The Times: Interview - Richard Littlejohn, Sky/The Sun

Racist? Not me. Richard Littlejohn has an answer for every critic. David Rowan meets him

Perhaps it was inevitable that a left-wing website would spring up offering a "Punch Richard Littlejohn" interactive game, allowing users to deliver a virtual slap to a man dismissed in some quarters - and on this particular site - as "corpulent, jowl-faced, baggy-eyed, racist, pompous and cowardly". Another victory to the Essex-boy Sun columnist who delights in enraging his enemies.

Littlejohn has no shortage of targets, ranging from "the Wicked Witch" in Downing Street to the multiculturalism that "means celebrating Diwali but banning Christmas". So it is not surprising that his new Sky News talk show, a twice-weekly live polemic, is billed as "controversial, opinionated, but never lost for words".

Sitting across a table from him, it is easy to be distracted by his laddish charisma. He is the football-terrace ringleader who enjoys dominating the room with his verbal brutality, and I almost feel relieved that his need to promote a show forces him to suppress his baser instincts. Perhaps much of the bravado is a need to provoke attention, but I would feel less comfortable encountering him and his mates drinking in an East London nightclub.

It is his persistent targeting of minorities - refugees, homosexuals, non whites - that sets him apart as the eloquent thug of British journalism. "I have always been the provisional wing of the newspaper," he says proudly.

His new editor Rebekah Wade - "an old mate, we have worked together before when she was deputy editor and features editor" - has spoken to him, of course, but not to dictate policy. "Sometimes the paper and I are as one. Sometimes we are diametrically opposed to each other. It so happens that (on asylum) at the moment we are in agreement."

Bizarrely, he was asked to stand as a Labour MP while industrial editor of the London Evening Standard in the early 1980s. "I considered it momentarily, but I'd be having a lot less fun," he confesses. "I couldn't avoid being a rebel. I just tend to go after vested interests - which nowadays means the Guardianista bureaucracy, the gay lobby, or the men in wigs."

As an unelected columnist, does Littlejohn ever reflect on his own power without responsibility? "I don't believe I have any power at all," he replies somewhat implausibly. "A columnist is someone who sits at the back and throws bottles, singing that the king is in the altogether. We don't have the power to pass laws."

But what of his controversial views on sensitive issues such as race and homosexuality? "People project their own prejudices on me - what they'd like me to be," he replies. "I'm a convenient whipping boy. So I'm the 'homophobe' who had a whole column in favour of gay weddings. I'm the 'racist' who supported Trevor Phillips for London mayor. It's not enough to disagree with them -they have to make you out to be a monster. I think calling people racist and a homophobe is a term of abuse and hateful, particularly when it's not true."

His critics disagree, citing his novel To Hell in a Handcart, published last year, which David Aaronovitch, then of The Independent, described as "a 400-page recruiting pamphlet for the British National Party". Mickey French, the main character, is "just an ordinary bloke" who kills a Romanian asylum-seeker - typical of the "swarthy, olive-skinned young men with gold teeth in designer clothes" who confront him daily.

Littlejohn's response is to dismiss Aaronovitch as "just an overgrown student-union activist". "The fact is, I get more hate mail from the BNP than from the other side," he says. "I write about them as 'knuckle-breaking scum'." He points out that he wrote a column in support of the Jews in Israel, for which he also received a "huge" amount of hate mail and death threats.

Would he take an Asian interviewer any less seriously than a white one? "Course not, why would I?"

So how would he feel if, say, a Somali refugee moved next door? "That's a ludicrous reductive argument, a ridiculous question, and I'm not going to rise to it," he says. "It isn't about one family, it's about bigger issues."

He does not like being challenged, and adds those who mock him to a pantheon of enemies that includes Roy Greenslade ("a laughing stock"), Polly Toynbee ("a sad, silly cow"), and The Guardian in general. "I can tell you what they think on everything," he says, "and it's often contradictory. Smoking tobacco - evil; smoking cannabis - wonderful. Killing people - evil; killing foetuses - a woman's right to choose. Irish nationalism - great; English nationalism - wicked, fascistic." By contrast, he enjoys P. J. O'Rourke, Mark Steyn and (The Guardian's) Rod Liddle.

The writer Will Self is also on Littlejohn's hate list, having got the better of him in a debate two years ago on Radio 5 Live. Self identifies in his tormentor the classic insecurity of the playground bully. "Like all bullies, he's a physical coward," he recalls. "He's a weedy man, who was shaking and sweating during our encounter. He was looking past me to the control room, gesturing at the people there and trying to drum up support." Self hates what Littlejohn writes. "I'm sure he believes it. Ask anyone who's gay: they find him repugnant."

(The Times, January 31, 2003)

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Interview: Stephen Lambert, reality-TV creator (Evening Standard)

How I seduced the Wife Swap couples: Critics panned it but viewers were hooked. So how does the creator of reality TV's latest hit react to claims of exploitation? By David Rowan

IF Stephen Lambert needs a follow-up to his hit Channel 4 reality series, Wife Swap, which ended its much talked-about run last night, he might want to invite the nation's TV critics into his office and switch on the cameras. For raw human emotion and unpredictable fury, he would be on to a winner.

After all, The Daily Mail condemned the series as " repugnant and confusing", The Daily Telegraph called it "an abuse of reality TV's Godlike powers" and The Guardian wondered whether the ITC should simply switch off the Channel 4 transmitter.

For a show that won the channel a breakthrough six million viewers, and has been bought for a second series and an American pilot, Wife Swap has proved remarkably controversial. In one episode Dee, an overweight white woman with "a real problem with coloureds", was forced to spend two weeks living with Lance - black, sexist and intolerant. The result made uncomfortably gripping viewing. Dee subsequently said that taking part was "a big mistake; it's made my family look horrible".

