lee, as he's known in these pages,

who is a reform MP, and Zir Youssef, the um chairman of the party, revealed that actually at some previous point complaints had been made both about Rupert Lowe and about people in his office.

And as a sadly, as a consequence of this, while they really looked into this and gave him really good due process, he was going to be suspended uh from the party whip.

Rupert Lowe, perhaps not unreasonably, has uh decided that this is sort of a revenge whacking.

It's extraordinary timing.

They just finally got to clearing that paperwork about all the complaints about him after he was read about nine.

But it was amazing on Sunday morning because Richard Tice, who is

we've named nearly all of the

reform MPs now, haven't we?

But he went on Laura Coonspoke to say, no, no, no, it's completely unrelated.

It's just absolutely, you know, any claims of bullying or physical intimidation have absolutely got to be taken seriously.

Meanwhile, Nigel Farage, writing in the Sunday Telegraph, pretty much said, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, totally, yeah, yeah, he's completely out of order, he's challenging me.

It was like the O.J.

Simpson book, If I Did It.

It was like, if I had whacked him, then it would have been very successful because I'm great.

But also, it's a pattern of behaviour in Nigel Farage's parties, UKIP, the Brexit party, and now reform is that anybody who goes against Nigel Farage does not last very long.

You know, we talk about these as populist parties, but all of them essentially are Nigel Farage vehicles.

UKIP still exists, by the way, but it collapsed as a force almost

as soon as Nigel Farage left it, really.

Well, not for the first time, because he stepped down, didn't he?

And then he came back a couple of times, but then at one point it did all seem to just slide out of his grasp when we had people like Jared Batten and Henry's later.

Oh, yeah.

Look forward to that.

Can I just check?

Rupert Lowe is, as we say, one of the five.

Yep.

And he's the one who Elon Musk spotted.

He had leadership potential on Twitter during January's Kirsten Rosa Pedophile enabler spree of tweeting.

That Rupert Lowe was the one who, when Musk and Farage fell out, Musk said, This is the guy.

Yes, that's that's the proximate cause really of all of this grumpiness, is that if you're Nigel Farage, you think Rupert Lowe's got a bit too big for his boots.

And if you're Rupert Lowe, you think Nigel Farage is actually a bit of a softy.

So Rupert Lowe, for example, thinks that we need mass deportations.

He said, you know, we should have, for people who arrive on small boats, they should be put on an island somewhere and given, quotes, minimal food rations.

He's one of those people who revels in the idea of being cruel to illegal immigrants, not just merely saying, as most of British mainstream politics does, now, you know, we need strong borders and it's fine to be concerned about these things.

So

there's two distinct problems here, one of which is that that type of very cruel, overtly populist right politics has a pretty hard ceiling on it in Britain, and it is much lower than the amount of votes that reform got at the last election.

So, Nigel Farage, I think, is very well aware of that.

That if he pandered too much to that tendency, he would lose people who maybe once were Labour voters in those northern seats, for example.

And, you know, then there's just the kind of, yeah, as you say, the kind of personality aspect of it.

Rupert Lowe is also another way that he represents reform's voting base, is that he is a very online baby boomer.

Right?

He just tweets a lot or rather posts a lot on X.

Ever since this scandal broke, he has been on there constantly, putting out statements saying, I have actually spoken to them, my lawyer says this, and the lawyer comes back to him.

He's been backed up online by Andrew Bridgeon, potato-loving friend of this podcast.

You know, these are, this is a kind of distinct, and that's what, as I said before in this podcast, one of the things that distinguishes Tory supporters from reform supporters is that very onlineness.

You know, the fact is that if you are somebody who's aged over 60 and is spending a lot of time on X,

that is the Rupert lowest tendency tendency within reform.

But it's not by any means the whole description of their support and what they could possibly capture.

And it's also a field that Kemmy Bainock has pretty much got to itself, isn't it?

At the moment.

Bless her.

You know, I had a steak sandwich at the weekend and I was trying to work out whether or not this was Kemi Baytnock pretty good or not.

Steak for lunch, good, sandwich for lunch, bad.

Because reform, they're reasonably left-wing, aren't they, on things like economics?

I mean, they talk a lot about nationalising various things.

Yeah, nationalising water companies and things, aren't they?

Another big, big split within reform and

tensions within the party between the kind of much more Thatcherite, Reaganite, that's the natural Farage tendency, which is all about deregulating the city and wealth creation and stuff like that, versus, as you say, the UKIP manifesto from the kind of mid-2010s was very much, you know, they're not going to be saying, let's get rid of the triple lock.

You people need to learn to fend for yourselves, right?

In certain senses, they are quite protectionist.

That was the manifesto that said that people should have to stop dressing up to go to the theatre again, wasn't it?

And the circle line should be a circle again, I previously.

Sorry, that was in a manifesto.

That was a UKIP manifesto.

That was one of the periods where Nigel Farage stepped down and thought, was it Lord Rannach?

Lord Rannoch went on an interview with John Sopol, in which they asked him about a series of bananas things, and he was like, I'll be honest with you, I haven't.

I didn't say it like this, but essentially the line was, I haven't read it.

Anyway, I thought it would be nice, given that my main takeaway about everything related to reform is Nigel always wins.

