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Abolish everything!

Andrew Hussey: Situationist International, 2 September 1999

The Situationist City 
by Simon Sadler.
MIT, 248 pp., £24.95, March 1998, 0 262 19392 2
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... It is not by chance that the history of the Situationist International reads like an account of a military campaign. During their first, ‘artistic’ phase, which ran roughly from the group’s foundation in 1957 through to the early Sixties, the Situationists were at war with what they contemptuously termed ‘the civilisation of the image’. Their enemies, in ascending order of importance, were work, leisure, boredom, advertising, modern art and, above all, the tendency of cultures of mass production to turn real life into an endless series of frozen gestures or ‘spectacles ...

E Bada!

Rye Dag Holmboe: What Isou Did to Language, 21 July 2022

Speaking East: The Strange and Enchanted Life of Isidore Isou 
by Andrew Hussey.
Reaktion, 328 pp., £20, September 2021, 978 1 78914 492 5
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... insouciant flair for self-promotion he displayed as a member of the Parisian avant-garde, but as Andrew Hussey makes clear in his critical biography, this is to overlook the extent to which lettrisme was driven by the experience of trauma. The fact that Isou rarely mentioned the Romanian Holocaust is only a measure of the impact it had. After the ...

Cod on Ice

Andy Beckett: The BBC, 10 July 2003

Panorama: Fifty Years of Pride And Paranoia 
by Richard Lindley.
Politico’s, 404 pp., £18.99, September 2002, 1 902301 80 3
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The Harder Path: The Autobiography 
by John Birt.
Time Warner, 532 pp., £20, October 2002, 0 316 86019 0
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... of the programme were back in fashion. According to Birt, the BBC’s Chairman, Marmaduke Hussey, regarded Panorama as a microcosm of a BBC that was ‘out of control’, that had ‘poor processes for handling legally sensitive programmes’ and ‘no one who told its journalists that they were not doing well’. Birt agreed, with consequences for ...

What are we telling the nation?

David Edgar: Thoughts about the BBC, 7 July 2005

Uncertain Vision: Birt, Dyke and the Reinvention of the BBC 
by Georgina Born.
Vintage, 352 pp., £10.99, August 2005, 0 09 942893 8
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Building Public Value: Renewing the BBC for a Digital World 
BBC, 135 pp.Show More
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... competition. In 1992, the governors (then under the chairmanship of the Thatcher appointee Duke Hussey) made the former LWT director of programmes John Birt – the inventor of Weekend World and Blind Date – director-general. Faced with a reduction in the real value of the licence fee, Birt proceeded to change what he described as the ‘sprawling command ...

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