So, is Lambert simply a public service "observational filmmaker", as he claims, or, in the words of Evening Standard TV critic Victor Lewis-Smith, "expert at persuading naive working class families to sign release forms, before coldly dissecting their lives on screen in the name of entertainment"?

Lambert, a focused, unostentatious man who created such reality formats as Faking It and Shipwrecked, does not seem too bothered by his critics. "It's patronising to say that these people are being hoodwinked by the producers," he says over lunch.
"They go in with their eyes wide open, and 99 per cent of people taking part in our programmes find the experience has more positive effects than negative."

"We're not social workers," says Lambert. "Our main job is to persuade people to take part, not point out hundreds of reasons why they shouldn't. We're documentary makers - people cooperate because they like the director. It's a question of trust."

This is a harder argument to sustain where children are involved, such as "foulmouthed" Mary, reportedly now being bullied for behaviour on episode one that, according to one newspaper, "made the Osbourne children look like the von Trapps".

Lambert says he was "particularly concerned about the children", and that scenes involving them were dropped if considered "unfair". He trusted his programme directors as " nonexploitative and sensitive people with a great sense of empathy".

"I think it very unlikely people will be bullied at school for doing something on TV that they're not already doing in school," he says matter-of-factly. "A family is portrayed as it is. But let's not just see the short-term consequences - maybe in the long term it will do them some good."

It is a neatly convenient justification - that even if participants are unhappy in the short term, the experience may enhance self-understanding. Would he allow a camera crew to record his domestic life? "If I knew what the programme was about and thought it was interesting, and if I'd met the director and trusted him, yes."

As executive producer of series such as Wife Swap and Faking It, Lambert, 43, designs programme formats, gets shows commissioned, and chooses the directors. After 16 years at the BBC, where he made his name with Forty Minutes and Modern Times and pioneered " docusoaps" such as Clampers, he left in 1998 to join the independent production house RDF as director of programmes and an equity partner.

There he has been responsible for a range of tabloid favourites including House Moves from Hell (ITV1), Michael Jackson's Face (Channel 5), and Shipwrecked (Channel 4). Generally, they have been ratings grabbers, but not all have attracted the critical acclaim of his earlier BBC documentaries such as True Brits, which followed the Foreign Office over a year, or Hilary's in Hiding, about a family divided by allegations of child abuse.

BUT Lambert refuses to accept that the current popularity of reality shows has pushed "serious" documentaries off the schedules. "Much larger numbers would rather watch real people talking with real dialogue than from weak scripts. And though these shows might take an artificial situation, it starts to matter to everybody - participants as well as viewers."

Peter Bazalgette, the Endemol UK chairman behind Big Brother, credits Wife Swap and Faking It with being "more upfront and honest" than many documentaries. He sees Lambert as "a very modern, effective TV operator". "With Wife Swap, he's created a human situation where people interact, there's a resolution, and you know it's going to deliver. It's just what the modern schedule needs - a guarantee of revelation and entertainment in each programme."

Lambert, who lives in Muswell Hill with his wife, a former Radio 4 producer, and two children, sees no reason for the "reality" genre to burn out. "We haven't reached a peak," he says, citing the US experience where Hollywood is reassessing the dominance of scripted TV. "It's bringing a young audience to broadcast networks that they've been losing for 20 years."

Reality TV has helped RDF to a £33 million turnover this year. Even as he reaps the benefits, Lambert cannot help slipping momentarily back from entrepreneur to observational sociologist. "One of the most striking things about Jamie's Kitchen was that those young people were shocked by the idea of putting effort in to make the restaurant successful. If no one's interested in putting effort in, it's problematic for society."

He reflects: "People aren't self aware, are they?"

I smile, knowing that therein lies a powerful media business.

(Evening Standard, January 29 2003)

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The Times: Tech column - RFID tracking/virus writers

By David Rowan

IMAGINE a world where everyday items, from the jeans you are wearing to the banknotes in your pocket, are fitted with tiny radio transmitters that can be monitored from a distance to track your movements. Whether you are out shopping or driving to work, each item could be signalling your presence to a network of electronic receivers - allowing marketers, the police, perhaps even burglars, to build up unprecedented patterns of information about you without your knowledge.

If this sounds rather far-fetched - a combination of 1984 and Minority Report - then let me tell you about a new generation of "smart tags" that is about to hit the British high street. The transmitters, microchips as small as a grain of sand, are known as radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, and retailers hope that they will replace barcodes as a cheap, efficient means of tracking stock. The chips store large amounts of product information, which is sent wirelessly to a receiving station each time they receive an automated prompt.

As the price of these chips falls to just a few pence, companies such as Procter & Gamble and Marks & Spencer are looking to embed them in a vast range of everyday products. Gillette is buying 500 million of them, Michelin is building them into its tyres, and the European Central Bank is even reportedly planning to fit them into all new banknotes from 2005. But what worries privacy activists is the uses that these chips, each with its unique identifier, could be put to once they leave stores.

Unless the tags are made inactive, critics argue, any person or agency could continue to track their movements using commercially available RFID detectors.

Consumer groups are starting to warn that the chips could promote "oppressive surveillance" by manufacturers, retailers, even lawenforcement agencies. They say that if a banknote can carry its own electronic history, then even cash transactions could be tracked within databases. The commentator Declan McCullagh warned recently that divorce cases could turn on a partner's RFID logs being subpoenaed to prove their whereabouts, while retailers could offer shoppers personalised deals at the cash register, based on information extracted from tags built into previously bought clothes.

Like many new technologies, RFID tags offer huge potential benefits to consumers and businesses. But we urgently need manufacturers, retailers and the Government to develop guidelines on how their data may be used - because soon, billions of tiny chips will be saying more about us than cash ever can.

