About whiteness and purity

Matt Chorley of the BBC has made a mistake. Referring to Nigel Farage’s response to the killing of Henry Nowak, Chorley said that the Reform leader used the phrase “white cold rage”. In fact, he’d said “pure cold rage”. The journalist subsequently apologised, explaining that he’d misremembered.

Well, any inaccuracy in reporting needs to be acknowledged but I’m not clear why this one in particular warrants an apology. For a start, the original phrase was clearly figurative. Rage is neither cold, nor pure. Neither, for that matter, is it white. I do understand that in the current febrile atmosphere, words that might have racial connotations should be treated with caution, but if “white” is a dangerous adjective then surely so is “pure”. Both might be used, together or separately, in the furtherance of racial hygiene and similarly bonkers eugenicist notions, for example. So Farage appears to be aggrieved not by the suggestion that he used a potentially inflammatory adjective, but that he used a different potentially inflammatory adjective from the potentially inflammatory adjective that he did use.

Of course, a few months ago accusations resurfaced that Farage might have used rather more robust language in his adolescence, although apparently that was “tongue-in-cheek schoolboy banter” so that’s OK then.

PS: In a deeply morbid way, I now really want to hear Farage’s Desert Island Discs. Although I doubt if they’d approach the, um, purity of his political idol’s selection.

About Charlotte Sometimes

Another World Book Day passes, which means – apart from the inevitable sprawl of kids going to school dressed as characters from books their parents pretend to have read – much soul-searching about the decline of literacy. There is much fretting on Radio 4, where the few remaining readers are assumed to lurk, as they repeat December’s podcast on the crisis, in turn based on James Marriott’s Substacked Jeremiad from a few months before that (and the irony that the participants are expressing their qualms via media that is at least in part to blame for the situation is not lost on anyone).

Elsewhere, though, Auntie is gung-ho in demonstrating that books are just as much fun as TikTok, kids, and not boring at all, appending a couple of Gladiators to the 500 Words writing competition and allowing the comedian Russell Kane to explain his adoration for Evelyn Waugh (which I share, of course) by reference to 90s raves and 21st-century social media, rather than just letting the old git be funny in his own right, in his own time, in his own very un-sweet way.

This sense of inclusivity is new on the block, it seems. At the weekend I picked up a 1970s Puffin edition of Penelope Farmer’s Charlotte Sometimes, one of those childhood classics I know only by reputation (and then mainly thanks to The Cure). And inside I find the stark, defiantly exclusive announcement: “You need an alert and imaginative mind to read and enjoy this book.” And if you aren’t blessed with one of those, I guess you should just stick to watching Gladiators.

About Pie Jesu

In terms of the various problems the BBC’s gone through over the last few years, this is fairly mild, but it does raise a few questions about what and who it’s for, as well as my old favourite, what exactly we should expect people to know, especially when it comes to high (or indeed low) culture.

Yesterday, the astronomer Michele Dougherty was the guest on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs. As was common in the past, not so much these days, her selection was weighted towards classical music, albeit the sort of classical that doesn’t frighten the horses (Nessun Dorma, Elgar’s Cello, Tchaikovsky’s Violin and so on).

And in that vein, her last selection was the Pie Jesu from Fauré’s Requiem. All perfectly normal, except that the excerpt they played was the Pie Jesu from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Requiem, a completely different piece of music. And then Lauren Laverne back-announced it as Fauré. Now, I don’t know how they actually put the show together, whether someone else slots in the pieces of music during the edit, so it’s entirely possible that neither Laverne nor Professor Dougherty was aware that they we’d not been listening to the piece they were discussing. But someone somewhere in the process (several people, I’d guess) would have heard the transition between speech and music and speech and not been aware of the disconnect. And those people would all have been working on what still purports to be a music programme. 

Now, it’s easy to say that this sort of cock-up wouldn’t have happened in Roy Plomley’s day, but just because it’s easy, doesn’t mean it’s not true. The sad thing is that, compared with Plomley’s era, people working on the show today have access to far more tools (Google, Shazam, etc) with which they could have checked what happened and avoided embarrassment. The problem is not necessarily that people don’t know, it’s that they don’t seem to care.

PS: They’ve now edited out all references to Fauré. Auditory gaslighting.

