BBC World: “Vein-Poppingly, Irredeemably Stupidly God-Awful…”

In The U.K. Sunday Times, television critic AA Gill critiques BBC World News:

“It has been quite some time since I seriously watched the BBC’s international output, and to say it’s eye-bulgingly, vein-poppingly, irredeemably stupidly God-awful is actually to be diplomatically reserved. BBC World News makes Fox sound like the sermon on the mount. It’s not just that it’s formatted as a pastiche of mid-Atlantic, visually portentous kitsch, with the strutting Tourette’s of repeated station idents; and that it produces news with all the energy, purpose and fluency of a constipated whippet; or even that the nuggets of content are squidged in between the garish furniture of braindead graphics and pointless graffiti. What was most depressingly sad was the upbeat, vanilla content of its reporting and investigation, as if it was all made by a committee from some timid, people-pleasing global development agency.”

You’ll probably want to read that paragraph two or three times to get the full effect. Here’s the full essay…