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THE TWO-YEAR jail sentence imposed last week on Simon Vallor, the Welsh computervirus writer, has polarised opinion - with anti-virus firms talking up the seriousness of his crimes (from which only their products could offer protection, naturally). But will the sentence really be a strong disincentive to others, as Judge Geoffrey Rivlin, QC, hoped? According to Sarah Gordon, a specialist in the field who has interviewed virus-writers for a decade, high-profile legal actions do little to deter others - and in some cases even encourage them.

She interviewed participants at a hacker conference about the impact of legislation, and found that "even the people who didn't think it was cool to mess with viruses said that if someone told them they couldn't do it, they would be more likely to do it". Virus-writers, she found, are mostly young men aged 14 to 24 who "feel a right" to write these viruses.

The solution, she says, is to make them see their hobby as "uncool" - a challenge beyond a simple court judgment.

(The Times, January 28 2003)

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The Times: Tech column - Celebrity blogs/Google Answers

By David Rowan

FOR many celebrities, the personal online journal, or weblog, has become the ultimate must-have accessory. From Michael Douglas to Sir Ian McKellen, the famous are increasingly choosing to bypass the mainstream media and share their thoughts directly with fans - often revealing more about themselves than they might realise.

Take Melanie Griffith's bizarre online persona as a white-robed goddess in a kingdom called Avalon (at www.melaniegriffith.com), where she confronts some "foul articles" written about her husband, Antonio Banderas. "These so-called journalists have fabricated a story about Antonio gambling and womanising," reads one diary entry. "So I am going to tell you the truth. We have a fabulously deep love for each other and we never lie."

Or enjoy Anita Roddick's ladies' room encounter with a bearded woman. "Not just facial fuzz, but a full jaw's breadth of manicured hair," she explains at www.anitaroddick.com. "I felt lucky as we parted that I could learn something from the way this seemingly radically different woman had chosen to express herself."

The worst of these weblogs look like thinly disguised commercial plugs - Delia Smith's online diary, for instance, keeps mentioning Sainsbury's products; or Uri Geller's hilariously vain site, which "could change your life for the better!", especially if you buy his T-shirts and amethyst crystals.

Others are plain odd: Jeff Bridges's hand-scrawled notes and sketches at www.jeffbridges.com, or Ann Widdecombe's cat poems on her Widdy Web. But among the trivia, some inspiring celebrity weblogs are emerging. The science-fiction writer William Gibson began using free Blogger software to publish his own gratifyingly thoughtful blog at www.william-gibsonbooks.com.

I also enjoy the obsessively web-literate musician Moby, who last week updated his www.moby.com journal up to four times a day. And if you find William Shatner's personal journal too bland (www.williamshatner.com), do keep up with Wil Wheaton's lively site (wilwheaton.net) which has gained a cult following.

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YOU CAN'T keep a secret for long in a wired world. Last week, an obscure query appeared deep in the economics section of Google Answers, where "experts" offer to answer questions for a fee.

For $100 (£60) somebody called "drstrangelove-ga" wanted any dirt that might tarnish the reputation of Paul Krugman, the liberal Princeton economist whose latest New York Times column ridicules George W. Bush as a fiscally irresponsible "alcoholic falling off the wagon". Is anything known about his personal life, eg, hobbies, sports, sexual orientation, etc? the questioner wanted to know. "How about his career - why has he moved around so much? Were there any problems?"

Within the day, "drstrangelove-ga" had received a comprehensive reply. "Sorry, but I have no sexual escapades to report," Krugman wrote, having discovered the plot. "I've never murdered anyone, or even been arrested. I tried smoking pot once, but failed." He did, though, admit to an unpaid parking ticket - "there's this convenient lot on Princeton's campus, and I thought I could get away with it for an hour".

With that, Krugman claimed his $100 - and showed how hard it is to keep a conspiracy quiet now that we are all but a search query apart.

(The Times, January 21 2003)

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The Times: Tech column - Tech trends to watch

By David Rowan

A COUPLE of years ago, when the most absurd technology ideas could attract funding, pundits were full of awe about the next big thing: a device fixed to your computer that would let you smell what you saw on a website. Somehow, the "digital scent" never quite caught on, but that didn't stop columnists from backing ever-more flawed concepts, from online pet-food stores to websites that let surgeons bid to perform your cosmetic surgery. So it will not surprise you if I chicken out of making predictions. What I will do, though, is point to six tech trends from 2002 that you ought to know about.

1: The personal microchip

It started with pets, but now people are having chips implanted under their skin. Last spring the Jacobs family of Florida became the first to wear a centimetre-long VeriChip transmitter in their arms, so their medical data would always be available. Since then, parents in Britain have asked for their children to be "chipped" in case of abduction, and the Home Office is considering the technology to monitor sex offenders. It is a privacy intrusion beyond even Orwell's imagination, but anxieties suggest that more of us will be wearing chips in our shoulders.

2: Wireless internet for free

As the telecoms networks struggle to make us pay for overpriced picture messages and mobile internet contracts, a quiet grassroots revolution has brought free broadband connections to streets across Britain. It involves subscribers sharing their connections using a "WiFi" wireless network, and is backed by an evolving language of street markings, called "warchalks", to tell passers-by when they are within range. ISPs and phone networks hate the idea, whose success is a welcome reminder that the web was built on community rather than profit.

3: The Google takeover

In another remarkable year, the search engine has evolved into a huge global newspaper, a vast shopping catalogue, a voice-recognising search tool, a fee based research forum and a profitable advertising medium. Yes, there are other search sites; but when you can fly first class for free, why bother with economy class?

