Latest news with #Civilisation
Yahoo
27-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
The Foreign Office is now a national embarrassment
Which institution has fallen furthest in the recent decades of British history? That they have fallen is indisputable: where once the pillars of our public life were the envy of the globe, they are now riddled with a very particular type of rot. We might call this lanyardism. What is lanyardism? Well, to paraphrase Kenneth Clark in Civilisation, I know it when I see it. It means cutting front-line services in favour of indolent clipboard-people with impenetrable job titles. It is increasingly failing to do what the institution was created for. It is a habit of turning away or belittling talented and committed members in favour of DEI initiatives. It does all this with a sort of rotten tweeness, a patronising mode of dealing with the public which seems to mirror both the wider infantilisation of society and the geriatric decay of a culture on its last legs. This, named for the ubiquitous uniform of its proponents, is lanyardism. Which institution, then, has suffered most from this? There are many candidates: the BBC abandoning its Reithian principles in pursuit of the confected and the patronising, the Church of England with its betrayal of ordinary parishes in favour of an out-of-touch apparatchik class, our ancient universities with their deliberate watering-down of quality in pursuit of political goals and dirty foreign money. The list goes on: opera companies, museums, the National Trust, the NHS. None though, has suffered a precipitous decline quite like the Foreign Office. It was once a byword for diplomatic skill, but is now an embarrassment. In the wake of the Chagos 'deal', their official social media accounts put out a Pravda-worthy explainer clip. Rather than responding with a gunboat as the Foreign Office of yore would have done, these days we get a patronising video with 90s graphics and a narration which sounds like the out of hours message at a GP's office. Hardly the artistry of Metternich and Talleyrand, indeed it's not even Robin Cook. Worse though than the lanyardist aesthetics is the content. If you're going to do propaganda, at least do it properly. The narrator begins with a lie; 'legal uncertainty was putting the future operation of the joint UK-US base on Diego Garcia under threat'. She describes this uncertainty as 'a gift to our adversaries'. There's a 1984 attitude to language here; it's 'a gift to our adversaries' to, er, not give away land to our adversaries. The rank sophistry of this claim was underlined by the fact that within hours of signing the deal with Britain, Mauritius agreed to strengthen its relations with Russia. It would almost be funny if it weren't so tragic; and suggests an alarming level of departmental capture. Then there is the general lowering of standards, particularly in the Foreign Office's historic insistence on language skills. A recent FOI request by The Spectator revealed that only 22 UK diplomats had obtained exam passes for the top civil service language certification in Mandarin, down from 45 in 2016. This is not entirely the Foreign Office's fault; reflecting a broader, depressing collapse in the numbers studying high-level languages. Still, historically the demand for higher standards was in part what then forced higher standard language teaching at universities themselves. And the Foreign Office has surely got weaker in this regard. In the past it would have been unthinkable for high-ranking diplomats in strategically important countries like China not to speak the language fluently. Elsewhere the attitude seems designed to corrode UK interests. Former Cabinet Secretary Gus O'Donnell famously described his job as '[maximising] global welfare not national welfare.'A recent pamphlet The World in 2040: Renewing the UK's approach to International Affairs, written by a group of former senior diplomats and officials, epitomises this way of thinking. 'The UK has often sought to project an image of 'greatness' to the world that today seems anachronistic', complain the authors, who include former cabinet secretary Lord Sedwill, former Foreign Office Director General Moazzam Malik and former No10 foreign policy adviser Tom Fletcher. To questions about 'industrial reparations', they say 'we cannot simply brush aside concerns around the UK's historical legacy and questions of nationhood'. Er, yes we can. Anyone committed to the national interest wouldn't simply parrot the criticisms of states which are often actively hostile to Britain, and assuredly have their own motives. I don't blame countries demanding reparations for trying their luck; the Chagos insanity suggests they might well succeed. I do blame those who are explicitly meant to safeguard our interests yet apparently view their role as an exercise in atonement for a past in which they take little pride. It bears repeating that no other country behaves like this; it is not normal, it is not how France, or America, or even Burkina Faso behaves. In this sense it is actually not international at all but a uniquely British form of self-cuckoldry. Indeed, France is widely considered our most directly comparable power; amusingly its longest land border is with Brazil and it hosted the Paris Olympics surfing not in La Rochelle or Brittany but Tahiti, which it considers an integral and non-negotiable part of its territory. France still has its Foreign Legion. We are not the same; and I'll leave you to guess exactly what has more clout in the 'Global South', a legionnaire landing on your country's coastline or an HR manager with a rainbow lanyard sending you an email from SW1. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Telegraph
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
How David Attenborough changed sport forever
