captain red dog wrote:That said, I think (I've done no research here I admit) The Spectator seems to have a better record recently. So maybe he has asked them to do better in terms of who they publish.
It was less than a month ago they were pushing the VERY far right idea of the great replacement....
I was in a bar with a few mates the other night, one of whom was Australian and had just given birth (like, a few weeks back, not in between rounds), and there was a similar story on the front page of a local paper here. She genuinely said 'that's awful, Hong Kong will lose its flavour'.
My missus immediately said 'they mean you, you know?' and she was like 'oh yea'.
Skarjo wrote:I was in a bar with a few mates the other night, one of whom was Australian and had just given birth (like, a few weeks back, not in between rounds).
captain red dog wrote:That said, I think (I've done no research here I admit) The Spectator seems to have a better record recently. So maybe he has asked them to do better in terms of who they publish.
It was less than a month ago they were pushing the VERY far right idea of the great replacement....
I was in a bar with a few mates the other night, one of whom was Australian and had just given birth (like, a few weeks back, not in between rounds), and there was a similar story on the front page of a local paper here. She genuinely said 'that's awful, Hong Kong will lose its flavour'.
My missus immediately said 'they mean you, you know?' and she was like 'oh yea'.
Bright spark.
White English speaking people are not immigrants. We're ex-pats.
captain red dog wrote:That said, I think (I've done no research here I admit) The Spectator seems to have a better record recently. So maybe he has asked them to do better in terms of who they publish.
It was less than a month ago they were pushing the VERY far right idea of the great replacement....
I was in a bar with a few mates the other night, one of whom was Australian and had just given birth (like, a few weeks back, not in between rounds), and there was a similar story on the front page of a local paper here. She genuinely said 'that's awful, Hong Kong will lose its flavour'.
My missus immediately said 'they mean you, you know?' and she was like 'oh yea'.
Bright spark.
White English speaking people are not immigrants. We're ex-pats.
You say that in jest but it's a legitimate belief amongst some of the wankier people out here who refuse to consider themselves as immigrants.
captain red dog wrote:That said, I think (I've done no research here I admit) The Spectator seems to have a better record recently. So maybe he has asked them to do better in terms of who they publish.
It was less than a month ago they were pushing the VERY far right idea of the great replacement....
I was in a bar with a few mates the other night, one of whom was Australian and had just given birth (like, a few weeks back, not in between rounds), and there was a similar story on the front page of a local paper here. She genuinely said 'that's awful, Hong Kong will lose its flavour'.
My missus immediately said 'they mean you, you know?' and she was like 'oh yea'.
Bright spark.
White English speaking people are not immigrants. We're ex-pats.
You say that in jest but it's a legitimate belief amongst some of the wankier people out here who refuse to consider themselves as immigrants.
It wasn't really a joke. You only have to look at "ex pat" Brits in Spain to know it's true. Americans and Australians are no different.
Ex-pat always feels like short hand for overweight British couple in spain who both wear sovereign rings and watch coronation street via satellite tv every day, then complain about foreigners being in their little England urbanisation.
Victor Mildew wrote:Ex-pat always feels like short hand for overweight British couple in spain who both wear sovereign rings and watch coronation street via satellite tv every day, then complain about foreigners being in their little England urbanisation.
My first girlfriend was like that (not quite as old though). We went on holiday to Tenerife ( ), which apart from being predictably gooseberry fool, was a holiday dominated by her attitude that all foreigners, even the ones in their own country, should speak English. She shouted at a waiter calling him an arsehole becuase he couldn't understand her cartoon cokney accent, then said all people should speak English. Every day we also had to go to the 'English fun pub' because there were no foreigners there.
Such a strawberry floating banana split. There's no way I'd have stood for any of that now of course. I'd have stuck up for the waiter there and then, called her a banana split and gone straight to the airport to go home and never see her again
Andrew Neil has given an interview to tomorrow’s Daily Mail. Some of the highlights…
I came close to a breakdown,’ he confesses, tears falling.