Okay.

I thought it would be nice to have a little quiz about people who are sadly no longer with Nigel or, you know, people who've cycled out of parties that he's founded even after he's left them.

So,

what happened at UKIP's 2013 Women in Politics event that led to Godfrey Bloom leaving the party?

You might not even need the multiple choice dingers.

Dinga ding a ding.

Go on.

He called them sluts.

He joked that a group of female activists were sluts for not cleaning behind the fridge.

That's right, and he meant that kind of sluts.

That was what was so magnificent, which was the most old-fashioned use of the word slut anyway.

And it had to be sort of explained to everyone.

No, you should be taking offence, but in a different way.

In the 2024 general election, what unorthodox campaigning tactic did UKIP leader Lois Perry adopt?

Did she, A, change her last name to Brexit?

B, hired a bulldog to attend all her events with her, or C, endorse Nigel Farage, even though he was in a different party?

I'll go with Bulldog.

No, you see, I think that's the false one because Andrew Rossendell famously

had it took his bulldog out in his Union Jack coat, didn't he?

So I think that's the red herring.

Who is the red herring?

Tory MP.

Yeah, Andrew Rossendell, MP for Brownfield.

It's somewhere in Essex, Romford.

He used to send out constituency leaflets in which some of his spicier views were attributed to the bulldog.

It's not implausible denial.

It wasn't me, it was the dog.

Blame the dogs.

Implausible denial.

It was like, Winston's very worried about illegal migration.

Yeah, anyway.

I'm going to change the name to Brexit.

Of course, it was Shendorse Nigel Farrar.

I didn't know it was that.

Oh, very nice.

Okay, so Andy's leads 1-0.

Okay.

Stephen Wolfe was notoriously pictured, sparked out on the floor of the European Parliament after an altercation with an aptly named fellow UKIP MEP.

What was the MEP called?

Buzz!

Alright, and you don't even need the multiple choice.

I can give you them if you want, and then you get first career.

Dan Punchy.

Jeffrey Decker, Mike Hookham, or David Nutter.

It was Mike Hookham.

It was Mike Hookham.

Hookum.

Hook him in.

And they had a fight, mano-il mano.

Mano-il mano.

That was the phrase one of them used.

Yeah, Mike Hookham, over whether or not Stephen Wolfe was going to try and defect to the Conservatives.

Would you like to know what happened next to Stephen Wolfe?

He got taken to hospital?

Well, yes, that's true.

But he resigned from UKIP in 2016, saying it had become ungovernable without Farage.

Round one.

He later tried to join Reform as a candidate, but wasn't accepted.

Thanks to Nikki Sinclair, a UKIP MEP from 2009 to 2010, which unexpectedly woke record, does the party hold?

It was sort of both the head and the deputy head of the party being women first in the UK.

Kind of in the right genre.

She was the first British transgender parliamentarian.

Would you like to know what happened to her in her membership of UKIP?

Resigned and left the party?

She was expelled from the party after objecting to the extreme views of the EFD grouping that UKI sat within the European Parliament.

She then founded the We Demand a Referendum Party, although it was basically just her.

Okay.

So I demand a referendum.

Get her under trade descriptions.

Okay, which of the following people elected as a representative of one of Nigel Farage's parties did not subsequently quit or get expelled.

Okay?

Douglas Carswell, Mark Reckless, Nigel Farage, former Express journalist Patrick O'Flynn, former leader Suzanne Evans, Calvin Robinson, a priest-ish, Carl Benjamin aka Sargon of a CAD, UKIP leader Henry Bolton, Mark Meacham, aka Count Dankula, UKIP leader Diane James.

I've forgotten the question.

One of them is still in the party that they joined.

Okay.

A party that was at one point founded by an or led by Nigel Farage.

I'm going to go Diane James.

Henry Bolton?

Henry Bolton, I'm afraid he was no confidence as UKIP leader of his girlfriend's racist texts about Meghan Markle.

Yes.

Diane James lasted 18 days as leader, owned less than half a truss.

And she was then cooed.

She left to be an independent.

The person who joined UKIP and is, as of this morning, still UKIP's lead spokesman, Calvin Robinson.

No.

Yeah.

You're joking.

When did he join?

He only joined like in the last year or so, so it's a post-Nigel join of UKIP, but he joined and he's studying.

But he's living in America, isn't he?

Oh, okay, well, well.

Someone sent me a crowdfunder to buy him a house in America.

Did you contribute?

Oddly, no.

Douglas Carswell quit in 2017.

Mark Reckless quit UKIP, joined the Conservative Group, left to be an independent, joined the Brexit Party, then joined the Abolish the Welsh Assembly Party, reason that Brexit had been achieved, then joined reform.

Nigel Farage, as previously discussed, quit several times.

Patrick O'Flynn left for the SDP in 2018.

Suzanne Evans left over Gerald Batten, appointing Tommy Robinson as an advisor.

Carl Carl Benjamin was also joined at the same time as Tommy Robinson.

He was expelled for his extreme views.

Count Dankula left after internal disputes and then, most recently, ran for the Scottish Libertarian Party.

Tommy Robinson's been at the root of a couple of these, haven't they?

