At the end of the Sixties the BBC top brass realised that the old pre-war stations with their starched collars and cut glass accents were losing touch with the emerging youth culture. So they rearranged the whole of BBC radio into four new national networks (plus a bunch of local and regional stations). They were imaginatively named Radio 1, Radio 2, Radio 3 and Radio 4.

Radio 1 was for young people - a group previously catered for only by chirpy (and seasick) pirate radio DJs. Radio 2 was for ‘light entertainment’ and music for the oldies (emphasis on big bands, Alma Cogan and Wurlitzer organs). Radio 3 was (and is) for the highbrows, the big-brains - inheriting The post-war Third Programme’s vanishingly small audience of Wagner and Verdi fans that, in any rational system, would have been totally ignored. This is Britain, though, so they got their own radio station (there’s a bit of ’serious’ jazz in there too plus some grown-up drama and very serious speech).

Radio 4 pretty soon turned out to be the jewel in the crown: an almost perfect blend of serious speech radio, quality drama, influential news and current affairs and groundbreaking comedy. Radio 4 became a permanent, day-long fixture in millions of middle class homes. Programmes and voices assumed the status of national treasures. Even the station’s soap, which is a frankly weird ‘everyday story of farming folk‘ originally planned as a way to promote understanding of agriculture is now on the protected list.

Meanwhile, Radio 4’s comedy commissioners - some of the Beeb’s best and most influential managers over four decades - brought in and nurtured hundreds of young comedians and writers, many of whom went on to create and star in important national and international TV shows and movies. Radio 4’s arrival caused BBC’s comedy output to be divided sharply down the middle: the old-fashioned, broad, belly laugh stuff from the music hall tradition (what Americans would call ‘Vaudeville’) stayed on Radio 2 - and it’s still there.

The new stuff, which came from university revues (the Cambridge Footlights was a particularly rich source), big city cabarets (there weren’t any comedy clubs in Britain back then) and from the inside pages of newspapers and satirical magazines, went out on Radio 4. Surreal sketch shows, political satire, funny quiz shows and sitcoms made their home here. Sketch shows like Monty Python, The Goodies, Little Britain, The League of Gentlemen, The Mighty Boosh; oddly uncompetitive panel shows like Just a Minute and the unparalleled I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue; dozens of stand-ups and writers - from Ivor Cutler and Chris Morris to Douglas Adams to Armando Iannucci all got their start there. It’s easier, in fact, to count the British comics who didn’t get their start on Radio 4: the only recent exception I can think of is Ricky Gervais, creator of The Office - now a global hit. He started on commercial radio: very unusual, that.

The orthodoxy now, though, is that Radio 4 has lost it. Comics and writers don’t need radio at all any more because of the explosion of TV outlets for comedy since the multichannel era got its belated start in the UK ten years ago. In Radio 4’s heyday TV was an impossible dream for all but the very best of comedians. Now there’s such a hunger for cheap content in the badlands of late night cable and satellite that comedians routinely score TV shows before they’ve even toured.

So Radio 4 may not be the natural nursery for mainstream comedy any more, no longer an essential rung on the ladder to fame and cocaine addiction, but there’s still plenty of funny stuff there. From the current crop I’d select sitcoms Ed Reardon’s Week and Fags, Mags and Bags, ‘quiz’ show Genius, loopy stand-up Mark Watson and topical surrealism from Armando Iannucci. The variety is still enormous and the wonders of the Internet mean you can actually hear this stuff. Spend an hour or two in BBC 7’s archive and you’ll be a British comedy bore before you know it… And while I’m about it, I’m going to squeeze in a plug for my own site Speechification, which selects and reviews Radio 4 programmes (as well as good speech radio from around the world) - subscribe to the podcast for an unending stream of good stuff from the best speech station in the world.

You know this already: Doctor Who is a triumph. It’s a really grown-up collision of ideas and drama in a primetime TV slot. In the three series since the Doctor’s return to TV in 2005, classical science fiction devices have mixed it up with classy pop TV plotting in a way you very rarely see. A handful of brilliant movies have done this. Can’t think of any right now, though. Kubrick? Not really. Tarkovsky? No. Alien? Hardly. Blade Runner? Getting there. It’s just very unusual for left- and right-brain to get it together quite so freely. The giant sci-fi anthologies of your youth were empty of emotion. Or emotion was reduced to a kind of vector, a weightless 2D plot element slithering through space-time (or something).

Anyway, the new Doctor - the creation of Russell T Davies, telly drama genius - is a man and a universal natural phenomenon in one. He cries over lost love and rescues an entire species in every episode. He resolves quite convincing space-time anomalies, closes rifts, reverses chain reactions and collapses exploding stars. The whole while properly engaging with the emotional sub-plot, breaking two or three hearts, reconciling parted lovers and acknowledging the yearning for freedom of an enslaved species. We, the audience, all cry and then, afterwards, twitter and blog and email about it like the pre-pubescent fanboys we’ve all been reduced to.

