- Programme not well produced… - 2nd January 2026
- Multi million pound Match of the Day! - 1st January 2026
- Wordy again part two - 31st December 2025
Here our Editor, Welshman Phil Parry, looks back at the BBC’s dismal selection of ‘extraordinary lives’ in a TV programme over the holiday season, which didn’t include the Pope, a former president, and had only a tiny reference to a key footballer.
It was given a huge fanfare, so viewers like me waited with keen anticipation.
The BBC’s ‘Lives Well Lived’, proclaimed excitedly on i-player: “Kirsty Wark looks back at the extraordinary lives of some of the legendary actors, celebrated singers and political giants who died in 2025”.
But these ‘giants’ did not include central figures who shaped events, although the programme DID devote an endless amount to actor Patricia Routledge, known to BBC television viewers as ‘Hyacinth Bouquet‘.
As someone who was in the BBC for 23 years (including in the ‘news’ department, out of which stable this appalling programme came), I think I have a right to comment.
Let’s start with the celebrated footballer Denis Law who made a fleeting appearance (others didn’t make it AT ALL!).
It could be argued that one of the unknown luvvies paying vacuous tribute to Ms Routledge might have been cut out to give more room to Mr Law.
He is, after all, the only man to have TWO statues dedicated to him at Man United’s ground Old Trafford – one on the Stretford End concourse, the other as part of the United Trinity statue overlooking the stadium’s forecourt where he’s immortalised alongside fellow greats George Best and Sir Bobby Charlton.
When he played for United’s fierce rivals Manchester City, he famously didn’t celebrate when he back-heeled the ball into his opponents’ net in 1974.
Then there are the people who didn’t appear in the entire programme, which looks odd given that it was a look back at “extraordinary lives”.
There’s the enormously important contemporary playwright, Tom Stoppard, who could have been promoted by the BBC as a ‘giant’ in the media world, where Ms Routledge was seemingly deemed so significant.
His works blended moral philosophy with acrobatics, Latin literature with gay love, and rock ‘n’ roll with the Velvet revolution in Czechoslovakia.
He challenged his audience at every turn to keep up with his dazzling conceits.
The play that made him famous, ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead’, was a tale of two very ordinary men, minor characters in ‘Hamlet’, pitted against inexorable Fate.
Then there was the absence of Jorge Bergoglio (Pope Francis), a man of astonishing humility and kindness, who preferred to live in a guest house rather than a palace. He welcomed refugees, and washed the feet of prisoners on Maundy Thursday.
He thought nothing of appearing, like St Francis himself, with a lamb round his shoulders, or of welcoming feathered Amazonians to St Peter’s.
His flexibility on doctrine drew plenty of hostility from conservatives, but his streak of Jesuit steel, honed in his years as Archbishop of Buenos Aires, enabled him to promote, slowly, the reformers he wanted and the church needed.
A major omission, I would suggest, was also Jimmy Carter, 39th president of the United States of America (USA).
Though successful in business (he was essentially a Georgian peanut farmer.), his term was marked by economic defeats against stagflation, unemployment as well as the energy crisis, and he was remembered for being vague and ineffectual. But, as a born-again Christian, he believed in the power of human kindness.
The closest the world has come to Middle East peace was engineered by him as he and Menachem Begin, Israel’s then prime minister, shared photos of their grandchildren on the White House veranda.
In retirement he monitored elections round the world, and helped to build housing for the poor.
His institute announces that it is ‘Waging Peace. Fighting Disease. Building Hope.’
But much better apparently to include vast amounts on an actor who was known to millions of television viewers, rather than people like this…
The memories of Phil’s astonishing 42 year award-winning career in journalism (including his years at the BBC) as he was gripped by the rare neurological disabling condition, Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in a major book ‘A GOOD STORY’. Order the book now!