4: Weblogs as a mainstream medium

According to some estimates, there are now 500,000 weblogs, or "blogs", where with little technical know-how anyone can publish their personal observations and link to webcams, other websites or "wishlists" of gifts that they hope site visitors will buy them. Mainstream media companies embraced blogging as a cheap, effective way to communicate, as did British schoolgirls offering suggestive photos in exchange for gifts. Expect the medium to grow even faster if there is a war with Iraq and critics feel that their views are excluded from "official" media.

5: Unplayable CDs and other scandals

In their desperate battle against piracy, the film and record studios are preventing legitimate consumers from enjoying music and movies that they have paid for. From the CDs that refuse to play in a PC, to TV shows that you cannot record, the trend is towards greater restrictions in the name of "digital rights management".

6: E-democracy

It is Whitehall's latest buzzword, and next May the Government intends to continue the online voting trials that began last summer. It is promising an "e enabled general election" some time after 2006, and believes that technology - from text-messaging to touch-sensitive screens - will reignite the public's passion for politics. But in the US, electronic voting in the mid-term elections revealed a range of problems, from software glitches to Democrats' votes being recorded as Republican. Considering the Government's appalling record on IT projects, perhaps we should start getting worried.

(The Times, January 14 2003)

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The Times: Tracking illegal porn sites

By David Rowan

IT DOES not take long to locate child pornography on the internet: 0.12 seconds, according to the Google search engine. Using a home computer and a dial-up telephone line, users simply type in a few phrases that in the past have brought paedophile websites to the attention of police.

Beyond the graphically descriptive Google results pages, users are just a mouse-click away from entering an easily accessible criminal underworld, though many of the 129,000 web pages that the search engine discovered belonged to anti-pornography campaign groups. Far more efficient searches involve specific paedophile buzzwords or phrases documenting particular forms of abuse.

What worries police and prosecutors is that for each site they close, hundreds more are on standby in countries such as Russia and Tonga to meet a lucrative global demand.

Normally, those visiting an illegal website can be identified by the address allocated to their particular computer, even if they do not provide an e-mail address or credit card details. For that reason, some child-porn businesses promise a measure of anonymity to their clients. This was a key selling point of an online child-porn ring run by Thomas Reedy, a Texan computer consultant, who was jailed for 1,335 years in 2001 after a police investigation known as Operation Avalanche.

His network, which operated out of three continents, had 250,000 subscribers, and made almost £1 million a month by offering to protect users' identities as they visited sites based in Russia and Indonesia.

When the US Attorney-General, John Ashcroft, announced that the ring had been broken, he lamented that "the profit-driven purveyors of child pornography" had often "outgunned and out-teched" law enforcement agencies.

The Internet Watch Foundation, which polices the net, has urged internet service providers to block access to 50 newsgroups linked to paedophilia, but some providers argue it is not their role to monitor the net for illegal content.

(The Times, January 13 2003)

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The Times: Interview - Jonathan Dimbleby

Jonathan Dimbleby, now a lone exponent of the long political interview, tells David Rowan that "ratings anoraks" are ruining the corporation

Jonathan Dimbleby, the broadcasting scion who first exposed Ethiopia's famine and later the Prince of Wales's adultery, will this weekend chalk up another journalistic triumph to the family name: when his eponymous ITV series returns on Sunday, it will be the last surviving "forensic" political interview on British television.

Last month the BBC axed On the Record after 14 years, admitting that its long set-piece confrontations had failed to stem a "democratic wave of disengagement". In its place from next month will be The Politics Show, a more youth-focused successor presented by Jeremy Vine, as well as "accessible" new programmes from Rod Liddle and Andrew Neil. Unless David Frost's sofa becomes a rather less cosy political battleground, that leaves Dimbleby alone on Sundays occupying the journalistic high ground.

Yet Dimbleby, 58, appears less than triumphal in his victory, if that is what it is. Sixteen months into the BBC's wide-ranging review of its political coverage, he is keen to go on the record himself with his reservations.

He has a range of worries about the BBC, including its "deplorable" policy of ghettoising arts coverage on digital channels and its failure, as he sees it, to justify the continuation of the licence fee.

His words, chosen deliberately as he paces across the living room of his sprawling Somerset farmhouse, could perhaps be dismissed as a competitor's attempts to garner cheap publicity at the BBC's expense. But Dimbleby, who has presented Radio 4's Any Questions and Any Answers for 15 years, is also a Corporation man, acutely aware of how sensitive the BBC is to criticism.

He was On the Record's founding presenter, and, like his successor John Humphrys, questions the BBC's "odd" decision to abandon its only fixed slot for in-depth political interviews. "I ought to rejoice in the fact that our principal rival has died, but I don't," he says. "The long forensic interview really matters. A lot of the trade commentators don't make the distinction between the sharp exchanges on the Today programme or Newsnight -which last for three, four, up to ten minutes - and the sustained 25-minute interview."

Humphrys, James Naughtie and Jeremy Paxman are, he concedes, "terribly good inquisitors -but they can't, in five minutes, test an idea to destruction". For a broadcaster to abandon the extended political interview, "you have to be damn certain you're putting something better in its place".

He is not convinced that the BBC is on course to achieve this in its much vaunted politics review.

"It's rather a damp squib," he says of the initial results. "Programme names have been changed, and we have Andrew Neil saying he won't be using long words...I don't want to prejudge The Politics Show -though it's hardly a strikingly original title -but if they are trying to attract younger viewers, I do think it's a very odd project. I seem to remember Janet Street-Porter trying valiantly to do 'yoof' programming in the 1980s. Trouble is, the yoof's always in front of you. It's very difficult to avoid being shallow or patronising."

His worries stretch across news and current affairs, and beyond. He fears that, by pursuing ratings ahead of its broader public-service mission, the BBC risks undermining the case to continue charging a licence fee. "If you talk about informing, educating and entertaining, then you might think that a bit of high-class traditional current-affairs reporting of the type that Panorama is capable of should be rescued from its ghetto," he says. "You might also think that not every programme dealing with issues of global significance has to be fronted by last week's winner of Have I Got News For You -but I suppose you might be wrong. I honestly believe that TV generally is obsessed with the ratings battle to the point of cutting its own throat.