Because the whole altercation with Musk back in January, when he said that Rupert Lowe would be a better leader, that was over Rupert Lowe would be more friendly to Tommy Robinson

joining the party, which obviously is kind of the red line for Nigel Farage, isn't it?

Yep.

Can I ask you, Helen?

Yeah.

That quiz.

Yeah.

What has it taught us?

Have we learned that there is a real dearth of talent and only Farage is capable of filling the space on the right and persuading people that his ideas are decent?

Because he is very persuasive.

He has attracted millions of votes in various elections.

All these other people seem to be absolute no-hopers.

Why?

I'm really reluctant to go along with the great man theory of history, but I think if you look at both Nigel Farage and Donald Trump, they matter in historical terms.

I don't think, as you say, that the British radical right would have got to the stage that it had without Nigel Farage.

Now, if you talk to Dominic Cummings, he will say, there's a reason we quarantined all those people and leave.eu and didn't let them anywhere near vote leave.

You know, we needed to build a bigger coalition.

But he's got an appeal, which is related to him being kind of upbeat and smoking a fag and drinking a pint.

And, you know, he's just got a personality and a kind of charisma and a style.

And, you know, he has occasional flashes of nastiness.

But I think some of the things that you see with some of the less successful and more extreme right people on that list is that the nastiness is overly exposed, right?

With Farage, there's a kind of bonhomie.

And I think if you start just talking about how you want to deport people, that is, in Britain at least, a kind of losing proposition.

And Nigel Farage has always been very careful about walking the line, about just asking questions or saying what legitimate concerns or framing it as part of a wider anti-elitism.

And then some of the people who try and do a Nigel Farage impression just come out and go, you know, I don't like foreigners.

And people go, Bit much.

And that's what's run him into trouble more recently, hasn't it?

Because, you know, this is a man who is also on the record saying, you know, Putin is the most impressive politician in the world and being very, very much on Donald Trump's side throughout everything.

Trump being in the White House this time around and the kind of more unchained version of Trump is a real problem for him and indeed for all of Europe's populists.

Ben Ansell, the political scientist, has just written a very good sub-site post about this.

But being tied to Putin is a real problem.

You know, if elites have a go at you and you're a populist politician for being, you know, chaotic or whatever it might be or being extreme, that doesn't necessarily hurt you because you kind of say, well, you would say that, wouldn't you?

You're just scared of me.

You're scared of people like me.

But being tied to an enemy, a foreign enemy, is really bad.

And it's obviously something that Farage is, you know, it's sensitive to because he was on Russia today.

You know, he has tried to kind of triangulate on the Ukraine war in a way that the other politicians, you know, Kami Bade not being an obvious example, have not.

And I think that could really...

It's a literal political knowledge hock.

It was what did for Jeremy Corbyn in the end, wasn't it?

Was it the moment in 2018 where he appeared to be sympathetic to Russia and said that we should send samples of

the poison that was found in Salisbury over to Russia?

Not to poison your poison, but just okay, go, no, no, no, definitely not mine.

Never seen it before, Gar.

I know.

Yeah, so I think, again, that's another real problem that they have at the moment, and populist parties across Europe have, is that feeling that they are not nationalists in the way that they would like to be, that they're now in an alliance with a kind of, you know.

Globalists.

They are globalists, but unfortunately, their set of allies are Russia and Iran and, you know, and China.

So

I think that's really damaging to them.

But the main thing we've learned is that it's very funny.

Right, now we come to our second story of the week, which is, from, I'd say, the other end of the political spectrum just about to reform.

This is about the BBC,

because Charlotte Moore, who's the chief content officer and has been for some years, has announced she's off.

The BBC's new chairman, Samuel shah has given his first big interview where he's been talking about the direction of the bbc we're coming up the bbc's license to operate runs out and it's all about how they're going to pay for what comes next the following decade because these things are normally done every every 10 years so it's a time of change

just trying i'm bidding for some documentary voiceovers at the moment tom hanks can't take all of the atom results look at it the gentle puppin so they're in a bit of a state as is tv in general yeah i mean the charlotte more thing um it just seems to have taken everyone by surprise as far as I can tell.

No one really has a brilliant explanation for it as yet.

Charlotte Moore had accumulated an enormous amount of power around herself at the BBC.

I mean, she was

by the end of it, I think she was chief content officer, which is basically sort of lord of everything.

It really is.

She'd taken over so many briefs from other people.

You know, we used to have channel controllers who used to be, you know, a big deal back in the days when it was Michael Gray cancelling Doctor Who or Alan Yentop getting rid of El Dorado.

You know, these were kind of like household names by people.

Out of every single episode of this pocket, last time it was the Wheel Tappers Tappers and Shunters Club or something, this time it's El Dorado and Yelena.

El Dorado's much more recent than that.

So what you're saying is Charlotte Moore was a kind of Cromwell figure.

She drew in an awful lot of different parts of the BBC.

She took the whole of TV and radio, which used to be separate divisions.

It's a really, really Byzantine organisation.

There's a director general.

Then there are about 50 layers of...

different management soup.

There's this whole other wing called BBC Studios, which is the commercial wing, but no one quite understands the relationship.

No, and then it will have super indies, so it will have independent production companies that are nonetheless wholly owned by the BBC.