The closest most of us associate the name Sir David Attenborough with the history of sport on television is his memorable commentary during an episode of Planet Earth II, broadcast in 2016. That was his breathless voiceover of the annual contest between freshly hatched iguana babies and racer snakes on the Galapagos Islands, a face-off which held the nation transfixed when that extraordinary footage of a life-or-death dash for the shoreline was first aired. But, unlikely as it may seem, the fact is Attenborough is also responsible for some of the few moments of the BBC's once prodigious sporting output that remain standing. Because, in the days before he became renowned for bringing us ever closer to the drama of the natural world, Attenborough was a hugely influential television controller. A wonderful moment on Centre Court as the crowd rises for Sir David Attenborough 💚 #Wimbledon — Wimbledon (@Wimbledon) July 1, 2024 Never mind the landmark series he commissioned like Civilisation, Monty Python's Flying Circus and the Old Grey Whistle Test, he is also the man who kept Match of the Day on our screens. Plus, he was so persuasive in his role as a telly executive he even managed to get the notoriously conservative Wimbledon authorities to change the colour of the tournament balls to yellow (eventually). Not to forget that, when millions of us hunker down to watch the final moments of the World Snooker Championship this weekend, we have one person to thank for it being on the box: David Attenborough. Back in the 1960s, while still in his early thirties, Attenborough had tired of his early career as a television executive and was studying for a postgraduate degree at the London School of Economics. But the BBC had long noted his innovative approach to programming and, with its new second television station struggling to make its presence known, persuaded him to become the second controller of BBC2, taking over in March 1965. His idea was to create a channel which, he once explained, 'catered to all levels of brow'. There was to be no traditional Reithian snobbery under his watch: all licence-fee payers would be invited to his channel. Not least fans of sport. On taking control, one of his first tasks was to rescue a programme commissioned by his predecessor Michael Peacock. Match of the Day had begun the previous August, its purpose to offer televised snippets of Saturday's football. And it had not gone down well in the corridors of the Football League. Those in charge of the game had always been wary of television, fearing that showing matches beyond the annual FA Cup final and the occasional England game would have a detrimental effect on live attendances. Thus it was decided among the game's hierarchy that the experimental first season of recorded highlights would be the last. But the new BBC2 boss was more than keen to keep the programme going. And in a meeting with the trepidatious blazers, Attenborough managed to assuage their doubts. He did it, he told a documentary to mark Match of the Day 's 50th anniversary, 'on the basis that nobody watched BBC2, which was more or less true. BBC2 was only visible in a small part of the country – London and Birmingham – and it had a tiny number of viewers'. 'Don't worry, no one's watching' is hardly the most compelling sell. But it worked. The Football League signed off on a new season-deal. Soon after which, thanks to Attenborough's shrewd negotiating skills, the show entered sporting folklore. Four years later, in 1969, Attenborough finally convinced the government to allow the BBC to introduce a new technology that had long since taken root in the USA and Japan: colour television. It required, however, expensive kit. And Attenborough needed something that would prove its vast superiority over bog-standard black and white to persuade viewers to fork out. So he called a meeting of senior producers, instructing all of them to come up with ideas. The best was a suggestion to embrace the game in which colour is absolutely central to its processes: snooker. Attenborough seized on the thought, sought the opinion of the established radio commentator Ted Lowe and immediately commissioned Lowe's idea for a show called Pot Black, a weekly competition involving eight players competing in one-frame challenges. Although available in colour for those who had new sets, for the rest of the nation it remained monochrome. Which explains Lowe's infamous attempt to clarify things in those early days: 'For those of you who are watching in black and white, the pink is next to the green.' It was Attenborough, moreover, who, in 1973, in his new capacity of director of programmes for the whole corporation, encouraged Grandstand to screen highlights of the semi-final and final of the World Snooker Championship. In 1978, after the tournament moved to the Crucible, daily coverage was introduced, an innovation that has remained in place ever since. Snooker was not the only sport he brought to the television audience in colour, either. He loved tennis, in particular Wimbledon. 'I mean, it is a wonderful plot: you've got drama, you've got everything,' he once told the Radio Times. 'And it's a national event, it's got everything going for it.' So his new colour BBC2, he decided, would feature not just recorded highlights in the evening as was traditional, but live matches during the day. Thus it was Attenborough who was responsible for half the British workforce feigning illness in order to spend the afternoon behind closed curtains watching the tennis. Even then, he was always seeking improvements. He noticed, while watching his station's output, that it was hard for the home audience to follow white balls moving across green turf. Why not introduce yellow coating for the balls? The International Tennis Federation did a bit of investigation and discovered Attenborough was right: it was not just the green of the All England Club lawns, yellow was a much more visible colour against all the surfaces on which the game was played. In 1972, it decreed yellow was the way forward. Though being Wimbledon, the annual fortnight did not adopt the Attenborough yellow until 1986. By which time the great man himself had long moved on into his career as a nature documentary maker. There can be no doubt he was rather good at that, too. But it is in sport we have a lot to be grateful to him for. Thanks to his hapless successors in charge of sport, the BBC has largely wilted in the face of rights challenges from more commercially muscular operations. The fact is, there is not much more remaining in the corporation's portfolio that does not have, some six decades on, a mark left on it by Attenborough. Even in sport, it seems, he is a national treasure.
