Just another woke-filled day on BBC Radio 4 . . .

As part of our investigation into Wokeness at the BBC, ROBERT J DAVIES took a slightly tongue-in-cheek look at the programme schedules for BBC Radio 4 on Monday, with the help of a festive edition of the Radio Times. Although in fact, it’s really no laughing matter. (Interestingly, female producers appear to outnumber males by a whopping 11 to 5).

Monday, December 21st, 2020:

5.30am News Briefing

5.43 Prayer for the Day with Rev Lucy Winkett
Rev Winkett is Rector of St James Church, Piccadilly. She’s also a founding advisor to Theos, a left-leaning Christian think tank launched in 2006, which publishes books with titles like: Fortress Britain? Ethical Approaches To Immigration.

5.45 Farming Today

6am Today with Martha Kearney and Nick Robinson, including:

7.48 Thought For The Day with Dr Anna Rowlands
Dr Rowlands is an associate professor of Catholic Social Thought & Practice in the Department of Theology and Religion at Durham University. She co-authored a book called Religion in the European Refugee Crisis, an academic compilation sympathetic to the cause of continued sustained immigration. In her contribution, Dr Rowlands focuses on immigration detention, deploying “Augustine’s notion of evil as the process through which the good is lost as an illuminating way to understand the disordered nature of detention practice.”

9am Start The Week
Andrew Marr is joined by historian Laura Ashe who regularly retweets left of centre, anti-Tory, anti-Brexit material on Twitter under her handle @AsheLaura, and Christopher de Hamel, a British academic librarian and expert on mediaeval manuscripts. The three of them explore the relationship between church and state.

9.45 (FM) Book of the Week
The BBC’s favourite ex-US president Barack Obama continues to read from his account of his campaign to be elected president A Promised Land.

9.45 (LW) Daily Service
Led by the third left-wing female clergyman of the day so far: the Rev Canon Dr Rachel Mann. Better still, “she” is actually transgender. A British Anglican priest, poet and “feminist theologian” Dr Mann writes, speaks and broadcasts on a wide range of topics including gender, sexuality and religion and is a strong supporter of LGBT rights. She’s the author of Dazzling Darkness: Gender, Sexuality, Illness & God and a contributor to Fear and Friendship, Anglicans Engaging With Islam.

10am Woman’s Hour
Presented by Jane Garvey, who was found to have breached BBC guidelines on impartiality in 2018 during the programme, while discussing President Trump’s nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the US Supreme Court. The BBC’s Executive Complaints Unit partially upheld a complaint about the bias of the interviewee selection and ruled that Garvey gave the impression of sympathising with the viewpoint of the biased interviewee.

10.45 The Mystery of Edwin Drood
A radio dramatisation of Dickens’ last (and unfinished) novel with two lead characters, Neville and Helena Landless played by Asians. We learn in the “Pick of the Festive Radio” article elsewhere in the Radio Times that this is a “dark thriller” adapted for radio by Mike Walker who “weaves in institutional racism, same-sex love, cross-dressing and drug addiction.” It is, we are told, a “rip-roaring listen” – or would be, if you were the sort of Radio 4 listener who enjoyed Charles Dickens’ output interpreted through the prism of woke left-wing hobby-horses.

11am The Untold
Guardian columnist Grace Dent follows the story of a woman trying to pull her special-needs son away from a life of drugs and crime. The Untold is billed as a series of stories about “21st century Britain” that you probably won’t have seen told anywhere else. And quite possibly won’t have wanted to either. A previous episode, entitled Young, Rural and Black, explored what happens when you try to organise a demonstration in support of Black Lives Matter in a rural area of Gloucestershire. Another chronicled what happened when one partner in a lesbian couple chose to transition to being male. Others, all on a dreary leftist minority-awareness theme, tackled subjects including Hong Kongers wanting to settle in Britain; a Caribbean woman recalling growing up in South Wales and tales from Grenfell Tower.

11.30 How to Vaccinate The World
Tim Harford reports on the global race to produce a vaccine to end the Covid-19 pandemic. Note the curious title to this programme – appealing to internationalists who see no borders, whereas those of a more neutral or conservative mindset might be more interested in how to vaccinate Britain.

12.04pm An Almost Perfect Christmas
First part of a collection of seasonal tales by Thames Polytechnic Humanities graduate Nina Stibbe in which she jokingly mocks Christmas and recalls previous festive disasters. Her Twitter feed is suggestive of a left-wing mindset and last month she chose to mock would-be authors who claim they can’t get a publishing deal because they’re male and white or male and straight. (They probably won’t be claiming to get much airplay on Radio 4, either).