About Kafka and crockery

Yet more musing on what we’re expected to know. This morning, in a discussion on Radio 4 about the overused adjectives “Orwellian” and “Kafkaesque” Evan Lian (who drew the cartoon above) says, “I’m not the most well-read person, which is sort of embarrassing to admit on a BBC radio programme” which does rather play into the idea of the BBC (and, by extension, Britain) as being the repository of everything and everyone erudite. Which is nice.

And then on the same station’s Electioncast, broadcast immediately afterwards, BBC's own chief political correspondent, who read PPE at Oxford, says that he thinks he once read an essay by Orwell and then admits he doesn’t actually know what a Ming vase is.

PS: And a few hours later, I heard another BBC journalist refer to a calvacade.

About images

I’m not going to add to all the partially-informed verbiage prompted by the story apparently involving the BBC, The Sun, £35,000 and some unedifying pictures, except to stroke my chin over one legal oddity the case has highlighted. Someone 16 years old or more has the capacity, the law says, to choose to display his or her or their naked body to someone older, provided said viewer isn’t in a position of responsibility. However, said 16+-year-old is not allowed to distribute an image of said body. The image, one might infer, is more powerful than the original. Baudrillard vindicated again. 

About the BBC

The BBC, we are informed, will attempt to attract viewers from less affluent socio-economic groups by producing more sports documentaries, crime dramas and other “lighter” products. Except that nobody asks why such groups (allegedly) prefer such material. Furthermore, does an individual’s socio-economic status determine the media he or she consumes, or is it the other way round? Does the choice of media put them on the path to a specific rung on the socio-economic ladder? By giving the punters what they want (which is supposedly restricted to variations on what they already know), the BBC would be fulfilling its remit to reach out to all social groups, but at the same time reinforcing the inequalities that keep those groups apart – and pissing the Reithian mission to educate all over the walls of Broadcasting House. And then what’s the point of the BBC?

About the Queen

And so the Queen finally enters Valhalla, not lasting quite long enough to tell us what she thought of Cobra Kai season five. Now is not the time or place to cast aspersions on the late monarch. Whatever you think of the institution itself, she clearly discharged her role with commitment and aplomb; and, in any case, she's someone’s mother, someone’s grandmother and so on. That said, we seem to have entered a moment – with uncomfortable similarities to the period following the death of her daughter-in-law – when those who aren’t swept up in the mood of collective melancholy feel uncomfortable about conducting business as usual. We don’t mock the Queen herself, but surely some of the bloody awful poetry and awkward corporate tweets are fair game? And as for faded celebrities trying to get in the act...

As far as big public events go, it seems that the effective shutdown of normal service at the BBC and other broadcasters when Prince Philip died last year is now rightly seen as overkill; but the laissez-faire attitude from the Palace has led to some anomalies and inconsistencies. So there was cricket, but no football. And we were allowed a few daft game shows on Saturday night, even if they were shunted to BBC2, but not the Last Night of Proms. This last cancellation seems particularly odd; wouldn’t a bit of sentimental flag-waving be just the ticket? And there are precedents. In 2001, the Last Night took place four days after the 9/11 attacks, surely a more brutal shock to the collective system than the passing of a 96-year-old? The mood was a bit more sombre than usual, exemplified by Leonard Slatkin conducting Barber’s Adagio for Strings. And it was beautiful and respectful and wholly right.   

About Radio 4

Two more nuggets that would have fitted neatly into my dissertation but will have to hover here for the time being. Both popped up as I did my usual Sunday morning potter to the strains of Radio 4. First, on Broadcasting House (from about 37.40) both interviewer and interviewee explicitly assume that listeners to the station will be familiar with a particular poem by Philip Larkin, not to mention an Oscar-winning movie from more than four decades ago. Are such assumptions justified? Should they be? Or is such cosy familiarity with the canon off-putting to too many people, specifically the people who aren’t listening to Radio 4, however much the BBC wants them to?

And then on Kate Moss’s Desert Island Discs (1.15) Lauren Laverne mentions cultural capital but I’m not entirely sure it means what she thinks it does. Which is another cultural reference that you, the imaginary average reader, may or may not get, and so it goes on...