"The BBC produces wonderful programmes; it also produces a load of old rubbish. Until it gets rid of the rubbish, the pressure will always be there for people to ask, 'Why pay this poll tax?'.

As a "profound supporter" of the BBC, he hopes that renewal of the licence fee is not taken for granted in 2006. "I hope Tessa Jowell did not volunteer the last word when she said that the licence fee is safe next time round," he says. "I hope it is tested hard, and that test should not be about ratings. What should weigh is the knowledge that a public broadcaster delivers programmes that matter, even if I as a viewer don't want to watch that particular programme. That's why the ratings anoraks shouldn't hold sway."

Should the licence fee continue? "If it can be justified, yes, and I believe it can be justified. But I'm not certain that the BBC at the moment can claim to be making a wide enough range of distinctive programmes to make the case convincingly."

As an example, he asks why the BBC is not making ground-breaking documentary series about Iraq, or the Israel-Palestine conflict, on a scale that only its resources would allow. Instead, he identifies a sharp decline in foreign current affairs and documentary output, while the "ratings anoraks" pursue more populist approaches. "To me, telephone voting on all fronts is for the birds. I don't mind if they conjure up good programmes about Churchill or Brunel. It's absolutely fine to think of new ways of doing things, and I'm not just asking for the traditional reporter to look into our living rooms night after night."

The BBC's treatment of serious arts programmes exemplifies what is going wrong. "I deplore the loss of arts on BBC One and Two," he says. "Licence-payers should not be required to go digital before they can see arts programmes on TV. I fail to understand how you can justify a poll tax on the entire population, yet exclude a significant proportion of that population from programmes that this tax is paying for. For me, that violates a basic principle."

Dimbleby is probably best known for his 1994 documentary Charles: The Private Man, the Public Role, in which the Prince of Wales confessed to adultery. They remain friends: visitors cannot fail to notice the strategically placed Christmas card by the coffee table, folded to reveal the greeting: "Jonathan and Bel -with lots of love from Charles".

Bel is Bel Mooney, the novelist and broadcaster and his wife of 35 years. They met while he was studying philosophy at University College, London, and she remains his enthusiastic unofficial ambassador, smoothing the way for The Times to profile her "Renaissance man". Certainly he maintains a rich, well-connected life, riding when staying on the farm, overseeing the organic food business, and even flipping burgers -"Dimbleburgers" -on his stand at Glastonbury. He also serves as president of the Soil Association, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and Voluntary Service Overseas.

But let's just say that he also found time to run BBC One. What would he do then?

"The challenge is the culture," he says after a pause. "You have to have a vision for the BBC -it can't merely be that it's big and has a place in the market. Gavyn Davies has been very good at humanising the Corporation. But I'd like to hear from the top a clarion call that made it clear that they do have a vision, a mission, as the BBC has the obligation to think big. And at the moment, that clarion call sounds an uncertain note to me."

(The Times, January 10, 2003)

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Interview: Peter Hill, Daily Star (Evening Standard)

The new editor of the year, the Daily Star's Peter Hill, offers Fleet Street his tips on survival. By David Rowan

THE editor of the Daily Star has been advertising for a "brilliant new Bitch" to join his "go-getting" showbiz gossip team, and is reflecting aloud on his ideal candidate. " I'd have no objection to a male Bitch, especially one who's gay and is up for partying," Peter Hill says in the dry, deadpan tone of a Peter Cook Beyond the Fringe character. "Now, Samuel Pepys would have made a terrific Bitch - the way he went to church just to catch the gossip. Or James Boswell. Or how about Dickens? No, on second thoughts, Dickens would have been a columnist on the Sunday Express."

His own literary output may be limited to "Kylie's Hot Date With TV Hunk" headlines, but Hill, the new What the Papers Say editor of the year, is a more thoughtful man than his paper suggests. For a start, the 53-year-old has a passion for the 17th century philosopher Thomas Hobbes - "Uncle Tommy", as he calls him - whose "witty, perceptive" writings he studied while a mature student at Manchester University.

Only a few weeks ago, he was delighted to read a Spectator piece by Paul Johnson pointing out that, facing war with Iraq and economic turmoil, we are today living in the chaotic world that Hobbes described. Every newspaper editor would like to know how to achieve the 20 per cent year-ony-ear circulation rises that Hill has been posting. Four years after becoming editor, and 14 after joining the paper for its first issue, he also launched a new Sunday paper last September that is already claiming to be in profit.

"There are not any clever secrets," he says in his Blackfriars office. "It's just a question of trying to give the reader what they want, rather than what some editors think they ought to get."

As he acknowledges, when he took over the Star in 1998, its future was uncertain. It had to find a low-cost editorial strategy which has meant, in part, making the careers of some staff more brutish and short than they would have liked. But it has also involved injecting what Hill calls "a little magic".

"Tabloids need a little something out of the ordinary," he explains. "The Star does it with wit and sharp headlines. And in among the hard news - and there is quite a lot of it in the paper, actually - there's an awful lot of what you might call entertainment. People who read most newspapers want to be entertained."

War with Iraq may be looming, but it is TV celebrities who concern the Star's editorial team. "I devote much of the paper to the people you see on TV, because you see their whole world," Hill says.

Then there are the babes, in various degrees of undress and on most pages. Hill rejects as "drivel" any suggestion that his paper may be demeaning women. "The page three girl has nothing to do with sex - it's a bit of fun. We even have a woman photographer take them. It's better than patronising them with a women's page."

