Is God out of fashion? Far from it

Power cuts and a racial slur: BBC2’s farcical launch night

BBC2 first came on air 60 years ago last month, says Jonn Elledge on Substack, and launch night “did not go well”. At 6.55pm, 25 minutes before the start of scheduled programming, London was hit by a massive electrical failure that knocked out Television Centre in White City. Broadcasting from back-up facilities at Alexandra Palace, and with their planned lineup unavailable, executives decided the best thing to do was just “read the news over and over again”. Unfortunately they couldn’t get the sound working in time, so the first three minutes of BBC2’s existence consisted of former foreign correspondent Gerald Priestland reading mutely into the camera. When the sound did finally come on, it was midway through a story about a racist bus conductor – so one of the first words ever heard on the channel was a racial slur.

Things didn’t get much better from there. At one point the phone on Priestland’s desk rang, but when he picked it up – expecting there to be a viewer calling in – there was no one at the other end. There was a very awkward moment when the anchor learned, a full seven minutes into the show, that he had been completely inaudible for the start of it. After 15 minutes, someone sensibly pulled the plug. The broadcast cut to some light music, with the caption “BBC2 will start shortly”. Then that was replaced by a screeching noise and the words “major power failure”. Watch the whole clip here.

What hypocrites many modern writers are

PEN America, an organisation set up “to defend freedom of speech and to protect writers from political oppression and persecution”, has cancelled its World Voices literary festival in New York and LA, says Lionel Shriver in UnHerd. This after it also cancelled its 2024 awards ceremony – in both cases, a critical number of writers had dropped out over PEN’s “failure to publicly denounce Israel’s ‘genocide’ in Gaza”. But PEN has no business taking a position on this issue. It is, by its nature, “a big tent”, which includes not only Muslim writers but also Jewish ones. Its duty is to defend free speech of every sort, “including the overtly Zionist kind”.

Yet via the hypocrisy of many of its members, it has succumbed to the “hyper-politicisation” that has infected organisations “from the National Trust to the NHS, from Anheuser-Busch to the Chicago Art Museum”. The PEN example is particularly egregious, and hilarious: the permissive ethos of the Anglo-Left is “diametrically at odds” with the “despotic Islamic theology” it has decided to embrace. Writers have failed on this front just like everyone else. “Although our occupation is more at risk from censorship than most, we’re all too capable of perversely embracing suppressive viewpoints that violate our own interest.” We’re paid “not only to write but to think, yet we don’t think” – we listen “for whatever tune is playing in our fellow travellers’ AirPods”, then whistle along.

🤓 To see what the critics say about Lionel Shriver’s new book, Mania, click here

“A memento of a vanished civilisation”

The Voyager spacecraft mission never ceases to amaze, says Anjana Ahuja in the FT. The two probes were launched a few days apart in 1977, the year “Jimmy Carter entered the White House, Pelé hung up his football boots and I queued with my brother at the cinema to watch the original Star Wars”. The date was timed to take advantage of a “rare planetary alignment” – happening just once every 175 years – that provided some “gravitational kicks” on the journey. Today, Voyager 1 is some 15 billion miles from Earth, by far and away “the most distant man-made object”. Sending and receiving signals to it, as engineers did recently to fix a communications error, takes more than 22 hours each way.

For those of us of a certain age, the mission’s landmarks have mirrored our own. Voyager 1 reached Saturn as I began secondary school; Voyager 2 arrived at Uranus as I left school, and approached Neptune as I “danced at university balls”. The first probe, in particular, feels like a kindred spirit: “sent off alone into the wilderness; writing home; reaching milestones; and now weakening as it glides into the void between stars”. One day, in a few billion years, the sun will run out of fuel, and whatever is left of life on Earth will die out. But assuming they can survive the interstellar dust, the Voyager probes will still be out there somewhere, the analogue technology on board “a memento of a vanished civilisation”.