Chiswick Book Festival 2020: The Lost Decade 2010 – 2020 and What Lies Ahead for Britain

Patrick Barwise, Emeritus Professor of Management and Marketing at London Business School and cultural commentator Peter York argue that the BBC is in peril as never before.

Journalist Bridget Osborne discusses 'The War Against the BBC' with the two authors in a podcast for the Chiswick Book Festival in association with The Chiswick Calendar. 

'The BBC is our most important cultural institution, our best-value entertainment provider, and the global face of Britain. It's our most trusted news source in a world of divisive disinformation. But it is facing relentless attacks by powerful commercial and political enemies, including deep funding cuts - much deeper than most people realise - with imminent further cuts threatened. This book busts the myths about the BBC and shows us how we can save it, before it's too late'.

Christopher Tugendhat is an active member of the House of Lords, who in his long career has been a journalist, a Conservative MP, a European Commissioner and a Vice-President of the Commission, as well as a hugely successful businessman, holding board and advisory positions at a number of major companies. He has been chairman of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) and Chancellor of the University of Bath.

Throughout his life he has always enjoyed reading and collecting first editions. He has previously written four books about business and politics, but his latest book is A History of Britain Through Books 1900-1964, he examines the history of 20th century Britain through the books that were written at the time.

From Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians to Allan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning he looks at how the big issues of the 20th century – Imperialism, War, feminism, pacifism, racism and the sexual revolution are reflected in contemporary literature and what those writers tell us about the last century.

Bridget Osborne, Editor of The Chiswick Calendar, talks to Lord Tugendhat about his book and the issues it raises.

James Rodgers was the BBC’s correspondent in Moscow from 2006 – 2009  but first went to the Soviet Union in 1987 to study the language. As he went from student to working journalist, he reported on the transition of the Soviet Union in to a free market Russia, an exciting time to be based in Moscow.

Now he teaches international journalism to students at City University, but took a sabbatical to go back to Russia to research Assignment Moscow – Reporting on Russia from Lenin to Putin. In it he describes how from the earliest days of the 1917 revolution foreign journalists were mistrusted as spies – which in some cases they were.

Bridget Osborne, Editor of The Chiswick Calendar, talks to James Rodgers about some of the foreign correspondents who have reported Russia over the decades – colourful characters whose influence through their reporting was wide-reaching and not always positive.

Polly Toynbee has been a columnist for The Guardian for more than 20 years. She was the BBC’s Social Affairs editor in the late eighties and early nineties and made a brief sally into politics as a Social Democrat candidate in the 1983 general election. Her husband David Walker, also a Guardian journalist, is contributing editor to the Public Leaders Network and a former Director of Public Reporting at the Audit Commission.

Their previous books together include: The Verdict: Did Labour Change Britain? published in 2010 and Dismembered: How the Conservative Attack on the State Harms Us All, published in 2017.

In The Lost Decade 2010 – 2020 and What Lies Ahead for Britain, they look at the impact on life in the UK of the austerity years under Conservative rule.

Bridget Osborne, Editor of The Chiswick Calendar, talks to Polly Toynbee and David Walker about their book and the issues it raises.

The English composer Michael Tippett was described by the philosopher Isiah Berlin as “a major asset to our age, morally as well as aesthetically” and when he died in 1998 he was lauded in obituaries as ‘one of the greatest English composers since Elgar’.

Tippett, whose music includes the oratorio A Child of Our Time, five operas and four symphonies, is considered to be among the most ‘visionary’ of the twentieth century, and yet, says author Oliver Soden, since his death he has been under appreciated:

‘His reputation fell so alarmingly that by the late 2000s, bar the continuing popularity of A Child of Our Time, it was as if Michael Tippett had been wiped from musical history’.

Soden seeks to restore him to prominence with this very thoroughly researched biography. The composer’s life mirrors the story of the twentieth century; he was nine years old when the First World War started, yet he lived to see the election of Labour leader Tony Blair, an event which brought him ‘unbounded delight’.

Bridget Osborne, Editor of The Chiswick Calendar, talks to Oliver Soden about the life and music of Sir Michael Tippett.

Tim Richardson is a garden writer, historian and critic, with regular columns in the Daily Telegraph and The Garden Design Journal.  He is also the Director of The Chelsea Fringe Festival, an extremely successful alternative garden event held in and around London, and he is an advisor to the National Trust on gardens.

Sissinghurst, the dream garden is a beautiful coffee table book, illustrated with photographs by Jason Ingram, in which Tim tells the story of Sissinghurst: how Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson came across the site of a ruined medieval manor in 1930 and turned it into one of the world’s best loved and most visited gardens.

Bridget Osborne, Editor of The Chiswick Calendar, talks to Tim Richardson about the design, planting and history of the garden; how Vita and Harold made it their own.

Mihir Bose, author of over 30 books and the BBC’s first sports news editor, has analysed and reported global sport incisively for nearly 50 years. He has followed Indian cricket since his school days and in The Nine Waves he writes with special authority about the history of the game in India, tracing its journey from colonial dependency to superpower.

Peter Oborne and Richard Heller, journalists and cricket fanatics who have toured south Asia with Mihir as their captain, talk to him about The Nine Waves – The Extraordinary Story of Indian Cricket.

Since the beginning of the lockdown in 2020, when the playing of cricket was cancelled along with everything else because of the coronavirus pandemic, they have been recording a weekly podcast for the ‘cricket deprived’. When play resumed they saw no reason to stop.