And the bit that there's people from within the BBC say this to me, and I want to go, isn't that just still the BBC then?

Apparently not, no.

So, and also BBC Studios making programmes for other people as well, as are ITV studios.

It's all a very confusing landscape.

So, it's loco.

I don't understand any of it.

But Charlotte Moore was this extremely powerful figure and she was definitely in the running to be a future director general.

That may be, a remote controller in our last issue speculated that that may be what it's done, that these days you're not going to get to be director general and head of the whole BBC without some experience out there in

the independent sector.

So, what are the main problems facing the BBC as it comes up for the charter renewal in 2027?

The big one has to be the future of the licence fee and whether that is going to carry on.

I think really interesting, by the way, that Samir Shahz, the chairman of the BBC's first interview that he did was with The Times.

So, a Rupert Murdoch paper that has been strongly ideologically opposed to the very existence of the BBC and certainly the public funding of the BBC through the licence fee for many years.

So, you know, that's that's that's getting right out there and not talking necessarily to the friendliest of sources.

But the debate over the licence fee has changed enormously in the fact that these days, you know, most of us are, or those who can afford it at least, are subscribing to various other forms of television, you know, be that Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney Plus, but there are absolutely so many of them out there.

So the idea that you just have a sort of universal public broadcaster service, which you are obliged to pay currently £169.50 a year for, I think is much, much less tenable.

And certainly, Lisa Nandi, who is the culture secretary we've seen, has been floating ideas of different ways of funding.

I mean, a very bizarre incident before Christmas where she floated, or those close to Lisa Nandy floated the idea of it being funded out of taxation, only to have that pretty much immediately shot down by the government of which she was a part.

But, you know, there is very definitely

some thinking about what's going to happen next going on at very, very high levels.

Shah's theory is one of the things he talks about in the interview is the idea of some kind of levy that is essentially like a proportional tax, right?

I think one of the things that he says, which I think is a fair point, is that it's not fair that it is essentially a flat rate of 170 quid no matter what your income, whether you're a millionaire or somebody who's struggling to get by.

Which I think is utterly bonkers, because surely the only way of justifying it is going, no, it's not a tax on everyone.

And if you suddenly say, well, it's related to the size of your property, which was specifically what you floated, if you've got a sort of a five-bedroom property, well, you might have five tellies in it, so you need to pay more for that.

That one just seemed to be a complete non-starter to me.

I think it's a bizarre one.

I think, I mean, this is absolutely only my personal opinion, I think at some point they are going to have to go over to a subscription model.

And I think that the BBC are going completely the wrong way about that, because the way for the BBC to sell itself in a marketplace is to say, we are the BBC.

This is the stuff that we do, that no one else is going to do.

And that is enormously appreciated by people in this country, however much they might moan about the licence fee.

BBC News is massively trusted.

It's still where people end up.

I mean, the BBC News channel itself, which I still think of as being this slightly obscure thing that only nerds like me tune into, it's got a reach of over 10 million a month.

I mean, the people are, at any sort of national event, that's where people go immediately, be that, you know, the royal deaths or coronations or just, you know, sort of terror attacks or anything.

That is the first port of call for a lot of people.

The other thing that people are showing is that they are willing to pay for news these days.

They're not willing to pay for newspapers necessarily, but there is an appetite, people are, as things fracture more, there is an appetite for paying for trusted news sources, be that sub-stacks of people

whose writing you like and you trust.

Or, I mean, GB News is charging considerably more.

GB News has membership.

You can watch GB News anyway.

It's on Freeview or satellite.

But there are people out there, there are GB News viewers who are willing to pay up to something like £200 a year to be members of GB News and get exclusive behind-the-scenes footage.

What on earth do you get for 200 quid?

Do Do you get to kind of like go on and shout at one of the hosts or something like that?

You get to be racist in the comments, as we revealed in an issue a couple of editions back.

And you also get exciting things like Christopher Chope telling viewers why he decided to defect from the Telegraph and go and work for GB News.

Okay, so 170 quid a year is what, that's about £14 a month.

Some of that out.

Most other platforms are charging not a huge amount less than that.

Netflix, £155.88.

Okay, so for Disney, £109, just to give you a couple of comparisons.

Okay, so for Netflix, for example, what you're getting is a lot of

not brilliant TV and movies, and some really good ones as well, that you will only be able to get that.

What are you so rude about with Love Megan?

I know you love it.

I suppose the thing I want to know is how on earth can these things be compared with each other?

It's really hard.

You can't, because the BBC is providing you, apart from anything else, with radio,

which is an entire thing on top of that.

But also, there's an awful lot of stuff that the BBC does, which I think is the stuff that justifies its existence as a public service broadcaster and is appreciated by people.

But that seems to be the stuff that they're insistent on cutting back on.

So last year we had massive cuts to BBC local radio, which is a huge thing for a really unserved older audience out there.

There were also attempts to cut back on the funding of sort of orchestras and choirs and that support of music, which isn't just about supposedly elitist kind of classical music either, because the other thing they cut back on was BBC Introducing, which is a real thing where local radio and TV people are out there in communities supporting kind of younger bands coming through and that music industry that's incredibly hard to break into or to make any money from.

You know, these are the sort of things that a public service broadcaster ought to be doing.

And you're not going to find Netflix going out there and doing that.