Meanwhile, in each highly-compressed one- or two-episode story, new characters have to be brought up to speed within the show’s first three minutes. “So. Hold on. You’re an omnipotent time Lord. A creature with other-worldly powers and a time machine. The spiny things are a species from the future who want to harvest our planet’s psychic energy. And my boyfriend’s just been vapourised. Well, let’s get on with it, then!” Ordinary people are accelerated along story arcs that would leave you or I dribbling in a corner. Humble characters are promoted to planet saving superpeople. And the whole thing hangs together beautifully.

David Tennant, The current Doctor, is an authentic heart-throb and a perfect, self-deprecating superbeing. Under Davies’ tenure the Doctor’s been translated from a remote and eccentric visitor from another world to a complex, near-human saviour figure, a man who carries the weight of humanity’s woes like a loving surrogate father or a benign secular God-figure. We love him because he offers himself in our place. This is potent stuff, pressing all sorts of primal narrative buttons. We all love the Doctor. We wind up crying inexplicably. I suspect that Davies has essentially hypnotised us by the canny re-use of Oedipal devices that pull our heart strings and leave us wondering why we’re so moved. He’s a clever man. No wonder he’s so sought-after. I anticipate a great future in Hollywood if the man can ever be torn away from Cardiff, the show’s hometown.

There are sceptics, of course, people who just can’t bear the introjection of sci-fi material into Saturday night drama (or vice versa) and there are people of a certain age for whom the earlier Doctors will never be bettered. Everyone has their own Doctor (mine was John Pertwee who took the job when I was seven and stayed till I was 11) but Tennant is the best yet. Around the world the geeks have certainly taken him to their hearts. Watching the Who chit-chat on twitter and in the ’sphere on Saturday evening it’s evident that techies wherever they gather are downloading the show’s torrent minutes after it’s finished. In San Francisco, after a weekend-long developer event called Foo Camp a couple of weeks ago, British hackers convened an ironic ‘Who Camp’ to watch a freshly downloaded episode.

So Doctor Who’s alive and well: a sophisticated and humane (but not human) character, comprehensively updated for the networked era. I really don’t know how I’m going to wait six months for the next series. I need some kind of paradox machine.

What’s a thirty-five-year-old countercultural love-fest doing ruling the pop cultural roost seven years into the twenty-first century? How did a crowd of feckless hippies wind up practically owning the British media for a week every Summer (rain or shine)? These and other questions are, interestingly, absent from the papers and the broadcast media these days. That’s because Glastonbury has essentially won.

Glastonbury is officially the largest and most diverse ‘greenfield’ festival on the planet and - for the artists - without question the most sought-after gig in the world. Artists and labels recognise there’s no better way for artists to commune with their fans. Glastonbury oozes love, good vibes, warmth, empathy, connection, optimism - all those precious, profoundly non-corporate values so hard to come by in the hard-edged digital era.

This year about 700 (nobody seems to know exactly how many) musical acts performed on 35 stages, alongside about 1500 circus, cabaret, dance and comedy acts in various tents and fields and huts and trucks and yurts. Well over a quarter of a million people paid nearly a hundred quid ($200) each for the weekend. It rained the whole time. No one complained.

The weather, at Glastonbury, is a kind of giant, global metaphor. It often rains at Glastonbury and, although it’s not exactly fun, it provides an opportunity, every time, for festival-goers to restate their quite awe-inspiring disregard for physical adversity. In the eternal contest of Glastonbury vs. the weather, Glastonbury wins every time.

Various media organisations and, in particular, the BBC, decamped to Glastonbury en masse. Over the weekend the Beeb ran between 50 and 60 hours (my estimate) of live coverage from the event across three national TV and four radio stations. Extra live material was to be had from the corporation’s various interactive sources, including loads of really good stuff on interactive TV. This is important because the state broadcaster’s participation makes Glastonbury effectively Britain’s official festival (can it be long before the event is renamed ‘Royal Glastonbury’).

Glastonbury’s commercial and cultural takeover is not such a puzzle, though. It’s the best celebration of Britain’s unstoppable musical inventiveness you could ask for. And it makes all the actual official stuff - the endowment-funded cultural festivals and jamborees, art export programmes and bursaries - look stupid. Could another medium-sized nation have mustered so many acts of real international stature in a muddy field in the pouring rain? Not on your nelly.

The festival’s unparalleled quality also gives the lie to the record labels’ persistent doomsday bullshit. Music in Britain is alive and well. It’s just not buying Bentleys for record company execs like it used to. British music is in better shape than it’s been since punk. Britain not only creates more good, internationally successful music than ever - Arctic Monkeys, Kaiser Chiefs, The Kooks, Babyshambles, Razorlight, Klaxons, Dizzee Rascal, Amy Winehouse, Fratellis, Kasabian, Magic Numbers (make your own list) - but also takes foreign talent to its heart.

