FROM Our Own Correspondent (Radio 4, Saturday) is a showcase for one of the BBC’s greatest strengths: its global network of correspondents. Steve Rosenberg is still reporting from a Russia that he evidently has not just a deep understanding of, but also affection for. So, when he says, “I’ve seen things that make me think something rather unusual is happening right now inside Russia,” it is worth attending to.
These include increasingly robust police and military measures against possible terrorism or aerial attack; but nothing struck him as being as significant as a joke against the country’s direction, in one of Russia’s most popular tabloids, normally slavishly loyal to President Putin. He described, from little incidents that he sees in his daily routine in Moscow, signs of increasing war fatigue and impatience with the economic dislocation and restrictions on civil liberty which the “special military operation” entails. Public criticism of the Kremlin is becoming more frequent, as are reports of feuding clans in the leadership clique.
Most of all, the scaled-back Victory Day parades on 9 May projected weakness to both Russians and foreign governments.
The rest of the programme — with reports from Canada, Japan, and Serbia — was also well worth hearing. It shows the value brought by long-term correspondents given the time to develop a deep understanding of their beat, with the skills to communicate their knowledge to a general audience. But how do we pay for it in the current media environment? The BBC’s budget has been slashed again, and parallel processes have unfolded in both commercial TV and the press.
Talk radio is, of course, cheaper to make. Much of its output is rightly disdained by critics — but, when dramatic events happen, it can be gripping. Waiting for the final results of the Scottish parliamentary election to be declared after 1 a.m. on Saturday, Joel Mitchell, standing in for Laura McGhie on Radio 5, kept me entertained, as did his callers.
Sarah, in Liverpool, thought that the Prime Minister deserved his party’s poor result for being “Reform Lite”, but she reserved her full contempt for Nigel Farage and the real thing. “Let me tell you something, my dear,” she spat scornfully when Sam, with a pronounced West Midlands accent, rang in to say that that was precisely the party she had voted for, wanting lower tax and less immigration — although she wanted to emphasise that she had Muslim and Sikh friends. Both ladies were evidently several glasses in. Neither possessed Sir John Curtice’s analytical skills.
Of course, talk radio presents the narrative that its producers want it to. And some may call it exploitation to source free content from tipsy people late at night. But Sarah and Sam managed to put their spoke in. It is different — magnificently different — from Putin’s Russia.