You're certainly not going to find Disney going out and doing that.

I mean this might be sort of heretical but but things like Call the Midwife or Vigil

could sit perfectly well on any of these subscription services.

I think that's a bit harsh because I'm not sure actually.

I mean Colin Woodmurf is now an absolutely massive banker of a hit but if you had tried to get that going as an independent commission for Netflix, I don't know if they would have said, I mean, A, every TV production company you talk to says, we don't really want to do period drama, and you go, you seem to be doing a lot of it nonetheless.

But then one of the things that was reported on the Sunday Times this weekend is about the kind of nightmare state of drama.

Actually, the Guardian Observer had some stuff on this too, about sort of even very senior producers working as shelf stackers now, because it's, you know, the big drought in that industry.

But essentially, saying that the problem is you can't do things, you can't do anything approaching prestige TV or even normal Sunday night TV now without a co-production sponsor.

The guy who was behind commissioning this debates against versus the post office said,

I couldn't do that now.

So basically, with the BC, or ITV in that case, stump up some of the money and a much bigger,

and then a bit more half comes from an international sponsor.

No, you know, Netflix did have Toxic Town, which is

one of those kind of issue and events dramas.

So it is possible, but

it really worries me about that.

But and I sort of take your point, Adam, but I just think people need to sort of buy into the BBC as a concept.

And I always wonder if you strip away the bits that people really like, stuff that would do well in the commercial sector, like Street People Come Dancing, say, then it just, it sort of denudes the kind of round offering of everything that they do.

You're saying you have to have the big shows in a way to justify the smaller ones as well, even though the smaller ones are the thing that you do that are unique.

Well, I guess the main problem is, when you're talking about this kind of cutbacks, is the linear channels.

They've just got to fill at least, you know, even if BBC only broadcasts in the evenings or whatever, they've got to, well, now online.

But you know what I mean?

For BBC One and BBC Two, they've got to fill 24 hours of scheduling every day.

Netflix doesn't.

I mean, it's not got any pretensions to that.

You could obviously watch Netflix 24 hours a day if you wanted to.

But I wonder at some point do the linear channels end?

And at that point, this becomes a...

I think, again, that's something that's inevitable.

I'm not talking about that being in the near future.

But I mean, if you're talking about planning for charter periods, charter periods are 10 years each, and you've got to be looking to the one after that as well.

So, I mean, at some point, that is the thing that always amazes me is not only the number of people who are still watching linear TV and just switching on and seeing what's on, it's the number of TV listings magazines that still seem to be doing really, really well.

It's one of the great mysteries of journalism.

There's about five or six different options of matter.

And you just think, well, but

so people are still going out with their highlighter pen and putting the ring round things.

So, I mean, that is still very, very definitely there.

But the co-production thing is kind of an argument against that as well.

That maybe they should be looking at doing more things like that.

I mean so Doctor Who at the moment is a co-production between the BBC and Bad Wolf Studios, isn't it, which is Russell T.

Davis and Judy Gardner set up.

And funded by Disney Manager.

And funded by Disney, and outside of Britain it goes out on the Disney Channel.

Now that doesn't seem to have worked out that well.

There are rumours that Disney are very much thinking of pulling out of that at the end of this particular deal.

But that sounds like more of an international thing anyway, or it'll give it an international skew.

Whereas what works really well, like the local radio you're saying, is things that actually reflect where people are where people are and give you an offering and the other thing about local radio is that that is a network that any news provider would kill for isn't it it's people embedded in their communities with connections to that community so that if something happens in Runcorn or Widness or Southampton or whatever you've got boots on the ground basically it's out there it's it's a really justifiable thing and the other bizarre thing that i find that the bbc are doing in terms of when you're talking about stuff that will work on streaming services if you go to the iPlayer there's quite bizarre things on on there.

So, Megan Markle, another show of hers, Suits, which is old.

It's from before she married Prince Harry.

All eight, seven or eight series or something of that are all up on the iPlayer.

As is, and this amazed me, the simple life with Paris Hilton and Nicole Ritchie.

Really?

Which was on when I was in my twenties.

I'm going to tell you something that's going to really upset you, which is that that stuff is on iPlayer because it's for people your age or my age about stuff that they remember for their youth, whereas actual today's young people are not watching even iPlayer, they are watching TikTok and YouTube.

And that's the that I mean that's the main thing is how does how does the BBC capture anybody under the age of 40 really you are now entering the kind of old demographics that that people from traditional media are going to cater to and as happened when newspapers went online and started largely flogging their wares through Facebook and Twitter most people aren't aware of who made something or where it was originally.

I mean, you know, if you're watching, an awful lot of TV is watching small clips on either TikTok or YouTube now.

It might have a little BBC logo in the corner, but hardly anyone is going to notice that.

And as far as they're concerned, they're watching it on TikTok or YouTube.

That's where their loyalties lie.

One thing that was really pleasing was the fact that Mr.

Beast, you know, the megaton YouTuber, has had a lot of trouble making a mainstream reality TV show.

And it's one of those things that's quite pleasing where it's like, oh, actually, the gradient for making big tele is actually quite tough.

You know, it's not like these new guys have got all the answers.

