The opportunity for a new era in British television begins in the studios of LBC, a radio station that has ‘balanced’ and effectively expanded the British legal requirements for broadcasting news. Instead of presenting news developments from middle to middle, the network presents conflicting and sometimes heated debates on issues. The station thrived during the long run-up to Brexit, making it clear to broadcasters that they could abandon their starchy practices and reflect more biased passions – as long as the stations did not embrace just one political side.
Now television is ready to fill the space that LBC has opened. The most ambitious player in this new arena is perhaps Andrew Neil, a Scot who played for The Sunday Times in the 1980s for Mr. Murdoch before acting as one of the BBC’s most formidable interviewers. He is a conservative, but his style shares almost nothing with his right-wing American counterparts, who alternately throw smoldering questions at Republican politicians and eradicate obscure liberals who have wandered around foolishly on their sets. Mr. Neil is an equal opportunity interviewer and is perhaps best known in the United States for the 2019 hoist of conservative figure Ben Shapiro. In the British election in 2019, Tory Prime Minister Boris Johnson refused to subject him to an interview.
I reach mr. Neil at his home in the French Riviera, where he is enduring the pandemic and preparing for the start of a new 24-hour cable channel network, GB News, this spring. When I called, he was watching “MSNBC Live with Craig Melvin.” “I think there are things to learn from it in terms of programming, and the footage is very strong,” he said on the left-wing American channel. “In terms of formatting and style, I think MSNBC and Fox are the two templates we follow.”
Mr. Neil raised 60 million pounds (about $ 83 million) to launch the channel, including investments from US giant Discovery and hedge fund manager Paul Marshall. (Mr. Marshall’s son takes unrelated time to play banjo in the band Mumford and Sons to ‘examine my blind spots’ after praising an extreme right-wing book on Twitter.) Neil said he expects the amount to network will hold. at least three years, although by the standards of American cable news it’s a big deal.
He said he intended to hire around 100 journalists, a fraction of the more than 2,000 at the BBC, but aimed to capture the resentment of the London media by many of them from their broadcasting hometowns in the north. The channel will rely on other news services for its news, he said, focusing its resources on producing American, personality-driven news programs. But he said he would not follow the American right in foreign conspiracy theories, and he denied Donald Trump’s claim that he had won the US election.
“I do not think there is an appetite for ridiculous conflict in Britain,” he said. Neil said. Still, he plans to perform a part of his own prime-time show called ‘woke watch’ in which he can mock what he considers progressive excesses. He cites a recent report that British nurses said they could use the word ‘breastfeeding’ rather than ‘breastfeeding’ to include transgender people.