Britain’s always been a kind of creative hub (like a musical Heathrow). It’s a place where artists, audience and capital come together in a (usually) benign and productive way… and Britain’s music scene is self-confident, open, always cheerfully accepting of foreign acts, many of whom have struggled at home because they were a bit odd (or a bit gay). Lately The Killers, The Gossip, Scissor Sisters, Gogol Bordello, Arcade Fire and a dozen other non-UK acts have all done great business in the UK - often much better than at home.

Michael Eavis, the event’s benign dictator (a dairy farmer the rest of the year and a man who looks more like an Amish patriarch every year), and his various partners have built an extraordinary reputation, patiently and with real passion, over many years. He’s drawn in the artists and the audiences while keeping the local, year-round community happy with plenty of useful income for local traders and some concrete funding for many otherwise unsustainable local projects taken from festival income.

Eavis’ personal involvement is vital. Reluctant megastars are brought round, obscure acts advanced and petulant has-beens let down gently - and all because of the organisers’ love and enthusiasm for the music and the people. There are no jobbing bookers at Glastonbury: only fans. Glastonbury is one of those precious, unreproducible brands dependent for their authenticity entirely on a single person’s belief in the product. Replacing Eavis would be impossible (luckily the succession has been taken care of).

Glastonbury, though, is not the creature of purest West Country benevolence you think it is, though. The event’s ownership is more than an interesting side story. The festival manages to sustain its spotless rep with fans and musicians while being part-owned by hugely powerful US media low-lifes Clear Channel.

In 2002 Eavis sold 20% (now 39%) of the festival business to a UK venue operator called The Mean Fiddler Group (named after a pub, since you ask). He did this during a difficult period for the festival and it’s likely that he regrets it now, especially since Mean Fiddler is now 50% owned by Clear Channel.

The relationship, we understand, remains ‘arms-length’ and I’m pretty sure that even fork-tailed Clear Channel execs would recognise the danger of interfering in a cultural institution as precious as this one. The globalised media and entertainment business produces some odd alliances: perhaps none odder than that of idealistic, Methodist farmer-impresario Eavis and Republican slash-and-burn media-monopolists Clear Channel. Can a Burning Man/Exxon alliance be far behind?

Thanks to Julia for the CC photo of Glastonbury 2005.

It was received, in fact, like other films by Stephen Frears. Frears has made lots of films. He’s an honest and unorthodox filmmaker whose body of work blends topical TV with indie movies and Hollywood in a thoroughly modern and thoroughly disarming way. He just loves what he does and seems to have no particular interest in the celebrity treadmill or the first weekend’s gross or whatever (although he sort of sheepishly admitted to having had his Oscar night tux made by someone or other – he just couldn’t bring himself to say who).

So then the bloody film started to acquire gongs – American gongs mainly, including a wheelbarrow-load of Golden Globes. The British media went collectively batshit and the British movie industry, puppy-like and quite clear where its duty lay, started throwing awards at the film too – awards it would instinctively have withheld. BAFTAs followed. You know the rest.

So, the question is: did snooty British critics ignore The Queen because it came from a director known for newsy shot-on-video TV productions and then decide it was brilliant after they saw the Americans salivating?

Or did inexplicably royalty-fixated Yanks adopt an essentially ordinary film because it featured a gutsy Shakespearian dame pretending to be HRH? We’ll probably never know but, whatever happened, I think it’s probably a good sign that The Queen didn’t win the truckload of statuettes it was sort of expected to.

Anyway, did Britain suddenly abandon racism and bullying? Unlikely. Did Britain just learn a useful lesson about humanity and difference? I guess we did. And what I find interesting about this micro-episode is how it sits alongside the other big race story of the moment which is the one about integration vs multiculturalism, particularly in the context of muslim immigrant communities and their apparent unreadiness to join the British club. Two behaviours are under the spotlight: the ancient and nauseating habit of intimidating and humiliating people who are different and the equally ancient resistance to assimilation by an inhospitable host. Should I make a glib attempt to connect them here? I don’t think so.
(the picture is from the front cover of Rupert Murdoch’s notoriously ugly The Sun, on this occasion impeccably anti-racist)

Opportunist politicians (government ministers included), parts of the liberal media and some angry British Asians wanted the show terminated, Channel 4 punished and Jade eviscerated. Others, me included, think the show did Britain a service. On TV, in prime-time, we watched three young white Britons isolating and victimising a black woman because she was black. That’s unguarded, unscripted, unfiltered racism. The more people see it the better.

