You Can't Win Them All - The Guardian can't resist the chance to have a go at me

When I first embarked on the Special Relationship programme recently broadcast on Radio 4 (I should say that I wrote the script it in its entirety, personally suggested most of the interviewees, and identified and pursued the Arleigh Burke recording from the start), I wondered how my left-wing automatic critics would respond. They, for quite different reasons from me, disapprove of the Anglo-American alliance.  Many are actively anti-American, in a hangover from the Cold War (mirrored on the ‘right’ by the weird continuing anti-Russian view common among neo-conservatives). Also, the cold facts are undeniable.

 

Well, now I’ve found out. Plainly, I think the programme was the best possible within the time limits available. I had the assistance of a highly skilled and experienced producer, Kati Whitaker, whom I cannot thank enough for her wisdom and her personal enthusiasm for the project .

 

And I think I can say that some professional radio critics have been reasonably complimentary about it.  (Not all. The Daily Mail called it ‘jaundiced’. A reviewer in the ‘Observer’ bafflingly called it ‘strident’, which I think is just plain wrong) . Catherine Nixey in ‘The Times’ (whom I have never knowingly met and who owes me no favours, and writes for a paper that is not especially fond of me) concluded that ‘its 27 minutes are a model of the genre’. Gillian Reynolds, who many years ago savaged my double-headed weekly live programme (with Derek Draper) on the then ‘Talk Radio’, said the programme was ‘Quietly but firmly argued, producing new evidence (from hitherto secret CIA files and little-known voice recordings) it exposed delusions, remembered humiliations and provided a formidable argument for allowing independent producers, Kati Whitaker of Juniper here, into BBC current affairs.’

 

But ‘the Guardian’ concludes today (in the shape of Priya Elan, whose toe I have never, so far as I know, run over on my bike), that I spoiled the whole thing by being in it.  Priya Elan pretty much accepts the programme’s argument (hard not to)  but concludes : ’Hitchens is the weak link in the show. Sounding like a cross between Jeremy Paxman, Jim Corr and Newman and Baddiel's old fogey ("That's you, that is") history professors, every sentence is laced with a retrospective suspicion. When a talking head says much of the US's help to Britain is hidden he adds: "hidden … and grudging". He labels the Star-Spangled Banner an "anti-British outburst" (which it is). It is hard to listen to some of his analysis and not feel like you are humouring a conspiracy theorist, surrounded by piles of old newspapers in his basement.’

 

I'm not clear what he objects to, about the use of the word 'grudging', which is apparently said in italics,  or about my description of the 'Star-Spangled Banner', which he agrees with but somehow also seems to see as evidence that I am a conspiracy nut in a basement. Beats me. Some of this (the stuff about Paxman etc)  is missing from the printed version and appears only on line, but as it’s all abusive, and doesn’t praise my intellect, as Melissa Kite once unwisely did in an article for the same paper  ( see : http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2014/01/intellectually-brilliant-and-impossible-to-dislike-what-the-guardian-thinks-about-me-or-does-it.html ),  that’s probably just because they ran out of space in G2.

 

The whole thing is here:

 

 

http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2014/jun/26/special-relationship-uncovered-radio-review

 

You can still listen to the programme itself for the next few days. 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0477nrw