Actually, sometimes there are things that are really genuinely hard that we just don't appreciate enough because only good people do them.

The basic problem is that all TV is in a huge amount of trouble.

The BBC is just a huge example of a huge tape TV maker.

A similar thing happened to video games, where all the consoles got into a race about how good they could look, right?

They just needed huge amounts of computer power because what they thought people wanted was the raindrops to look really realistic on the end of your gun as you shot someone in the face.

Sorry, I've been playing a lot of Far Cry this weekend.

I have done a lot of that.

And actually, some of the best and most beloved video games are actually pretty kind of lo-fi.

But what it meant is it put them into a kind of arms race on graphical processing, and that jacked up all of the prices.

It meant that often titles were released when they weren't really that particularly finished, and you had to have a day one update.

And a sort of weirdly similar thing has happened with TV, which is that the streamers entering the market has just jacked up the quote-unquote quality level of anything, right?

You had all of those interviews around the crown that were like, we remade the entirety of Diana's wedding dress.

And people's expectations, rather than just going, oh, she's put her in a white dress, you know, sort of that vaguely will do,

have gone up, which is, again, the story of what's happened to Doctor Who, right?

It used to be the fandom loved the fact it was all filmed in a quarry.

They'd be like, oh, there's a quarry episode standing in for an alien planet.

Now it's CGI'd up the wazoo, and it doesn't actually make it any more lovable.

It doesn't make the stories any better.

It just makes it a hell of a lot more spendy.

But that's deemed to be what audiences demand, a level of spendy that means it's costing them two, three million dollars an hour.

The other thing that I think will happen is the death of soaps, because they are one thing that I don't, I mean, they're not doing well now on linear TV channels, neither EastEnders, which has just celebrated this 40th anniversary, or Coronation Street, which is right down there from the 26 million who watched Den and Angie, which obviously was exceptional, but right down from the sort of tens of millions that they used to.

And also, they don't work on streamers, as we discovered with Amazon Prime made that really weird decision to bring back neighbours after it went out a couple of years ago, and I have rethought that, just wasn't getting the viewing figures.

So whether we'll be seeing EastEnders through to its 50th anniversary or Coronation Street through to its, where are we at now, 70th, 75th?

But is that just because they're very expensive?

Because you'd think they're like podcasts.

They're just podcasts podcasts with visuals.

You know, you can make them for ages and ages and ages.

Quality doesn't have to be very high, present company accepted.

But I think, again, as Helen was saying, it's the pressure on ramping up the quality of it and the events of it.

I mean, there used to be episodes of East Enders, if you've watched them on UK Gold.

Will Lofty get his sewing machine to work and

Will Ethel take little Willie out for a walk today?

And these days, you know,

how many times have they blown up the Queen Vic now?

It seems to happen about twice a week.

And yep, one of the big successes of BBC Only Connect.

It's made for nothing.

The prize is a piece of perspex, it gets huge viewing figures, it gets really, really decent viewing figures.

All of those late afternoon quizzes as well, do I mean your pointlesses and your

Bradley Walsh?

My wife is for both the people on pointless because they have the thing we know in the jackpot's only like 1,250 because it's the first day, and then there's two of them.

And they're like, What are you going to spend it on?

They're like, You can see in their eyes, they're going, sort of just about a holiday, isn't it?

Now, let's take in a little bit of glorious spring sunshine in Riyadh.

Let's get Riyal.

Yes?

The currency.

Thank you.

No, no.

Okay?

No, Andy.

Let's go to Saudi Arabia, where all sorts of very consequential meetings have been happening recently.

So the initial US-Russian summits over ending the war in Ukraine took place there a month or so ago.

And Vladimir Zelensky recently flew there for meetings with US officials with the same aim in mind.

And it's an interesting place, not least because Britain has very, very, very strong ties to Saudi Arabia.

And the role of Saudi Arabia is changing.

Britain seems to be absolutely determined to cling on.

It's extraordinary.

I went through the last six prime ministers we've had.

They've all

I wouldn't say not put a foot wrong with Saudi Arabia, but they've clung very closely to nurse.

Boris Johnson was just there for a half-term holiday.

Wasn't he just?

In fact, actually, when you were one of my favourite media outlets, Carrie Johnson's Instagram feed, was posting all the way through the half-term holiday these gorgeous vistas of what looked like the kind of Maldives, just like lovely white sand beaches, adorable blonde-head backs of children's heads, because she desperately wants to post pictures of her kids, but also knows that she sort of...

She haven't got faces.

Her hair just goes all the way around.

Leading to Adam's long-running conspiracy theory that there's a family of little cousin Its running around.

But at the end of the week, she said, oh, by the way, of course, it was the Red Sea Marriott.

I looked it up.

She said, it is quite expensive.

I thought, are we paying for this ourselves?

Who knows?

If you are paying for yourself, the entry-level room is a thousand pounds a night.

And I suspect they may have had one of the rather more charming colours.

But you know, it's part of the Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince and kind of de facto ruler at the moment.

It's part of his Red Sea project where he wants to put a huge amount of investment into turning Saudi Arabia into a real tourist destination.

So this is all, as you're saying, part of this kind of wider image rehab.

No longer will we be the place of people getting their hands chopped off and throwing homosexuals off buildings and not letting women leave the house without a buyers on.

