This article is taken from the December-January 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

Ashes under Uricon. That’s one way of describing the presidency of Joe Biden, asleep at the wheel, before the Democrat powerbrokers handed Kamala Harris the most treacherous of hospital passes. Whack!

“Sleepy Joe”, the Irish-American who would struggle to pick out the mother country on a map of the world, no longer troubles the scorers. Bat, pad and wicket. He lost the lot. The giggler anointed in his stead then knocked her stumps over, whilst munching a word salad.

How could they get it so badly wrong? Yet, motes and beams, how did the media class imagine so limited a candidate could possibly prevail? Particularly on this side of the Atlantic, where many pundits mistake familiarity with the United States with genuine knowledge.

On Radio 4 Justin Webb hosts Americast, which is not all bad. Sarah Smith, the BBC North American correspondent, is a contributor, and she has always been trustworthy. Webb knows the States from his years there, when he got out and about.

Not for him the cosy news slot at 10pm, with the White House glimpsed over his right shoulder. Webb never patronised those who live in the boondocks, because he met them, and usually liked them, so his voice should be heard with respect. He writes well, too.

it is less easy to respect the views of those on The Media Show, which goes out every Wednesday afternoon on Radio 4. This programme is smothered in self-absorption. Are we not grand, the presenters seem to suggest, for letting you lot into the holy temple of journalism?

Neither Ros (as in Roslyn) Atkins nor Katie Razzall has a particularly sympathetic manner. Atkins sounds as if he could slide up pillars, and Razzall’s ascent is a puzzle. For somebody who holds two jobs, covering “media” and “the arts”, she seems incurious. How many stories does she break?

She also has a weak voice. Like many of the well-bred, whose education often includes three years at Oxford, she tries to disguise her identity by talking flat. “Hello” comes out as “ell-ow”, and the letter T is optional.

The guests on this show, which is unwisely bumped out for an hour, tend to come from the ranks of PR agencies, media consultancies and alternative news sites, with a sprinkling of Americans. The day after the presidential election they heard from an American journalist, who spoke of “folks”, and an English lady resident in Manhattan fluent in “transatlantic”.

Taken as a pair they didn’t add much to our understanding of what had happened. The show is a mishmash, which needs some pruning and a sharper edge. There’s too much waffle.

Jim Naughtie has been going to America for half a century and written a good book about what he has seen and learned. Here is a reporter who cannot be accused of confusing familiarity with knowledge.

He was back again for the election, and before he went he presented four 15-minute talks on Radio 4 about the America he loves, though not uncritically. It is an understanding rooted in matters cultural as well as political, a distinction lost on some of his successors, for whom a narrowly political life is all. That is why we end up with someone like Lewis Goodall, the boy wonder for whom the BBC was too small a stage.

Identity was the subject of Naughtie’s nocturnal essays. In a continent forged by immigrants, what makes an American? There is no specific answer. “I hear America singing,” wrote Walt Whitman, and the melody, whilst unending, has known many changes of key.

High marks for Naughtie, then, and a pass for Webb and Smith, though their show would do well to lose Marianna Spring, the queen bee of fact-checkers. There are facts, and there are things absorbed through experience. The finest wine tends to be found in old bottles.

Bryan Ferry appeared on Private Passions. “O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”

The founder of Roxy Music chose Mahler and Richard Strauss interpreted by Janet Baker and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. There was also room for Charlie Parker, Johnny Hartman with the John Coltrane quartet, Prokofiev and Elgar. And a curio — Walter Huston’s version of “September Song” by Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson.

In recent months Private Passions has gone off the boil, and Ferry was just the chap to put the kettle back on the hob. He’s a shy man, and needed a bit of prodding from Michael Berkeley, but his selections revealed the ear of a good listener.

Once upon a time Desert Island Discs had good listeners. Now it is the thinnest of shows, when even promising guests, David Nicholls for instance, betray an alarming lack of interest in music before the arrival of pop. What kind of life is that?

A repeat on Radio 4 Extra of Randy Newman’s appearance in 2008 was startling. The American ironist went for Beethoven, Stravinsky, Shostakovich and Mahler, with Dante as his book for all seasons. You have to admit, that tells you rather more about a person than “Life on Mars”.