PS: And on the Today programme on Monday morning, Hadley Freeman compares Ms Moss to Thomas Pynchon...

PPS: Discussing the broadening of the canon, with particular reference to Brain of Britain.

About Penny Mordaunt

Of course I haven’t read Greater, the book by the woman who might be Prime Minister in a matter of weeks, so I’ve had to rely on artful filleting by lefty journalists (in this case John Harris of the Guardian) to acquire this gem: “The British prefer a future that looks very much like the past, only a lot better.” Which seems to hint at both a Baudrillardian simulacrum and a Radiohead lyric, while meaning precisely nothing. Which is a pretty good fit for this blog, and for 2022 as a whole.

And if Mordaunt does bellyflop into Number 10, she’ll have to decide whether to carry on her party’s deranged feud with the BBC. If she does, she should ask herself how a commercially-driven broadcaster might have made this rather wonderful production of The Waste Land. Except that that might expose a fatal cognitive dissonance in modern Conservatism, which seeks to exalt the best culture of the past, while simultaneously deriding intelligent examination or experience of that culture as elitist.

About books

On the day it was revealed BBC4 is to be shifted into the online-only nowhere land, as BBC3 is welcomed back to the family of proper telly, this seemed horribly apposite.

About OK Computer

I’m really not that miffed about Radio 4 doing an hour-long documentary about the definitive Everything Turned Into Tuesday album OK Computer and not asking me to contribute, despite the fact I’m one of just two people to have written a book about the LP (and mine was longer). Looking at the roster, there are plenty of other qualified voices they left out. That’s fine.

But did they have to broadcast it on my birthday?

PS: If anyone’s interested, the French Radiohead documentary I appeared in a few years back has resurfaced, and is available on YouTube for a limited period. 

About things

Back in the days when blogging was a thing and people used to read this, every now and then I’d use a post as a repository for various bits of stuff and nonsense that had caught my eye over the past few days or weeks, a sort of snapshot of my cultural life at that moment. 

In that spirit, Matt Doran, the man who forgot to listen to the Adele album, offers an apology that sounds like something from a Stalinist show trial, except that I’ve got a horrible feeling it’s genuine. And just when you think being under-prepared is a sin, BBC4 runs a documentary about Geordie singer-songwriter Alan Hull, which kicks off with the presenter admitting he doesn’t know anything about Alan Hull. I’ve got a horrible feeling that the success of You’re Dead To Me has given the Beeb the idea that ignorance is a qualification.

Also on a musical theme, I offer you Olivia Lane’s review for Pitchfork of the new Robert Plant/Alison Krauss album, for no reason other than that she uses the words “effulgent”, “magmatic” and “empyreal” and doesn't explain or apologise, so there. Then there’s Andy Bull’s quip about the Tim Paine scandal: 

Paine sent an unsolicited “dick pic” to a female employee of Cricket Tasmania with the caption “finish me off right now”. Four years later, she has...

A line from Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ that made me giggle foolishly:

I arose and argued about trifles...

And this, via Richard Blandford on the Twitters, which also made me giggle, but not as much as the trifle thing did.

About offence

Yesterday afternoon, two things occurred that got me thinking back to my Religious Studies O-level. On Radio 4’s Any Answers programme, the subject under discussion was the Assisted Dying bill currently in the House of Lords, and a woman called in to describe the last, horrible, cancer-ridden days of her mother. It was a grim but entirely necessary lesson, even as she relived the end-stage faecal vomiting; but it was her utterance of the dread word “shit” that prompted Anita Anand to apologise to listeners for any offence caused.

No blame lies with Anand, who was just following Corporation guidelines. My issue is with the people who make those guidelines necessary, who are more agitated by a slang term for bodily wastes than hearing about an old woman’s pain and humiliation, something that might have been relieved had more enlightened legislation been in place.

Minutes later, at the Crystal Palace-Newcastle match, fans of the south London club wielded a banner detailing the moral failings of the Saudi Arabian government, the effective owners of the visiting team. And inevitably the police response was to deal with the “offensive” material.

Motes and beams, anyone?

About Brain of Britain, yet again

Another fleeting appearance on the best quiz show on the wireless. 3pm today, repeated on Saturday night (both on Radio 4), Sounds for a month or so thereafter.