‘It was terrible, it was terrible,’ he says as I hug him [wtf kind of love-in is this?! - KK]. He’s recalling the moment when, at the end of his first week as much-vaunted lead interviewer and chairman of newly-launched GB News, he decided he couldn’t go on.
It followed a serious of technical disasters and glitches that had made the station a laughing stock and left him ‘in despair’.
On launch night, the cameras and sound were out of sync, a microphone failed, and as for the lighting... well, it was so poor that those watching throughout the country struggled to see much of what was happening. But it didn’t stop there.
As he puts it: ‘It just went from bad to worse. There was one day we spent the whole day preparing the programme and fixing up a number of interviews down the line [meaning remotely, rather than in the studio] because that was the business model.
‘At one minute to eight [his flagship show was broadcast live at 8pm] I sat down, earpiece in, microphone on, only to be told by the director we had no external communications, so I had no guests.’
Left with an hour of live television to fill without a single interviewee, his heart began to race and did not stop for a full 45 minutes after the show. ‘I was in despair,’ he says. ‘Unlike other shows where there are two anchors so they can talk rubbish to each other, I was on my own. We had to scour the newsroom and get Tom Harwood [the channel’s political correspondent] and Liam Halligan [its economics and business editor] to come in so I had someone to talk to.
Live TV is stressful at the best of times but not knowing whether or not the technology would work…’ He shakes his head. ‘It just got worse and worse. At one stage, we were waiting to go on air and the whole system went down. It had to be rebooted and we only managed it with 15 seconds to spare.
‘That stress was just huge. It meant you couldn’t think about the journalism. You were just constantly wondering: “Will we make it through the hour?” By the end of that first week, I knew I had to get out. It was really beginning to affect my health. I wasn’t sleeping. I was waking up at two or three in the morning.
‘I had a constant knot in my stomach. When I did wake up I’d feel fine, then remember all the problems I had with GB News and this knot would come and wouldn’t leave me for the whole day.’ That weekend he and his wife Susan flew to Jersey and stayed there for two nights in a quayside hotel.
‘We planned what we were going to do. We said “this is not going to get better, this is terrible”.’ He pauses and his chin trembles. ‘So we decided I had to get…’ He takes several deep breaths.
‘So, that Jersey weekend we decided I would go back for four more nights. I couldn’t leave them in the lurch. I would do four more nights and then I was gone, whatever the consequences were on contracts. I knew if it went to court I’d need to build a fighting fund. Susan and I talked about that and decided maybe the best way of financing it would be selling my apartment in New York.’
Andrew, 72, has walked away from a £4million contract but couldn’t give a jot. ‘It was a big decision but I frankly couldn’t care if it was £40million,’ he says. ‘This would have killed me if I’d carried on.’
Today, Andrew is finally able to give his astonishing account of the behind-the-scenes shambles at this hapless news channel after a legally-binding separation agreement was, in effect, ripped up by lawyers acting for GB News following his comments on Question Time ten days ago. He now reveals, in this exclusive interview, that he had warned the board time and again that GB News was not ready for launch – and has numerous emails to support this.
‘Every time I raised red flags with the board they were polite, they listened but they always sided with the chief executive [former Sky News Australia chief Angelos Frangopoulos]. I was in a minority of one. I felt like the Lone Ranger on so many things without even Tonto to keep me company,’ he says.
‘All start-ups are fraught,’ he says. ‘Half the people are willing you to fail and the other half just want to get a good story from all the cock-ups... although I have to say the launch of Sky News went pretty smoothly.’
Andrew, as chairman of Sky from 1988, oversaw that project with Rupert Murdoch. ‘At Sky, we’d had three weeks of rehearsals before going on air. GB News barely had a week and there were so many hitches with the technology. The CEO wanted to get on air, even if it was ramshackle, and then improve things.
‘At one stage, about a month before the launch, he said: “We’re launching a boat that’s only half-built. We’ll build the rest when it’s floating.” I said: “I’m not a shipbuilder, but it seems to me if you launch a boat that’s only half-built it will sink.” I’d warned them we couldn’t only have one studio because that means nobody can rehearse. You need two studios to do the proper handover; in news channels you never say goodbye, you hand over to the incoming presenter in the other studio with a bit of happy talk so it’s seamless.