Unlike the Mirror's Piers Morgan, Hill has no mission to change the world. "I don't take moral or ethical stances," he says. "I'm not here to educate the public - the real job is to sell more copies. If you want your newspaper to be a moral crusade, you won't survive."

Hill lives in Pimlico with his partner and four-yearold son, and has a daughter in her thirties from his first marriage who, he confesses, is a Guardian-reading teacher. But hasn't The Guardian survived with a distinctive ethical standpoint? "The Guardian? Look at the swear word on the G2 cover. That's not moral crusading. That's tabloid provocation: I'd never have that in my newspaper."

Hill began his career on the Manchester Evening News and the Huddersfield Examiner, and spent seven years on the Telegraph. In those days, the Telegraph was "a gentle patriarchy". "They lent me £5,000 to put a deposit on my house. The company secretary said, 'Just pay it back when you can, old boy.'" One presumes that Richard Desmond's Express Newspapers group does not take a similar approach today. Hill claims that the proprietor has "very, very little involvement" in what goes in his paper.

He does, though, always pay a visit before he goes home. "He'll say what he thinks about the front page, giving us the benefit of his extensive experience in publishing, and may suggest changes."

Desmond has been aggressively marketing the Star against the other tabloids. In the London area, the Star is selling at 20p - so how long does Hill believe the price wars can last? "How long can a poker game go on?" he responds. "As long as people have enough money for it to keep going."

He takes delight in the prospect of charges being brought over Morgan's alleged share-buying activities. He has even less respect for his newspaper. "It looks as if it's put together by schoolboys, using internet jokes in headlines written by sixthformers. It's bonkers."

Already Hill believes that his own Sunday paper - launched using the libel payment returned by Lord Archer - is showing up the opposition. "I thought this Sunday, for instance, we were better than the red tops," he says. But where were its genuine scoops? "Scoops are not what it's about. The scoop mentality of Sunday papers is what's driven them down. They buy up tripe and people aren't interested - more footballers screwing more blondes. It's just a bore."

But didn't the Star feature a footballer's sex life on its front page on Sunday? "You're always damned by the exception," Hill says with the slightest trace of a smile. "That's just part of the irony of being a newspaper editor."

(Evening Standard, January 8 2003)

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The Observer: Jeremy Vine profiled

Has hard work and a commitment to the BBC paid off for Jeremy Paxman's 'mini-me', who tomorrow takes over from Radio 2's much-loved presenter, Jimmy Young? By David Rowan


Just after midday tomorrow, a former punk rocker turned Christian novelist will play a record - probably 'Thunder Road' by Bruce Springsteen, although Joy Division's 'Atmosphere' has not been ruled out - and thereby infuriate a militant army of grieving Jimmy Young fans. As the new lunchtime voice of Radio 2, 37-year-old Jeremy Vine is 44 years younger than his eminent predecessor, whose long-drawn-out final 'Ta Ta' even provoked an unsuccessful campaign by MPs to save him. The £250,000 job and a new television politics series represent further effortless steps on Vine's journey to BBC ubiquity. But the question now is whether Jeremy Paxman's 'mini-me' from Newsnight can prove he has what it takes to charm Middle England.

The Jeremy Vine show promises to be a sharper, more news-driven and 'interactive' radio programme than Young's, a BBC institution for 30 years that has enticed every Prime Minister since Alec Douglas-Home. Vine, under instructions from station bosses to inject the 'warmth' that his award-winning TV reports have sometimes lacked, confesses that succeeding Sir Jimmy is 'a frightening thing to do'. Yet he has never met Young, and feels little need to defer to the JY legacy.

Nor does he care to mollify the likes of John Humphrys, whose On the Record slot he usurps next month when BBC 1 launches The Politics Show with Jeremy Vine. After all, he knows he is the Corporation's current golden boy, whose text-book progression since joining on the same day as John Birt has colleagues describing him as a 'terrifyingly focused careerist'. Even Peter Mandelson is said to have chided him for being the only person in Britain who wanted to be on television more than he did.

Unlike those colleagues less attuned to the nuances of BBC internal politics - such as Nicky Campbell, who angered Radio 2 executives by announcing that he had been offered Young's programme - Vine has always proved a safely dependable Corporation man.

Those who have worked with him on Today and Newsnight describe him as work-obsessed, ambitious, focused, not particularly clubbable - all but the last were virtues in the Dyke era. So when Young went on holiday, his producer called on Vine rather than Campbell to cover. Subsequently, his serious news background helped convince the BBC's director of radio, Jenny Abramsky, that Vine was the obvious successor.

He knows that if Radio 2's record 13 million audience tails back in six months, he will face much of the blame. 'It's a long haul,' he admits. 'You do not become a household institution simply by taking over from another household institution.' Already his programme's website is filling with criticisms by Young's defenders - known inside Radio 2 as 'the militia' - who say 'Sir Jimmy should be continuing his excellent show, not sacked for being the best'.

Vine accepts he will face the continued hostility of a minority. But station executives are comforted by the fact that its most conservative audience members are those least likely to retune their sets. Indeed, Radio 2 insiders express a certain relief that Young was finally persuaded to go, having outfoxed programme controller Jim Moir for the past six years and, colleagues claim, increasingly inflated his own audience figures to justify his continued tenure.

Within Broadcasting House, Young is considered to have closed his radio career with bad grace, telling listeners: 'I don't want to leave you, that's true to say, but none the less that's what's been decreed, so that's what we have to do.'

So who is Jeremy Vine, a man so driven by work he says it contributed to the break-up of his first marriage? The son of a college maths lecturer, he grew up in suburban Surrey where he attended Epsom College and attempted to launch his broadcasting career at 16 by building a pirate-radio transmitter in his bedroom - though he succeeded only in blocking reception to his parents' TV.