About the BBC

I’m quietly impressed by the way that modern conservatives manage to reconcile the sort of contradictory realities that would send wiser, more reflective individuals into an intellectual death spiral. For example, they’re quite capable of trumpeting their support for what they define as traditional family values, while at same time aligning themselves with insatiable shaggers like Trump and Johnson.

Their attitudes to culture are similarly, shamelessly incoherent. A conservative, one would assume, appreciates the canon, all that tradition holds to be best in literature, music, art and so on; not least because such works provide us with a link to the past, to the history of our own civilisation. At the same time, though, most conservatives are in thrall to market forces; logic dictates that what sells is by definition right. The recent appointment to the role of Culture Secretary of the preposterous Nadine Dorries, with her visceral suspicion of anything “elitist”, embodies this trend. And, of course, modern conservatives really, really hate the BBC.

In the Telegraph, Ben Lawrence dares to tackle the cognitive dissonance head-on, arguing that what is popular (Strictly Come Dancing, for example) is not necessarily good and that the Beeb must justify its special status by daring to be on the side of the elites. 

You could argue that, in its old-fashioned Reithian approach, the BBC did always patronise its viewers. However, I think there is a crucial difference in the way we used to be talked down to. Indeed, doesn’t a bit of pedagogic paternalism now seem rather refreshing? ... It sort of goes like this: fearing that it may lack working-class cred, the Corporation is now giving the public what they think the people want, and perhaps in the case of Vigil they have got it right. But otherwise, it feels like the equivalent of Sir John Gielgud donning a flat cap and trying to speak with a Cockney accent (actually, I am sure Gielgud’s accent would have been flawless, but you know what I mean). In other words, it is shrinking people’s horizons … And who is to say that a binman might not want to watch a profile of Stockhausen?

At least it’s a coherent, considered view. But then the bloody readers – few of whom, I suspect, would watch a Stockhausen doc either – go and spoil it with the usual gammony whines about lefties and the licence fee. And Nadine Dorries breathes a sigh of relief.

About NFTs and Geronimo

I’ve remarked before about the way BBC journalists – presumably in the spirit of accessibility and inclusivity – have taken to explaining references that 10 years ago would have needed no gloss; thus, a mention of Hamlet becomes “Shakespeare’s play Hamlet” and so on.

But some other aspects of our culture have become embedded in the stuff-you’re-assumed-to-know box, and remarkably quickly at that. A year ago, I’m pretty sure I’d never heard of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), but today a BBC website story not only refrained from explaining what they are (there’s a link to a separate article that does that) but didn’t even say what the abbreviation stands for. Or whether “a professional NFT collector” is a real job.

And just as I’m about to hit send, another BBC-related thought. Geronimo the alpaca met his fate today; it was a bit of a silly season story, and some questioned why a culture that happily slaughters thousands of animals a day should fixate on this one beast. Evan Davis, on the PM show, mused on similar lines, as an explanation of why he wasn’t covering the story. But surely by doing so, he’s covering the story. The only thing worse than being talked about, as Wilde nearly said, is having one’s purported newsworthiness dismissed live on Radio 4. Well, that and being shot in the head by a vet.

About The Lark Ascending

Tonight’s edition of BBC Radio 4’s arts/culture show Front Row was presented by Liv Little, who is black, female and 20-something and whose presence, one assumes, is intended at least partially to address the Corporation’s concerns about its own lack of diversity and increasing irrelevance to young people. Little managed the first segment, on the new Wonder Woman movie, perfectly well, and seemed equally confident moving on to discuss the 100th anniversary of Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending with violinist Jennifer Pike. 

But then she did something rather unusual; she admitted that until she’d started to prepare for the show, she’d never listened to The Lark Ascending. Let’s be clear, this is not some obscure nugget by Hildegard of Bingen or Iannis Xenakis, unrecognisable and incomprehensible to anyone not steeped in the theory and lore of classical music. It’s the piece that’s regularly voted the nation’s favourite by listeners to the avowedly populist Classic FM. It’s a Favourite, a Standard, a Classical Greatest Hit.