‘We didn’t just launch with only one studio. We launched with one studio and most of it didn’t work.’
Andrew rolls his eyes but now there is a gleam of humour. Indeed, the catalogue of ‘cock-ups’ would be downright funny if they hadn’t made a mockery of those who worked for GB News.
‘The studio had four areas. One was the digital wall, another was the breakfast table area – which I thought looked rather good – the other was the sofa, which looked like a Habitat sofa we’d picked up off a skip in Notting Hill, and the fourth, which was where I did my show from, was so black I had to take my jacket off and wear a white shirt.
‘It actually looked like I was Kim Jong Un in a bunker about to launch a nuclear attack on San Francisco. When it came to the launch, the digital wall wasn’t ready and they discovered they couldn’t light or get the sound and audio right for the kitchen table... so we were then reduced to the Habitat sofa found on a skip and the North Korean nuclear bunker.
‘We only had a floor manager because I’d insisted. We were meant to operate our own autocue and do our own make-up. It makes student TV look well-financed.
‘We were also broadcasting from the most diverse, multi-ethnic city in the world and we couldn’t light people of colour. In the early days you could barely see them for our backdrop. They faded into the background because we didn’t light them properly.’ He adds: ‘I raised the issue that the reputational damage we were risking was monumental. I said it was a disaster. There were endless things and, by the second week, things weren’t getting any better. Some things were getting worse. It was terrible. I came off air one night and I looked straight at him.’
Such is Andrew’s enmity towards the channel’s CEO, he can’t bring himself to mention Frangopoulos by name. Instead, he has a nickname for him: Triple G, the Great Greek God.
‘I said: “This is a disaster and it’s my reputation that’s on the line.” That’s what really did me in the end – and it’s my own stupidity for getting into it – the fact that everybody saw my face on the tin. It was Andrew Neil’s channel. That’s what everyone talked about.
‘What nobody knew was [before the June launch] in March, April, May... my face was still on the tin but I had no say over what was going into the tin. That’s what was unsustainable for me.’
Andrew’s contract required 40 weeks of broadcasting a year. But he left the studio for a final time after the second week of shows on June 24.
Two directors, conscious of the PR disaster should their lead presenter and chairman walk out after just two weeks, suggested he take July and August off. They assured him that by September the glitches would have been ironed out. Andrew agreed.
‘I came off air at 9pm. Susan [Andrew’s wife] turned up with my driver. We went straight to the airport and were in the air before 10pm. We had a glass of champagne. It was like a mercy flight or a CIA extraction flight to get away.’ He chuckles briefly, but his palpable despair soon returns.
‘The reason I am quite emotional is that I’m angry. I thought after ten years at the Economist, 11 years at The Sunday Times, the launch of Sky Television and Sky News, ten years as publisher of The Scotsman and, for 25 years working to become the BBC’s premier interviewer, GB News would be the final big career move and then I’d pack it all in.
‘I am angry. I’m also quite unforgiving of this chief executive and the board. They are the ones who put me through this – the disrespect.
‘Why pay me all that money? Why make me chairman? Why make me lead presenter and then just not listen? So I’m angry that what should have been my last big media gig – which, if we’d made it work, could have been great – turned out to be the worst eight months of my career, the worst by far, from early January to last weekend when I finally got free of everything. Don’t forget, I’ve been on the IRA hit list twice. I’ve had special protection – anti-terrorist forces outside my house. I’ve been on the jihadists’ hit list. This feels worse.’
KK wrote:Andrew Neil has given an interview to tomorrow’s Daily Mail. Some of the highlights…
Don’t forget, I’ve been on the IRA hit list twice. I’ve had special protection – anti-terrorist forces outside my house. I’ve been on the jihadists’ hit list. This feels worse.’
), which apart from being predictably gooseberry fool, was a holiday dominated by her attitude that all foreigners, even the ones in their own country, should speak English. She shouted at a waiter calling him an arsehole becuase he couldn't understand her cartoon cokney accent, then said all people should speak English. Every day we also had to go to the 'English fun pub' because there were no foreigners there.
