About the Louvre

On Radio 4 this evening, a newsreader helpfully glossed an item about the redesign of the Louvre with the information that the Louvre is a museum in Paris that houses Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.

Now, I get that the BBC is desperate to broaden its reach to the younglings and as a result we might need to broaden our assumptions about canons of knowledge and what is or isn’t known, but if someone doesn’t know what or where the Louvre is, why might they care that President Macron is chucking some money about it. And why does this passion for inclusivity only apply to Radio 4? Does Radio 1 explain every few minutes who Chappell Roan or Sabrina Carpenter might be? No, because the people who listen to Radio 1 are expected to know. 

Why are expectations so low at R4?

About Orlando

I grabbed a random book for the work commute and it turned out to be Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, which I’m pretty sure last read in the dying days of the Thatcher regime (yes, even before the film came out). Except that I must have skipped the preface that time, because surely I’d have remembered, in among the nods to pretty much everybody who was Bloomsbury or Bloomsbury-adjacent in 1928, the following salute to failure, which feels like Alan Bennett channelling Jane Austen, or maybe vice versa:

Miss M.K. Snowdon’s indefatigable researches in in the archives of Harrogate and Cheltenham were none the less arduous for being vain.

About Tony Slattery

Sad to hear that Tony Slattery has died, and it inevitably prompts a slew of posts, many incorporating clips from the TV show where most of us first encountered him, Whose Line Is It Anyway? This one, for example, which gives us a chance not only to mourn a mercurial talent, but also to gaze back at a time when a major channel would put out a show with the working assumption that a critical mass of the audience would know who William Burroughs and Anthony Burgess might be.

About lynx

I was mildly startled, during the coverage of the lynx being released in Scotland, to hear more than one broadcaster explain, often with an annoying mini-chuckle, that they meant a kind of big cat, not a brand of deodorant. But surely there’s a large constituency, especially among listeners to what’s now known as legacy media, who don’t have day-to-day contact with stinky, surly 14-year-olds, but do have a bit of an idea about the different species of wild cat. And as a result, for a decent number of listeners, the rather desperate attempt at clarification would surely have made things more confusing. 

About Listen

At the urging of expat@large, one of the faithful from the days when Blogging Was A Thing, I have been reading Michel Faber’s Listen: On Music, Sound and Us and immediately feel a wee bit seen.

Being exceptional is not a badge of honour, it’s just a divergence from the general standard. Intellectuals (or bookish types or deep thinkers or cultured souls or whatever label you choose) are a minority like any other. They find validation in their specialness while missing out on easy communion with the larger herd. They console each other, reassure each other that they’re not weird or poncy even though, statistically speaking, they are.