He became a rather clean-cut Surrey punk rocker, singing and drumming in bands. His closest brush with musical success came at 18 with the Flared Generation, which aimed to shock Cheam's sensibilities by singing almost entirely about, and wearing, flared trousers.

The combo's original material, including the songs 'Flared Revolution' and 'University Sweatshirt', came to the attention of Radio 1, which interviewed Vine on Newsbeat, but an attempt to storm the pop charts came to naught when the band's debut vinyl single emerged from the presses as oval rather than round. The band's manager disappeared soon afterwards.

But it was while reading English literature at Durham University that Vine's broadcasting career began. He wrote to Metro Radio in Newcastle and was given a 2am to 5am weekly slot to play his adored Smiths, Joy Division and Elvis Costello albums.

This led on to a graduation traineeship with the Coventry Evening Telegraph, followed by entry to the BBC's news trainee scheme. His subsequent rise has marked the classic fast-track BBC career. He became a reporter on Today, moved to Westminster for four years as a political correspondent and started presenting on 5 Live. He started stand-in presenting at Newsnight in 1996.

There followed two years based in Johannesburg as the BBC's Africa correspondent, where he won awards for an extraordinary film that showed policemen beating black suspects, which led to the prosecution of 22 officers. By 1999, Vine was back as a fixed member of the Newsnight team, the 'Jeremy Minor', as some put it, to Paxman and Kirsty Wark.

But behind the hard-nosed reporter, friends talk of a softer Vine: his poetry, for instance, which he wrote intensively in Africa as a way of absorbing the brutal cold facts he was witnessing. 'It's very easy in journalism to stay inside the M25 and do everything from the wires and TV feeds,' he explains. 'But travelling through 18 countries in two years, you can't command an emotional response from journalism.'

He also retains a strong Christian faith, although claims to have mellowed since his more 'hard-line' approach of the late 1980s, which former colleagues describe as evangelical. 'Gradually as one grows up, with my South African experiences, I've realised that life is in three dimensions, and it becomes harder to believe in two dimensions,' he says now. 'The idea that I can have some notion that God exists is a comfort.'

In the mid-1990s, he wrote two comic novels about the Church of England, one about a suburban vicar jolted out of complacency by the news that he was in competition with a neighbouring minister and that his wife might leave him.

Vine's own seven-year marriage, to Janelle, an American banker, ended three years ago under the pressure of work and travel. 'It's very sad but it's because we have seen so little of each other in the past three years because of our jobs,' he said. 'We've spent two days together in the past six months.'

He has since married Rachel Schofield, a Radio 4 reporter 10 years his junior, after wooing her in the 1976 Volkswagen van in which he toured the country for Newsnight before last year's general election. The tour allowed Vine to deflect criticism that he is merely a 'Lara Croft version of Jeremy Paxman', a cypher with more ambition than intellectual rigour. He was widely considered to have struggled while refereeing a Newsnight debate in 2001 between Iain Duncan Smith and Kenneth Clarke, and was dismissed by one newspaper as typical of the Corporation clones 'trying for all they are worth to impress not us, but their bosses at the BBC'.

Colleagues also mock Vine for extending himself too widely: when he sat in for Eddie Mair on Broadcasting House, for instance, the latter dismissed him as 'television's Jeremy Vine'.

His critics will have more ammunition next month, when Vine becomes, as the BBC's in-house journal Ariel put it, 'the new face of politics' alongside Andrew Neil and Rod Liddle. The phrase caused raised eyebrows inside the BBC, particularly among those who have accused it of dumbing down its political coverage.

Vine, naturally, rushes to the Corporation's defence. 'If we were truly dumbing down, we wouldn't put the world "politics" in the title,' he says. 'We certainly wouldn't be highlighting it.' One would not expect him to say otherwise. This is, after all, a BBC man through and through.

Jeremy Vine

DoB: 17 May 1965

Education: Epsom College; Durham University (BA Hons)

Jobs: Coventry Evening Telegraph; reporter, Today; political correspondent/Africa correspondent, BBC; replacing Jimmy Young on Radio 2

Family: Divorced Janelle, married to Rachel Schofield

Likes: Elvis Costello's 'This Year's Model'

(The Observer, January 5, 2003)

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Evening Standard: The new pirate radio economy

Ms Dynamite, Craig David and So Solid Crew started on illegal radio stations. Now this underworld business is making some real money. Investigation by David Rowan

TO visit the studios of Galaxy FM, you must first make a series of mobile phone calls to set up your vetting interview in a bleak Peckham pub. Then, provided Abdul and Rene decide that your answers can be trusted, you will be given further instructions to return early on Sunday morning and wait at a nearby street corner.

"We'll have to blindfold you before we can drive you to the studio," Rene explains, a little apologetically. "It's for security - operating a station like this, you can never be too careful." Rene, who looks to be in his late forties, knows that by running one of London's 80 or so pirate radio stations he faces a two-year jail sentence and an unlimited fine if caught. But he is prepared to take the risk in order to play reggae music and host phone-ins that, as he sees it, are "empowering" south London's black community with a message of racial pride.

By 9am on Sunday, the studio - a converted bedroom on a council estate not far from where Damilola Taylor died - is buzzing with more than a dozen DJs, friends and local activists, as cannabis smoke wafts towards the Malcolm X posters on the wall. "Listeners call us, fax us, text us - because we're here for them when the mainstream radio stations aren't," says Rene. "Even the police use Galaxy to help find missing people."

It may be illegal, but pirate radio is booming as it fills gaps not catered for by licensed stations. The number of pirate stations has doubled in 10 years, finding audiences for otherwise neglected music such as UK garage and drum 'n' bass, or using £400 homemade transmitters to spread anarchist or black-power propaganda. Typically, the DJs are in their late teens and early twenties, often mixing tracks in improvised bedroom studios. But this is no amateur hobby. With some stations now earning £3,000 in a weekend by selling adverts, plus thousands by promoting club nights, it is an industry making real money for its sharpest impresarios.