Instead, come to our beautiful Japanese sushi banquet and you might run into Boris Johnson.

Yes, exactly.

This is all part of a thing that is called Vision 2030,

which Saudi Arabia is very keen to talk about.

Broadly, it means they want to make themselves less dependent on oil and more dependent on things like

influencers and owning all sports, which are growth areas.

So that is certainly what what they want to talk about.

There is a very convincing counter-narrative that actually a lot of the reforms, quote-unquote, that have been made are rather skin deep.

And if you say anything critical about Mohammed bin Salman, you will be in prison

very, very swiftly.

My Atlantic colleague Graham Wood went and did a very big cover profile a couple of years ago with Mohammed bin Salman.

And he mentioned he's got

MBS, as he's known, he's got a tick.

You know, he does this thing where he looks like he's sort of gulping.

And it is completely forbidden anywhere in Saudi media.

This is like one of these things that is just unspeakable.

And actually, I was going to read the Foreign and Commonwealth Office advice about going to Saudi Arabia.

And they said, you know, do not criticise anybody in the regime.

Also, it's possible they might dig up your social media comments from years and years ago.

Well, in October 2018, a Saudi journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, was invited to go to the Saudi, I think it was a consulate

in Istanbul, where he was murdered.

And it is believed by various Western intelligence agencies that this was done, in fact, with the say-so and in fact on the instructions of Mohammed bin Salman.

That led to a distinct withdrawal by the West from all sorts of various Saudi ventures.

There is a thing that gets called Devos in the Desert, which is a big Saudi deal-making jamboree.

Lots of banks, lots of governments didn't go.

They went back extremely quickly.

And this is the thing.

So, I did have a look through the record of the last six prime ministers on Saudi.

So, Kirsteimer went in December.

The thing he said the last time someone else went to Saudi was when he accused Boris Johnson in 2022 of going cap in hand from dictator to dictator.

He's now seemed to realise that is quite a good thing to do.

So we have to win contracts and investment around the world, and UAE and Saudi Arabia are key partners.

So that tune really has changed.

Rishi Sunak met him in 2022, invited him over in 2023.

Liz Truss got in with a call when she became Prime Minister.

Sadly, there wasn't time to take things any further, but...

There wasn't time for a waiter's delivery.

Exactly.

They got along famously, basically.

Boris visited in 2022.

He was actually there in the country about 10 days before Khashoggi was murdered, which is better than being there 10 days after Khashoggi was murdered, but nonetheless.

He was quite vocal about the Khashoggi murder at the time, wasn't he?

He was, he was.

Probably not now.

No, he seems to have recovered his bonhami.

Theresa May is an interesting one because she was PM at the time of Khashoggi's murder and made very clear what she thought about it.

And a few years later, she announced in the Register of Members' Interest she'd received £107,000

for a speaking event with the Saudi Arabian government, the World Travel and Tourism Council.

David Cameron, you may remember, went camping with MBS in the desert when he was working with Lex Greensill, trying to shove his dodging...

Lovely photo of them in the yurt.

Exactly.

So it does feel like when you become Prime Minister, you get ushered into Downing Street, you get given the letter to write to the nuclear submarine commanders, and then you get told, here's why we're going to be nice to Saudi Arabia.

And it's financial.

It's weapons sales there and investment here.

And to be fair, it has been absolutely transactional, hasn't it?

I mean, ever since Tony Blair cancelled the investigation into the Al Yamamar

arms deal, which is something Paul Foote wrote for us about Lowe's in the eighties and just said, No, we just need to do business with them, so we're not going to do this.

I mean, there was at least no pretence about that.

No, absolutely.

Before they'd start dismembering journalists with bone sores.

It is a red line for me.

I think that's a good idea.

No, it's a red line for me as well.

I can see the point that if you're a British Prime Minister, you're going to have to deal with Saudi Europe.

They exist.

They are a geopolitical fact.

They are going to be a key partner in any kind of peace in the Middle East between Israel and Gaza.

They have essentially become the only country that has buy-in from both Russia and America to be able to host Ukraine peace talks, right?

In the way that Britain would like to, but Russia knows that we're really not on their side.

So, you know, all of that stuff is just a kind of geopolitical fact.

The stuff I find more difficult is the kind of journalists and influencers going over there.

And then, because the point about that is that you then, after that, slightly lose your ability to criticise them, not least because it is indeed illegal in Saudi Arabia to do so.

Yes, and this is where I think

this is a big part of the MBS strategy is to make it seem like Saudi Arabia is not a petrostate.

They get about 30% of their income from oil.

They're definitely a petrostate.

How much do they get from the gullies, Andy?

I mean, they're in fame.

It's all gulf, no gully there.

Actually, they are investing big in Chinese green tech.

That is a thing they're doing, and that's,

you know, I'm sure that's something also they want to shout about.

They're very keen to be known,

that's known about in the West.

The idea is that they want to be a middle power.

So between the USA and China, and somewhere where, like the UAE, you know, a lot of deals take place.

So there is this chat about greening the economy.

We'll see how real that is.

But as you say, the media stuff is really interesting.

So they bought a big stake in the Independent and the Standard.

And Lebedev is great, great pals with MBS.

He spends a lot of time out there personally, yeah.