12.18 You and Yours, consumer affairs

1pm The World at One with Sarah Montague

1.45 Why Why Why?
New Series: Presenter Phill Jupitus searches for the answers to questions posed by songs, beginning by looking at The Clash’s Should I Stay or Should I Go?  Phill joined Neil Kinnock’s Red Wedge movement in the 1980s, in which performers staged concerts for the Labour Party.

2pm Tracks: Abyss
The concluding part of of a conspiracy thriller with Stefan Adegbola playing the part of the medic. His avatar on his Twitter profile is a clenched black fist – a notoriously divisive and racist symbol of black power movements. In one of his latest tweets, concluding with the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter, Stefan says he loves telling Honest Black Stories. In one of his tweets, he claims that “Christianity is not for Black people and was a key tool for imperialists”. His timeline is pretty interesting and whenever Stefan uses a heart emoji, he carefully selects a black one.

2.45 Welcome to the Quiet Zone
Emile Holba goes stargazing with a resident of the Quiet Zone. This actually sounds quite interesting and not obviously tailored to promote the BBC’s ideological world view. It’s presided over by yet another female producer though (very few male ones spotted so far today): this time Sarah-Jane Hall. Sarah-Jane’s last but one contribution to Twitter was to retweet The Empathy Museum – a museum which seeks to tackle global challenges such as prejudice, conflict and inequality.

3pm Counterpoint with Paul Gambaccini
Third heat of the “eclectic” music quiz produced by Paul Bajoria. A male producer at last! And still managing to tick the diversity box as he’s half Indian.

3.30 The Food Programme
Repeated from yesterday. Produced by another female, Clare Salisbury.

4pm Faith In Music
Scottish Catholic composer James MacMillan is wheeled in to discuss Elgar – England’s most iconic composer.

4.30 Beyond Belief
All about the Virgin Mary. This sounds very Christian, but have no fear, Mary is not only a “highly-revered figure in Christianity” explains the BBC, but also in Islam too and that’s their cue to invite Muslim academic Mona Siddiqui to talk about the mother of Jesus. Siddiqui is a professor of Islamic and Interreligious Studies at the University of Edinburgh, and her specialisations are entirely based on Islam. She is the author of How To Read The Koran. You might think, as we anticipate celebrating the birth of Jesus on Christmas Day, that the BBC would have focused on having a panel of Christians (ie people who actually believe in the divinity of Christ). Her fellow guests are: Tina Beattie, a Professor of Catholic Studies at the University of Roehampton, whose interests included natural law, human rights and women’s rights, and Anba Angaelos, an archbishop in the Egyptian Coptic Church. The programme is presented by the Very Ecumenical Ernie Rea, who once told the Belfast Telegraph: “The idea that there will only be Christians in Heaven strikes me as an absurdity”. Rev Rea is a member of the Faith and Belief Forum which seeks to connect people of different faiths, beliefs and cultures and also offers tailored training and support for LGBT+ organisations.

5pm PM
News and current affairs, presented by the male but fortunately also gay, Evan Davis.

6pm News

6.30 I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue
Jack Dee with another episode of the comedy panel game produced by Jon Naismith – a white English male, still hanging on in there.

7pm The Archers
The BBC diversity brigade came for these quaint rural folk a long while ago, shoe-horning in some ill-fitting diverse characters and equally strange and unwelcome plots. What is happening in the long-running radio soap currently? I have no idea. I gave up listening to it a long time ago, like many others.

 7.14 Front Row
Tom Sutcliffe and guests review “Bridgertron”, as the Radio Times misspells it. They’ll love it no doubt – a ludicrously ethnically diverse Regency romp in which numerous lead characters are black. Bridgerton is made by Netflix but the BBC is clearly happy to promote the output of a rival broadcaster, so long as they’re equally woke.

 7.45 The Mystery of Edwin Drood, repeated

8pm And Please Can I Have a Unicorn and World Peace?
Miles Jupp joins the elves at Santa Claus’s post office in the Arctic Circle, presumably hoping to find that Santa has “woke”n up and is happy to involve himself in such global politics.

8.30 Crossing Continents. Darfur: A Precarious Peace
More international handwringing, this time about the conflict in Darfur, where two million displaced people still live in camps. Will there be subliminal messages that they should be allowed to migrate to Europe? Tune in and find out.

9pm Don’t Log Off – Searching For Hope
Alan Dein connects on line with . . . wait for it, an entrepreneur in Bangladesh, a midwife in Uganda, a student in China and a woman celebrating her 30th birthday in war-torn Armenia. Well, of course.

10pm The World Tonight
With female (tick) and Asian (tick) presenter Ritula Shah.