The story is so rich with social and cultural and political weirdness you could write a largish book about it (I guess someone will). To start with: as the crisis peaked, Channel 4’s press people were eager to point out that Jade’s stupid boyfriend Jack had called Shilpa a cunt and not a paki in the house (’paki’, as a racist term, would be actionable in UK law, ‘cunt’ would not, so the distinction is important). The Indian ministry for tourism has invited Jade to visit the country. Germaine Greer, feminist icon and — amazingly — former Big Brother contestant has the measure of the nasty girls. Jade’s tearful post-eviction TV appearances are unwatchable but also somehow touching — like watching an insanely accelelerated therapeutic intervention. C P Surendran in The Times of India provides evidence that Indian reality TV is at least a cruel and that class colours culture everywhere. Jackie Ashley, Guardian political columnist, reckons tawdry Big Brother racism is a symptom of the decadence of the end of the Blair era. The episode’s most eyepopping what-if must be the near appearance on the show of the Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, one of Britain’s top prelates and the country’s first black Archbishop.
Channel 4, by the way, is a most peculiar British hybrid: an advertising-funded commercial TV station with one shareholder — the government — and public service obligations embodied in an act of parliament. The station has been thrown into turmoil and its young and clever (and impeccably liberal) management are all at sea. An emergency statement today didn’t do much to help.

And the way it’s all come together is breathtaking. Three of the participants (Danielle, Jo and Jade, since you ask) turn out to be playground bullies and petty racists. Their constant schoolgirl nastiness towards the only Asian housemate has turned them, remarkably, into national hate figures. The show has become a kind of educational tableau about class and race in Britain.

In this story, Shilpa Shetty, the Bollywood star, is the willowy Tamil princess and her tormentors are the jealous, snot-nosed trolls. Shilpa will win by a mile. The bullies will, it seems likely, disappear without trace.

The semiotics of the event is a complicated treat (undergraduate theses will be written). Shetty is an impeccable creature of the imperial legacy, of India’s post-imperial economic success, of cultural globalisation and, above all, of the rich and strange Indian movie industry. She’s wealthy and successful but also beautiful, articulate, shallow, snooty and decorous. She won’t talk about sex, swear or drink. Offered the opportunity to lash out or abuse her abusers, she refuses. It’s what Britain used to be versus what it has become.

Her miserable experience in the house has turned her from a kind of Indian Paris Hilton into an articulate martyr to bigotry. Her star will inevitably rise. Meanwhile, the bullies are perfecting their version of the world-famous British working class belligerence (it’s practically Dickensian). These kids repeat and celebrate their ignorance — their pride in knowing and caring nothing about Shetty’s world (“they eat with their hands, don’t they? Or is that China?“) is a mask — we can all see — for their fear and discomfort. They know nothing and will learn nothing.

The gripping thing about the clique’s very public self-destruction is that they have no idea what a mess they’re making of their careers. They’ve been hung out to dry. Their contracts with the show’s producers allow them no help. In this particular hole they will be allowed to keep digging. Their various managers and agents and loved-ones must be shouting at the screen and desperately trying to get messages into the hermetically-sealed house — tossing notes wrapped round bricks over the garden wall, hiring sky-writers, bribing security. Some people — the government of India, for instance — want the show taken off the air.
I disagree. I’d like to see Jade and her stupid friends kept on air for as long as is feasible. They have important work to do.

So, this year, Santa brought Carl Hiaasen’s second childrens’ novel, Flush. I don’t need to tell you that Hiaasen is a slick, funny thriller writer – one of the elite of sophisticated mainstream American writers who get good reviews in the broadsheets and sell by the wheelbarrow-load in supermarkets too. His kids’ books are brilliant. Now that it’s OK for serious writers to knock out children’s books (see Elmore Leonard’s equally good Coyote’s In The House – the Harry Potter effect, they call it) we’re going to see lots more of these crossover works from established adult authors.

This one is a fast and funny crime thriller with a green theme (sewage, greed, turtles) and has the usual mix of Hiaasen types: the stoical hero, the wise rogue, the venal capitalist and assorted meatheads, innocents and sidekicks. The principal characters here, though, are kids and the environmental theme is one they easily connect with. I’m reading Flush to my seven year-old girl and eight year-old boy and it’s a real pleasure to read something that’s sharp and grown-up while still within their range.

I usually stop at one chapter per night but the kids are finding it easy to push me to read another with this one. It’s also really interesting to learn that a writer can paint a very convincing, quite dark and urban canvas without the usual cast of prostitutes, drug dealers and rapists. The wild side, here, is limited to booze and tattoos and I haven’t found myself explaining any dubious practices to the kids (”well son, a crack pipe is a…”). Verdict: the best book we’ve read together since, well, probably since the last Hiaasen: Hoot (which also has a green theme – endangered owls and greedy property developers).