In many ways, Little’s admission was refreshingly honest. I remember when Ned Sherrin presented Loose Ends on the same station, regularly flubbing his lines as he gave scripted introductions to bands of whom he’d clearly never heard, mispronouncing the names of genres of which he was equally ignorant, and giving the impression that he didn’t really care. I’m sure Little does care but, as she acknowledged, this lacuna in her own personal canon probably puts her in a minority among Radio 4 listeners. (That’s the ones who do currently listen, rather than the ones the BBC wants to listen.) And inevitably, if she didn’t know The Lark Ascending until a few days ago, those listeners might wonder what other gaps there could be in her portfolio of cultural capital.

I argued recently that presenters on Radio 4 shows such as In Our Time and You’re Dead To Me operate as spokespeople for the moderately informed listener, knowing enough about the subject to ask sensible questions, but happily deferring to the experts when things get serious. Little’s honesty raises a question, though; what’s the rationale for a presenter who knows less than the audience?

PS: Also from the BBC: Neil Brand’s delightful programme about TV music shows what can be done when presenter and interviewees alike actually know what they’re talking about; and then there’s Idris Elba interviewing Paul McCartney and the less said about that...

About Fairytale of New York

Warning: This post contains language that may offend, but since it’s entirely about language that may offend, that can’t really be helped.

In 1987, when ‘Fairytale of New York’ began its trip to the number two spot (and, let’s be honest, its melancholy appeal would have been rather compromised had it actually succeeded in topping the Christmas charts), I was working in a pub where the clientele leaned towards white, middle-aged, working-class men. It was an immediate hit in the (45 rpm vinyl, 20p a play) jukebox, although I suspect few of the punters knew who the Pogues were or what the rest of their oeuvre sounded like. I did know the band, but I assumed this latest effort was a cover version of something from the ’60s or earlier, not least because of the speed with which the drinkers picked up the lyrics and started to sing along, especially as last orders drew near. The most popular artist in the machine, with six different records, was Jim Reeves, and ‘Fairytale’ felt closer to his world than to that of more recent additions (which included T’Pau, the Bee Gees, George Harrison and the act that would hit the top Yuletide spot, the Pet Shop Boys). The term “instant classic” smacks a little of careerist cynicism, as if MacGowan and crew deliberately had created something they knew would still be played (and, yes, overplayed) 33 years later, but this was clearly something that resonated with people who didn’t read the NME or watch Top of the Pops.

I may be doing my former customers a disservice but I can’t imagine that many of them had particularly enlightened opinions regarding what we would now call LGBTQ+ rights; yet at the same time I don’t recall any of them bellowing the word “faggot” with particular gusto. Had an openly gay person stumbled into the pub they may well have done that, but I’m guessing not. However, that is the essence of the controversy that’s surrounded the song in recent years. Within the Donleavy/Bukowski-influenced context of MacGowan’s lyrics, Kirsty MacColl spits out the taboo word in character, as a performance, inhabiting the role of someone who’s actively seeking to hurt; but others hear it and seize on it and deploy it without distance, without irony against anyone who is or appears to be different in terms of sexuality or gender. An obvious comparison is TV viewers in the 1960s and ’70s who took the imbecilic bigotry of Alf Garnett at face value and threw his words at any black or Asian people they encountered.

Ever since I was born, my family has celebrated Christmas by playing 2 minutes and 23 seconds to 2 minutes and 24 seconds of Fairytale of New York on repeat for at least six hours, then we go to our local hospital to lick the doorknobs, and the woke left are not going to stop us.

— Tom Peck (@tompeck) November 19, 2020

So, just as ‘Fairytale’ has become a Yuletide tradition, so has the annual argument about whether it should be removed from playlists or somehow have its language ameliorated for a more sensitive, inclusive age. It does feel a little bit redundant now when most of us are able to control the sounds we want or don’t want around us. If we want to hear the song, with or without “faggot” (and, let’s not forget, “slut” and “arse” too) we can summon it up in a manner that would have seemed to my pub customers in 1987 something akin to witchcraft. And if we don’t, we don’t.