Jordan Times
05-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Jordan Times
Next round for strategy game lineage in 'Civilisation VII'
A visitor walks past the booth of 'Sid Meier's Civilization VII', a video game developed by Firaxis Games, during the media day at the Gamescom video games trade fair in Cologne, western Germany on August 21, 2024 (AFP photo) PARIS — Fans have waited more than eight years for the new instalment in heavyweight strategy game Civilisation, with the release of the seventh instalment on February 11 promising to get budding philosopher-kings thinking more about the consequences of their actions. At first glance, little has changed since the very first title released in 1991: Players are presented with a top-down view of the game world in which they build up their society turn by turn from the Neolithic period to the modern era. Virtual rulers can exert their will over opponents either by diplomacy or war -- a formula that brought sales over the whole series to 73 million by summer 2024, according to Take Two, parent company of publisher 2K Games. "Civilization" spawned a whole genre known to gamers as 4X, for its core gameplay activities: Explore, Expand, Exploit and Exterminate. Comparable titles include Paradox Interactive's starfaring "Stellaris" (2016) or French developer Amplitude's "Humankind" (2021). That range of alternatives is one reason why fans "don't just want the same game with a new coat of paint, with fancier graphics", Ed Beach, creative director for the Civilisation franchise, told AFP in August at Germany's Gamescom trade fair. "We need to do something new each time... something that is going to really improve the game." Civilisation is still developed by US studio Firaxis, which has run the franchise since its third instalment. Its seventh edition, available on PC and console, allows players to set any historically-inspired ruler at the head of any empire -- allowing Charlemagne to govern Egypt, for example. A match is now divided into three acts, each wrapped up with a major crisis such as the collapse of an empire or a foreign invasion. The way players cope with the challenge defines how their civilisation will adapt as they enter the next age. 'The human journey' That is one way the developers wanted to confront player-governors with the consequences of their actions. "We're not trying to say you have to play a certain way," Beach said. "There are times I play as a very bad guy, and that's an interesting way for me to look at the world and look at history as well." Nevertheless, topics tackled in Civilisation -- such as climate change or the battle of democracy versus autocracy -- are hot issues out in the everyday world. "It's not getting political, it's just we're always thoughtful about what the human journey has been," Beach said. "The more our game can mirror that in interesting ways and let people adjust it and play with it and experiment with it, we think that it's doing what it should do." Civilisation's image as a "serious" game is a legacy of its origins on desktop computers, "at a time when the PC was a tool for work", said Sebastien Genvo, a researcher specialising in video games at the University of Lorraine in eastern France. Firaxis itself brought in historians to advise on keeping gameplay plausible and modelling civilisations in the new structure -- all while allowing the player as much freedom as possible. Return of Sid Meier "Civilisation doesn't aim to teach you history," Genvo said, even if the close attention to certain historical details may "awaken an interest" among players. Hundreds of people have contributed to the development of "Civilisation VII", going back to before the Covid-19 pandemic. Among them has been Sid Meier, 70, the original creator of the series, whose name still features proudly in the game's full title. Meier had been "off doing other projects" during the development of the previous instalment "Civilisation VI", Beach said. "He likes to experiment... he offered to prototype some of the early ideas for Civ VII," he added. These included how units are moved around the map or the different military, scientific and cultural objectives players must achieve in each age.
