There is no pleasing them. For years, weeping into their pints of real ale in the staff club, BBC executives would rail against "the sodding governors"; and though both the tipple and the epithet may have been updated, the sentiment persists. Yet when a committee headed by Lord Burns recommends the abolition of that disparate band of worthies charged both with administering the corporation and regulating it, the suggestion provokes [...]

Listen carefully when you switch on, and you might just hear the plates moving beneath the BBC's talk-radio networks. By the end of 2005, Radio 4 will still boast more listeners than its sprightly little sister, Radio 5 Live, but the gap will continue to narrow, probably at a faster rate. A curiously conceived hybrid of 70 per cent news and 30 per cent sport, Radio 5 Live is no [...]

As Auberon Waugh was about to die last year, Richard Ingrams and A N Wilson went into his bedroom to find him struggling half in and half out of bed in a state of confusion. When he was settled he asked them, in some befuddlement, what he had done in his life.

"You made people laugh," Ingrams replied; at which Waugh chuckled, before falling into unconsciousness for the final time. [...]

The first thing everyone says about Rod Liddle is that he doesn't look the part. Shaggy hair, a pierced lobe and nicotine-stained fingers are not what you expect from the man who composes the daily menu of what the thinking and chattering classes chatter and think about. Nor is his liberal use of four-letter words.

As Sue MacGregor, the longest-serving of his team of rottweilers on Radio 4's Today programme, [...]

The last Friday in March was the first decent day of spring. Unfamiliar rays of bright sunshine poured through the large windows of the rooms in the House of Commons that the political team from the Sun share with ITN, Channel 4 News and the London Evening Standard.

Trevor Kavanagh, the Sun's political editor and doyen of the parliamentary lobby, had every right to feel content. For one thing, if [...]

As Oscar Wilde would have put it, to visit the Millennium Dome once may be regarded as . . . Oh, stop it: I confess to having been thrice to the North Greenwich folly, instantly labelling myself a masochist, a techno-nerd or a man with much too much time on his hands. It means, also, that I have paid it three visits more than many of its most vitriolic critics.

For everyone who thinks Class Act an appropriate title for Lynda Lee-Potter's forthcoming semi-autobiographical tome, there will be as many who would prefer something on the lines of Vindictive Harpy. For most of her long career, the Daily Mail columnist has, with the late Jean Rook and their several imitators, acted as a role model for Private Eye's Glenda Slag.

She recognises that it does not matter what opinions you [...]

If Simon Jenkins would only stick to his fonts and flying buttresses, he would not get up so many people's noses. His book listing the thousand best churches in Britain, graded by star ratings, was meticulously researched, concisely written and became a deserved bestseller last Christmas. Yet he insists on regaling us with his erratic views on every subject under the sun, in irritatingly self-righteous columns in the Evening Standard [...]

In the matter of green open spaces, as with most of London's amenities, it's the rich wot gets the manicured pleasure grounds, while the poor make do with scruffy scrubland dotted with turds. Those lucky enough to live within strolling distance of Hyde Park, Regent's Park and Kensington Gardens can escape from their luxury duplexes and sit on clean seats to gaze at lovingly tended flowerbeds. Just a few miles [...]

An honest obituarist of Inspector Morse ought to say that it is hard to regret his death. In statistical terms - the number of murder cases eventually solved - he was a successful detective but he was prone to wildly wrong guesses in the early chapters of Colin Dexter's novels, sometimes directly causing the deaths of people who would have survived had he got it right first time. In many [...]