GB News review – Andrew Neil’s alternative BBC? Utterly deadly stuff

“Now is the time to do news differently,” said Andrew Neil as GB News went live on Sunday night. “We are committed to covering the people’s agenda, not the media’s agenda.” Not in the first hour you weren’t. Instead, Neil spent it introducing his new colleagues while – be still irony – indicting the woke numpties from traditional news channels stuck in the narcissistic Westminster bubble. There may have been news breaking during the hour (indeed it was scrolling on a ticker at the bottom of the screen) but it went unreported.

No matter. First up was Neil Oliver, former BBC archaeology presenter turned GB News current affairs presenter, whom Neil introduced as the King of Scotland. An ill-omened title, given that the last title holder was Idi Amin. “I seem to have come to the fore with opinions,” he told Andrew Neil. “People talk to me all the time. They come up to me when they’re walking the dogs. They no longer feel their voices or voices like theirs are out in the mainstream.” The thing to do, Neil baby, is not to slow down.

When asked which three words would sum up his new employer, Oliver replied “Truth at last”. The implication, of course, was that the British Biased Corporation and Channel 4 Lies – stuffed as they are with macrame weavers so smugly PC they make Owen Jones read like Tommy Robinson – are more out of touch than people like him who have spent the most successful part of their careers having their hair impeccably conditioned at the licence fee payers’ expense. Oliver, it’s worth saying, told the Glasgow Herald last weekend that lockdown was the “biggest single mistake in world history”. To be fair, Oliver had forgotten his new beard.

Other presenters gave their three little words to characterise what GB News might mean. “Good news now,” Becca Hutson told the channel’s website, which fingers crossed means more than airlifting news crews from Syria to Surbiton to get the scoop on the Cute Kitten Rescued from Tree story. “Fresh. Experienced. Challenging,” said Alastair Stewart, ex-ITV news anchor who has been the second and third of those words for many years.

The most resonant definition came from the channel’s economics and business editor, Liam Halligan. “British. Unbiased. Welcoming.” But that creates the kind of philosophical problem that comedian Andrew Doyle, presenter of GB News’s Free Nation Britain, might wish to address in his show. Can a channel that postures as unbiased correct biased coverage without itself becoming biased? Probably not. But the claim to be unbiased is risible. In the second hour, Dan Wootton railed against extending lockdown, urging that Britain should follow Texas, Florida and Sweden instead of becoming a “bio-security state copying China”. Which is not just biased but very, very silly.

After 10pm, Alan Sugar fielded viewer questions from his computer in Chigwell, where, judging from his Zoom backdrop, he has spent lockdown building a super-swagged Bedouin tent in his back garden, God love him. Like an Essex Socrates or Manuel in Fawlty Towers, Lord Sugar had nothing to declare but his ignorance. Asked about the prospect of extending lockdown, he replied: “I have no clue when this thing is coming to an end. I’m no doctor, I’m no scientist and the thing is changing every day and I have no idea.” Thank you for your insights, Lord Sugar! What about taking the knee, asked another? “Where would I take the knee – Sainsbury’s?” Then he told us about his knee op, like some dear old grandad leaning on the garden fence as the long day closes and you wish you were somewhere else. Did anyone say appointment-to-view TV? No they did not.

It was an utterly deadly segment, apart from when Lord Sugar had a question for one of the channel’s hosts, Apprentice winner Michelle Dewberry. “ I notice there’s been no advertisements yet. How are you going to make your revenue?” Dewberry couldn’t answer this question, because it was time to go to the body language expert. They were going to tell us whether Joe Biden really does like Boris Johnson. Which is certainly doing news differently. Or rather not doing it at all.

Here’s another philosophical question. Can GB News change Britain’s news agenda if no one watches it? The answer, incredibly, is yes. Wired magazine recently reported that GB News will be a success if it has reach rather than ratings. Which means that if it creates a controversy through interviews and reportage, it will create news or the clickbait semblance of it. That certainly would be doing news differently, but I’m not sure GB News yet has the personnel to deliver that business model.

GB News’s biggest problem is that the elephant isn’t in the room. Piers Morgan, the man for whom GB News could have been and perhaps was invented, has not yet been signed up. Nor has another anti-woke tabloid bruiser Nick Ferrari, whom GB News sought to lure from LBC, where the breakfast bulldog is renowned for eviscerating politicians, exposing for instance Diane Abbott’s innumeracy. These are the A-listers GB News needs if it is to produce reach as well as ratings. There’s a danger that it could have neither.

As for reporting the people’s agenda, GB News aims to deliver it by “unmuffling the muffled voices”, as presenter Nana Akua put it. A noble aim, but in practice this policy so far means stories on the channel’s website with such headlines as “Trailblazing Teesside has been ignored for too long”. If this is doing news differently, it is only different in mistaking local puffery for news of national significance. Another story championing the neglected east Midlands was equally fatuous. “East Midlands airport is only second to Heathrow in terms of cargo,” reported Hanisha Sethi. More of that, please!

Forty years ago the Social Democratic party sought to break the mould of British politics. Its so-called gang of four split from the Labour party that they thought had gone too far to the left. GB News is, effectively, TV’s answer to the SDP. The current disgruntled BBC exiles who make up the backbone of GB News – Andrew Neil as Roy Jenkins, Neil Oliver as David Owen and Andrew Doyle as the brains of the operation, ie Shirley Williams – risk having made a terrible misjudgment. This feels akin to the gang of four’s not actually breaking the mould but rather destroying their careers while leaving everything else pretty much as it was. My three words? “A year tops.”