The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has praised veteran broadcaster Bob Harris as a ‘hirsute icon’ as he announced his retirement from broadcasting on BBC Radio 2 after 56 years on the radio and TV.
He first appeared on BBC Radio One 56 years ago today hosting Sounds of the Seventies from August 1970. He became well known as a presenter of the Old Grey Whistle Test on BBC2 and continued to present a Country Show on Thursday evenings on Radio Two as well as from 2024 Sounds of the Seventies on Sunday afternoons.
Bob Harris was named Hirsute Broadcaster of the Year in 2011 and 2012.
The campaigners say that while some early photographs show Bob Harris with distinctive sideburns but no beard, he has been a standard bearer for a positive images and impacts of beard wearing in broadcasting over six decades now.
BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, I was a youthful listener to the Sounds of the Seventies programmes in 1970 and fifty six years on Bob Harris has become a hirsute icon in broadcasting and a positive role model for gravitas on air.
The Bob Harris Archive (caution includes beardless picture)
Beard Liberation Front calls on Brendan McCullum to shave his beard off
The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has called for England Men’s cricket supremo Brendan McCullum to shave his beard off as the men’s Test Match summer gets underway at Lords on 4th June.
The campaigners say that while McCullum’s beard was a distinctive part of Bazball, in more recent times it has become associated with poor performances by the England side.
BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, as things currently stand Brendan McCullum’s beard is bringing English and Welsh Men’s Cricket into disrepute. A clean shave might help England towards a razor sharp performance.
The former CEO of the SNP and former partner of Nicola Sturgeon Peter Murrell has been sentenced to over 5 years in prison for using over £400,000 of the SNP’s funds to buy an often idiosyncratic list of items over some years.
One item that has attracted ridicule is the purchase of two hair dryers. The assumption seems to be that these were for Ms Sturgeon as Murrell is follicly challenged or in common parlance bald.
However campaigners say that this is another example of peladophobia, the fear of baldness.
In reality as with many follicly challenged men, Murrell is not entirely bald but has hair growth on the back of his head. This will require regular care, washing and trimming, and it follows that a hair dryer is essential as part of the process.
BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, obviously we hold no brief for Murrell but while his hairdryers were illegally acquired the need to have them is a rather different matter
The Times Obit of Marion Kozak (Miliband) has important detail on her eventual escape from the Nazis and a reminder that she was active in Jews For Justice For Palestnians (3rd June 2026)
Farage made a rare appearance in the Commons on 3rd June for Prime Minister’s Questions. He droned on about two tier policing.
Starmer did not call out Farage’s racism as he should have done, but he did at least call out Farage’s riots inspiring language.
The Guardian report is below
Starmer said: “I don’t believe there’s two-tier policing in this country.”
And he said that he was “really shocked” by Farage’s approach. He said Farage pretended to respect Nowak’s family. But he was acting like this.
Starmer went on:
The grieving family have asked us not to respond in the way that the leader of Reform has responded. They’ve asked us not to. They have lost their son in the most appalling circumstance. They make a simple plea of us as human beings to please not exploit that.
That is their plea to us. We all need to reflect on those words of Henry’s father.
My response – and the response of others, to be fair – has [been focused] on the lessons to be learned so we can deliver justice.
His response has been to appeal for rage.
That’s his response to a father who’s lost his son and asked for that not to happen.
Exploiting this tragedy to create grievance and division would be wrong in any circumstances, but to do it when the family are expressly saying please don’t is unforgivable. It shows who he is.
Farage prides himself on his knowledge of military history (more WW1 than WW2 I think) so we might reasonably assume that the Reform candidate for Makerfield got his comment about El Alamein from the Reform owner himself
As Lord Roberts points out the attribution is to the wrong battle.
Andrew Roberts is a Tory supporting historian who has written on WW2, Napoleon and Churchill. His politics doesn’t mean that he writes bad history, far from it, simply that he is unlikely to write a sequel to E P Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class
The murder of Henry Nowak was a dreadful affair and his family have asked that their mourning be respected. That did not of course stop Farage from making an ’emergency address’ on June 2nd with the aim of politicising it and in doing so helping to promote round two of the Farage riots, convened by career criminal Stephen Yaxley Lennon in Southampton on the same evening.
