SKY ARTS ‘TO FILL GAP LEFT BY BBC CUTS’: Luke May (Daily Mail 28/7) reported that satellite broadcaster Sky had decided make its dedicated arts channel available from September on the Freeview platform with no extra charge because cuts on the BBC Four television channel meant there was an important gap to fill. Mr May said that the BBC had cut the budget for BBC Four because it had decided to focus instead on a more youth-focused service on BBC Three. He added that Sky had also announced a raft of new commissions for the arts channel, including Landmark, designed to bring communities together to create the next ‘great British landmark’, as well as a programme about the playwright Harold Pinter. It would also be offering a series of arts bursaries.
BBC CHURCHILL REPORT ‘WAS OUTRAGEOUS CALUMNY’: Henry Getley (Conservative Woman 28/7), analysing further a BBC news report which posited that Winston Churchill had killed three million Indians by triggering the 1943 Bengal famine, asserted that to ‘anyone with the slightest knowledge of history and an ounce of humanity and common sense, the BBC’s outrageous calumny beggars belief’. Mr Getley, noting that ‘ironically’ a 2002 BBC poll – responded to by 1.6m viewers – had found Churchill the greatest Briton ever, also argued that in siding with the mobs who had defaced Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square, the BBC had sold its soul to Left-wing creeds of progressiveness, virtue-signalling, identity politics, diversity, race, gender and man-made climate change’.