Gareth Roberts is a TV scriptwriter and novelist who has worked on Doctor Who and Coronation Street
Like all of you, I’m sure, I’ve got accustomed to celebrities – particularly actors and comedians, but also pop stars and sporting luminaries – sharing their unsought opinions with the public. My eyes have gone grey from it, to the extent that the brows above them no longer so much as twitch when a celeb
Twenty years on from its spectacular revival it looks like Doctor Who might not be returning to our screens again in the immediate future. I haven’t actually watched Doctor Who for a long time, but because I wrote an awful lot of it for years – on TV, but also books, comics, radio plays, yogurt
50 min listen
End of the rainbow: Pride’s fall What ‘started half a century ago as an afternoon’s little march for lesbians and gay men’, argues Gareth Roberts, became ‘a jamboree not only of boring homosexuality’ but ‘anything else that its purveyors consider unconventional’. Yet now Reform-led councils are taking down Pride flags, Pride events are being cancelled
Is Pride flopping? This parti-coloured celebration of all things LGBTQIA+ started half a century ago as an afternoon’s little march for lesbians and gay men. Then it became a day, then a week, then a month, and now it spreads throughout the summer, accompanied by all manner of feast days and ‘visibility’ events. Its expansion
They think it’s all over … well, it is now. We’ve had false alarms about Gary Lineker leaving the BBC before, and several yellow cards have been flashed. But this time – following his reposting of a video about Israel featuring a rat emoji – the ref has finally blown the whistle and pulled out
‘The UK’s first ever gay dating show is louder, prouder, and more irresistible than ever,’ says the BBC about I Kissed A Boy. But things on the BBC Three reality dating show aren’t what they seem. Amongst the gaggle of young gay men this time around is Lars: a 23-year-old hotel receptionist from Wolverhampton, who is,
The new artistic director of the National Theatre is Indhu Rubasingham, who this weekend told the Sunday Times what to expect from her tenure. Now hang on to your hats, because it’s bold, exciting and unexpected stuff. No, don’t be silly, of course it isn’t. It’s utterly ordinary, bog-standard, progressive-establishment rubbish. But you will, I’m afraid,
Ian Hislop has found someone to blame for Have I Got News For You‘s failure to tackle the Supreme Court’s gender ruling: the programme’s editors. After the BBC show ignored the big story of the month on its Easter edition, Hislop launched into a rant on the latest episode – insisting that he had spoken
I’m always a little perplexed when people say they wish they could travel through time. Because you can – nowadays, it’s never been easier. Hop on a plane and you can visit places that are stuck in the past or places that are stuck in the future. And even some that are a bit of
Like most people, I haven’t tuned in to Have I Got News For You for years. But when I heard of a staggering omission in last Friday night’s edition, I just had to see it – or, rather, not see it – with my own eyes. The biggest news story of the week – the
The slow death of ITV makes for painful viewing. In its glory days of the 1980s and 1990s, the channel had a salty naughtiness, a thrilling random quality. Its kids’ shows were raucous or even scary, its crime dramas were raunchy, its quizzes and games were sparkly and crass and its highbrow offerings were spicy.
28 min listen
On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Petroc Trelawny reads his diary for the week (1:14); Gareth Roberts wants us to make book jackets nasty again (6:22); Tom Lee writes in defence of benzodiazepines (13:44); Leyla Sanai reflects on unethical practices within psychiatry, as she reviews Jon Stock’s The Sleep Room (19:41); and, Iram Ramzan provides her notes on
Looking for a light, breezy read? If you happened to be browsing the bestseller bookshelves this summer your eye might be drawn to a cover that shows two colourful beach chairs under wafting palms on a bright, sandy shore. The shadows cast by the chairs become those of two children – maybe it’s a story
It’s not even a month since Adolescence ‘dropped’ on to Netflix and into all our lives, whether we actually watched it or not. The mania about the thing is still raging like a persistent brush fire, with the Prime Minister – apparently still unsure whether it’s a drama or a documentary – meeting its makers
Has the very online left, the bane of our times, been usurped by the very online right? It’s a poetically appealing idea, for sure – an amusing conceit. But I really don’t think so. Purity spirals and internecine denunciations have been a feature of the last decade or so in the era of woke. This
In bleak times, Brits could rely on light entertainment to get them through. George Formby and Vera Lynn made the Blitz bearable. Slade and T Rex got people through the three-day week and power cuts of the 1970s. In the good times of the money-in-your-pocket 1990s, we had equally cheery, cheeky media like The Fast
Is nothing sacred? Not quite, as it turns out. There remains one last object of piety in these, the early days of the third Christian millennium (don’t laugh). Surprisingly, it is a fictional bear from darkest Peru. Yes, Paddington is back in the news. Because he hath been desecrated. There is, or was, a sedentary
Stormzy has finally completed the journey from super-cool to super-cringe. The rapper, once the symbol of youthful rebellion, is to receive an honorary doctorate from the University of Cambridge. Meanwhile, in your local branch of McDonald’s, you can partake of ‘the Stormzy Meal’. How depressing to see Stormzy abase himself in this way. Stormzy’s McDonald’s
Pity poor James O’Brien. The long-suffering remainer has always had a raw, fiery quality unusual in the British phone-in host. Where most of his male colleagues tend to be pear shaped more than bear shaped – and where female radio presenters often resemble head girls sitting bolt upright in the front row of the class
When will the BBC get a grip? The corporation which, remember, is funded by licence payers, appears to be strangely overgenerous to its ‘marginalised’ executives with saintly protected characteristics. Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT), ethnic minority, disabled and female BBC bosses typically earn more money than their colleagues, statistics buried in the corporation’s annual