It is also creating stars for record companies and mainstream broadcasters, from Daniel Bedingfield and Craig David to Judge Jules and Trevor Nelson. Just as Radio 1 took its presenters and attitude from Radio Caroline in the Sixties, so the BBC's new digital black-music station, 1Xtra, is modelling itself on today's hottest pirate stations. 1Xtra even boasts that its DJs - 24-year-old Femme Fatale, for example - learned their trade on illegal stations in "dodgy high-rise blocks in south-east London". Even at Broadcasting House, it seems, the glamour of this criminal underworld is too great to ignore.

The pirates are certainly proving influential in shaping our musical culture. The Mercury Award winner Ms Dynamite got her start DJing on the London stations Freek FM and Raw FM, and So Solid Crew built their fan base through Supreme FM and Delight FM, which they helped set up.

Delight, a black-music station based in Battersea, claims to reach 10,000 listeners, who are encouraged to buy tickets for the station's dance events and records promoted by mainstream labels. "My aim is to go international - to be the Puff Daddy of radio," management spokesman Mr C, an early twenties, south London entrepreneur, well-built and wearing a thick gold chain, tells me in a Clapham bar. "We're a training school for presenters, and are giving listeners a reason to get on to the FM dial." The three-year-old station, broadcasting on 103FM from a tower-block roof, is heard as far away as Milton Keynes and Guildford, and involves a team of more than 100 people, from MCs to technicians.

According to a smooth young station executive calling himself AJ - pirates avoid using their real names, for obvious reasons - professionalism demands that DJs sign up to a strict set of rules. "There's no swearing, violence, drugs, smoking or drinking in the studio, and you can't bring friends," AJ explains. "We'd like to go legal - that's the exit strategy. We're hustling, and if we see an opportunity, we'll take it. If the law obliges us to pay our taxes, do the news and the weather, then we will."

It is a dream that Kiss FM achieved in 1990, after its illegal broadcasts attracted a claimed 500,000 listeners across London with a mix of hip hop and house music. Today, the legal stations are feeling increasingly threatened by the pirates' growing influence, and have been urging tougher government action to clear the airwaves. They point out that pirates do not pay music royalties - up to five per cent of a legal station's turnover - and that they steal listeners and advertisers. They also promote their own club nights at venues such as the Astoria in Charing Cross Road and Caesars in the Old Kent Road. Ticket sales are lucrative.

JUST before Christmas, the Government responded by targeting the nightclubs that let pirate stations hold dance nights. "Pirate radio stations cause interference to legal broadcasters and damage property and annoy local residents," explained radio minister Stephen Timms, as he warned club owners that they, too, faced twoyear jail sentences. "Those who support the stations, by supplying premises or advertising with them, are just as bad."

The Radiocommunications Agency, the Government body that polices the airwaves, argues that pirates interfere with legal stations' signals and can block the radio systems used by airports and the emergency services. Last summer, a west London pirate station disrupted air-traffic control at Heathrow for around six hours until an enforcement team shut it down. The agency also warns that some stations are linked to drug gangs and other criminal activities, and its staff talk of being threatened with knives.

For some illegal broadcasters, violence appears to be an acceptable means of protecting their equipment. In a studio raid last year in Lewisham, police removed a copy of "Radio Is My Bomb", a guide to running a pirate station. "One easy way to hit back [at enforcement officials] on tower blocks is to trap them in the lifts," the booklet advises. "Then you take your gear down the stairs, beating up any of them you meet on the way." It continues: "If you're going to attack them directly, make sure you're well masked and tooled up. Go straight for the police officers and disable them before they can make their 'officer in distress' call (take or smash their radios, or have someone jamming their frequencies). Other direct ways of hitting back are attacking officials at their bases, attacking their vehicles at their depot, obtaining home addresses/ phone numbers of chief officers and harassing them."

According to Woody "Uptown Bad Boy", a former station owner and "mixmaster" who now works in a Soho record shop, pirates are far more concerned to protect their "rigs"( transmitters) from rival stations. Some stations, he says, booby-trap transmitters with CS spray to keep them from being stolen, and one has kept pit bulls on a tower-block roof in Hackney.

"The established pirates put up grids on the roofs so people can't gain access," explains Woody, 30. "One station had an electrician fix a rig to an elevator shaft so that it went up and down with the lift. There were 200,000 volts going through it - but it didn't get busted for months."

Woody estimates that a station can be on the air for less than £1,000, to include a "microlink" transmitter that allows the studio to be some distance from the rooftop aerial. The studio will normally be in a squat or a £50a-week rented room, and electricity will commonly be stolen from the mains network. He claims that at least 10 stations in London are now highly profitable.

"With 20 advertisers, you could easily make £3,000 a weekend," he says. "You charge the DJs for their slots, say £10. There's also talk of record companies paying DJs to play certain tunes. And stations such as Kool FM are making plenty of money from their raves."

Music stations Unique FM and Station FM have also been featuring advertisements for West End nightclubs, and even the police-backed Crimestoppers Trust - but the difficulty for the authorities is proving that a company knowingly bought a slot. Paper receipts are rarely issued. So far, the stations seem to be winning. In 2001, The Radiocommunications Agency carried out 1,438 raids on stations across Britain, yet it secured just 20 convictions. The average fine was £397. In a typical case, two men aged 19 and 21 were convicted last month at Highbury Magistrates Court of running an Islington-based pirate called Y2K - they were fined £50 and £100 respectively.

That is what other stations say they can earn from selling a single advertising package. As one enforcement officer told the Evening Standard: "It's not a bad little earner - especially when they're not paying royalties for records and stealing electricity."

(Evening Standard, January 2 2003)

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