But this is the BBC though, which isn’t meant just to entertain us; it nominally represents what we aspire to as a nation. If it does an offensive thing, even though we don’t hear it (if Kirsty sings a homophobic slur on the BBC but we’re all watching The Queen’s Gambit on Netflix at the time, does it make a sound?), it’s somehow doing it in our name, on our behalf, even the tedious twerps who decorate their Twitter profiles with “#DefundTheBBC”. Do we want to see ourselves reflected in the BBC that seeks to protect the non-gender-conforming teen who has to run a gauntlet of vicious sneers and jibes every day, even if this means policing the art of yesterday – not just pop music, but literature, film, painting and more – via the semantic sensibilities of 2020? Or do we want it to chuck all the rules in the bin, tie itself to the mast of free speech fundamentalism and have effing and jeffing gangsta rappers on CBeebies and Nazi Satanists on Thought For The Day?

The fact is, whether the BBC plays the uncensored version, or a censored version, or doesn’t play it at all, they’re going to annoy somebody somewhere, which is why the usual response is a fudge of banning and un-banning. I think – and this may be premature – that this year they’ve got things about right, by the simple process of giving their various audiences what they want. On Radio 1, whose younger listeners are more sensitive to language around gender and sexuality (or virtue-signalling woke snowflakes, if you prefer), the bad word will be excised. On Radio 2, whose older listeners are apparently more amenable to a dose of earthy invective over the mince pies (gammons, karens and Trump-loving homophobes to you, squire) will get the version I first heard in the Duke of York in 1987. And on Radio 6, which hovers somewhere between the two extremes, it’s up to the conscience and taste (if they possess either) of the individual DJs.

As I was writing this, I discovered something that had never occurred to me in the third of a century I’ve shared a planet with ‘Fairytale of New York’; the fact that in its original, non-redacted form, it runs for four minutes and 33 seconds, a nod, subconscious or otherwise to John Cage’s mash-up of minimalism and conceptualism. So in a grim year when the loneliness and melancholy that oozes from Fairytale will, for many people be the reality of Christmas rather than a drunken karaoke session, maybe the BBC should just play silence instead, and we can fill the gap with our own thoughts, offending nobody but ourselves.

PS: Some people are inevitably weaponising this against the BBC; but those who stand to gain from a performative let’s-all-buy-Fairytale campaign aren’t playing ball.

About Radio 4

I’m not sure how seriously to take the article below; for a start, it has to be taken into account that it appears in The Times, the sober, respectable manifestation of the virulently anti-BBC Murdoch empire. And in any case, I’m not sure if the phenomenon it reports is really that new; when I was touting my Noughties book a decade ago, I encountered interviewers (on both BBC outlets and Sky TV, part of the same stable as The Times) who had clearly only read the press release, and ultimately, in the course of a five-minute chat, it didn’t really matter. The only thing that strikes me as odd is the assertion that producers have explicitly been advised (“no direct order”) by their superiors to follow this tactic, which would be a bit like teachers specifically telling their students that it’s perfectly OK only to read the CliffsNotes and not bother with the text itself. The teachers know it happens; they’re actually quite glad it happens, because the alternative is that the kids have no chance whatsoever in the all-important exams, which are the be-all and end-all of modern education; but if they were to say it out loud, it would be akin to Toto pulling back the curtain.

It is interesting, though, that what is essentially a “dumbing-down” narrative is presented in the context of a shift in priorities towards younger listeners. Whether this is either fair or accurate is another matter, but the perception seems to be there. I wonder how many people from that all-important under-24 demographic read The Times?

About getting it right/wrong

I’ve just come across an article I wrote for the BBC website in 2009, as part of a retrospective of the decade that was drawing to a close. Pretty uncontroversially, I picked the 9/11 attacks and the collapse of Lehman Brothers as the two events that would be emblematic of the Noughties, but also pointed out that they took place within a few minutes’ walk of each other, and people who live thousands of miles from Manhattan might have a different perspective on what’s important.

And then I took a bit of a punt and wondered if, in years to come, the most important development of that decade might turn out to be the launch of Wikipedia, because of its potential to disrupt the hierarchy and control of knowledge itself:

Along with Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, blogs and the other manifestation [sic] of Web 2.0, it meant that the final judgement as to what was significant would never again be left to a self-appointed elite of media professionals.

Yay! One in the eye for the so-called experts, the big media tycoons, the smug commentators in their ivory towers! The only difference is, in 2009 I thought that might turn out to be a good thing...

PS: The book I wrote about the Noughties is still available, packed with observations I got horribly but justifiably wrong.