Yes, and Lebedev had him to dinner at Hampton Court when he came over in 2018.

Stud house.

Stud house, Hampton Court.

He doesn't actually own the whole of Hampton Court.

It's just stud house.

Do you think he makes them do all the kind of longevity stuff?

Do you think they're there doing the sort of penile plasmographs and the hyperbaric chambers and all that sort of stuff?

Lebedev together.

Lebedev did join the board of Hevolution, which is a

rather crankish longevity organisation, which

is MBS-headed.

Yeah, yeah, it is.

Not Hervolution.

Immortality, poor Om.

And this is all via the PIF, the Public Investment Fund, which is about half a trillion dollars of oil money.

It's big.

They started it in the 70s, and it turns out we've needed a lot of oil since then.

So that's been spent on things like Newcastle United, 2034 World Cup, the Live Golf Tournament.

I know you two are both keen, keen golf fans, and they've...

Do you know what?

I know so little about that that I thought this is how posh I am.

I thought that was the 54 golf tournament.

Oh my god.

But there are things like Vice, where the Saudis bought a chunk of Vice and as a result it really pulled back its criticism of the regime.

There's a lot of reporting that they would have done.

One editor at least resigned in protest over that.

So that's the interesting thing.

They've bought bought shares in Disney and Facebook.

About 1% of each of those two is owned by Saudi Arabia.

So

it's not just about media ownership either, because there's an awful lot of SponCon.

I mean, we've done Enders pieces in Street about various papers, particularly the Financial Times, is quite keen on.

Whilst being editorially quite critical of the Saudi regime at times, awful lot of stuff from sort of visit Saudi and is it Nyom?

Nyom.

Nyom.

It's the noise of the future.

Nyom.

Which, as far as I can see, looks like a sort of military base, and you have to eat all your meals in a kind of group canteen.

It's something that you look like you would sentence influencers to do if I was in power rather than something you'd actively choose to get to.

It's not the Morrison Carrie and the kids went to, is it?

No.

So as these meetings are happening, it's just very interesting to think this is a space that Britain, as you say, Helen, might have occupied in the past.

Oh, I thought you meant like physically like our colonial power, but you mean the sort of imaginary space of the bridge between America and other authoritarian powers.

Yeah, exactly.

But it's not just that you're not allowed to make any criticism of MBS either, is it?

It's that if you go over there for one of these jollies and are paid however much, you do seem to also have to make the obligatory gushing quote.

Have you got this?

It's the

well, it's very much like appearing on Meghan Markle's show.

You just have to turn up, you have to try the stuff, the canopes, and you say, my goodness, did you make this?

That is amazing.

I've been watching a lot of

clue into Andy's life here.

Yeah, you have to say, this ladybird Crostini is fantastic to MBS.

Yeah, you do.

And Boris has been doing that.

And I think some leaders clearly are even more enthusiastic to do this than that.

Piers Morgan was over there, wasn't he, for a jolly recently?

Was he now?

Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Who we haven't been extremely outspoken about Jamal Khashoggi when he was in his days back on Good Morning Britain when that happened.

This is what he said

when he was interviewing then Business Secretary Kwasi Kwateng in March 2021 about Crown Prince Mohammed Bil Salman.

Are you going to apply sanctions and stand up in a moral and ethical way against this Crown Prince who, according to the United States government, is a man who murders journalists?

Where is our moral compass?

He literally sent a team of executioners to lead this journalist into a room where they swore him to pieces.

Do you not feel uncomfortable about doing business with him?

This is Piers Morgan in January this year when he appeared as a guest at the Saudi Real Estate Future Forum in Riyadh.

I have never seen a personality like that of His Royal Highness Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

I have witnessed gender equality in the kingdom and I am very proud of the developments the kingdom is experiencing, supporting and empowering all its citizens.

Saudi Arabia has achieved remarkable success in sports, with national team players demonstrating a high level of skill and competence.

This transformation happening in the kingdom is truly inspiring, both intellectually and emotionally, driven by a visionary approach that sets a global benchmark.

I mean, Meghan Markle at this point would be kind of being slightly sick and

how much money would they have to give you to put that out?

Much as I want to live in a really big house, I just think I'd just be like,

you know what I mean?

Even if

that could be about my own mother and I wouldn't want to say something that nice about them, I'm critically nice.

I think I'd have the get-a-clause because they said, do you want to come over for X amount of money to certain amount of time?

I'd just say, can I bring my husband?

Is that what I want?

He and Tucker Carlson interviewed each other.

Oh, my God.

Yeah, it's a sort of bizarre stage set of the two of them in front of a kind of windswept Dune.

Had they both been briefed that they were going to be the one being asked questions?

I fear, although I only watched about 10 minutes before my eyeballs started liquefying, but they sort of did a kind of tag team thing where one of them did one in the end, they both put it out on their own platforms, as it were.

Oh, I don't feel entirely well hearing about that.

It's not having to go to the desert to see it.

There's not enough money in the world, is it?

Booker Castle Nova wears sockless loafers as well, which I imagine in the desert would be very unpleasant.

You never saw Lawrence Arabia in sockless loafers, did you?

That's true.

Okay, that's it for this episode of Page 94.

Thank you so much for listening.

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