There is a reason Farage is doing this and its not respect for Henry Nowak or his family. Rather he knows and has said that there is a great moving right show underway with Rupert Lowe, another in the long line of people Farage has fallen out with, outflanking him on the far right.,
Farage has been complaining that Restore the far right to fascist party which is run by Rupert Lowe is taking votes from Farage’s political business in Makerfield allowing Andy Burnham a path to victory.
A Survation poll found Restore on 7% but it was a small sample. Moving on to a genuine psephologist Prof John Curtice (Mirror) he noted that if Restore polled at 3% it could prevent Reform winning 70 seats at a General Election leaving it well short of a majority.
Restore has been gathering support from the range of fascist and anti-Semitic splinters in the far right as research from Searchlight has underlined but its name recognition comes from a presence on Twitter, where Lowe is backed and promoted by Musk and on Facebook.
In fact Lowe’s tweets, thanks to Musk, get far greater engagement than Farage and Lowe has earned £72K from tweets in the past period, again far more than Farage.
Whether Musk should be allowed to use his algorithm to promote Lowe and Lowe earn money from it, are questions for anyone who thinks political democracy is a good idea.
Twenty years since the end of free to air cricket in the UK
Its twenty years since the end of free to air cricket (i.e primarily that broadcast on the BBC)in the UK. To mark this the Telegraph carried an assessment (1st June 2026) which was of course paywalled. I have nevertheless read it.
Sky won the contract from the ECB to show all English and Welsh cricket from 2006 and the first series was England v Sri Lanka in May 2006.
The ECB’s argument was that the money from Sky kept the game going, while those (myself included) who opposed it suggested that the reverse would happen. Those who might have become interested in cricket would no longer come across it.
Of course the broadcasting world has changed quite a bit in the last 20 years (something the Telegraph article only vaguely grasps).
There has been some free to air cricket in the meantime variously on Channel 4, Channel 5 and the BBC.
Currently the controversial franchise series The Hundred is screened on Sky and a bit on the BBC.
In 2006 Sky was owned by the Murdochs, now its in the hands of Comcast who one must suspect are not hugely sure why they are showing cricket. The Telegraph article notes that the average Sky cricket viewer is a 57 year old white male and audiences are a bit over a million, at least for Tests. Sky has the rights for England cricket played in South Africa but will not be showing this winter’s series. The resource will go instead to the Ally Pally darts whose global audience will far exceed that of the cricket.
Meanwhile BT Sport also picked up on some cricket around the globe. It had the rights to New Zealand cricket games for a bit (now ended I think) and still has the rights to West Indies domestic games. Audience figures are unknown but in the meantime BT Sport became TNT and now HBOMax. One suspects that the same view of cricket is taken as Comcast have. Why are they showing it when other sports likely get bigger audiences and more advertising revenue.
Meanwhile ways of watching cricket are changing. Games go on all day (ebb and flow being a key part of cricket) but attention spans last perhaps a few minutes at a time. Hence the focus on clips of key moments, wickets, boundaries etc. This seems to be primarily how the IPL is viewed and the BBC does a lot of it on their cricket website.
Meanwhile for the complete-ists like myself there is Test Match Special. Of course if Reform get into office the BBC probably won’t exist. Like much else in the world however there is a contradiction. Farage is a cricket obsessive and if you didn’t know that its because the interns who do his social media don’t know about cricket either…
Update
The Telegraph (where else) is reporting (2nd June 2026) that when TV and radio rights go to ‘market’ for 2029 and beyond next year they will be considering competition for the BBC’s Test Match Special. Rupert Murdoch’s TalkSport is in the frame. While their cricket broadcasts are usually OK they lack the gravitas and heft of TMS, particularly as in recent times it has done a lot to ‘modernise’ its team while keeping icons like Jonathan Agnew in place…The Telegraph reports that the ECB sees the new rights issue as a chance to be ‘creative’. Oh dear.
America also has recent memories of wars- including Vietnam and Afghanistan-that went on far too long as the US struggled in vain to improve a losing position.. some achievement from the master of the art of the deal.
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