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 Sally Mann

I’ve been grumbling for some time over the tendency of BBC Radio 4 presenters and guests to assume that listeners will need every cultural reference glossed and clarified before they can take it on. So it was a pleasant surprise to hear the photographer Sally Mann on Desert Island Discs this morning, blithely dropping into the conversation Proust (also her book choice) and Nabokov, Cy Twombly and Kandinsky, all so fast that Lauren Laverne didn’t have chance to explain, before selecting eight discs that bounced between Keith Jarrett, Vivaldi and Sylvester.

And then she almost ruined things by saying “the proof is in the pudding” but I forgive her.

PS: Not that anyone really cares, though. As the writer Joel Morris observed, also this morning:

About Kant

I keep returning to the matter of Radio 4, pretty much the last remnant of Reithian values, and how in its desperation to remain relevant to Gens Y and Z, its presenters apparently feel the need to explain cultural references that their parents and grandparents would have taken in their stride.

And then this happens. In the lexicography-cum-comedy show Unspeakable, the comedian Russell Kane explains how he and his wife, when in the presence of their children, use the name “Immanuel” to describe someone who might in adult company attract a rather more robust epithet. What’s interesting is that the audience gets the gag with the barest of clues; all Kane tells us is that Immanuel is a philosopher who wrote the Critique of Pure Reason and the ribald chortles begin. I’m not suggesting that everybody who rocks up to a BBC comedy recording is totally conversant with what Kant has to say about metaphysics (I’m certainly not) but they have enough basic, possibly superficial understanding – what ED Hirsch would call cultural literacy – to ensure they laugh in the right place.

I wonder what it would take for producers and controllers to understand that listeners at home can cope with the same sort of thing.

PS: Vaguely related: investigating the war on so-called performative reading; and when AI destroys one’s ability to flirt, let alone write a college essay.

PPS: From the vaults: when I defended Paul Morley from the Philistines.

PPPS: An argument that men don’t read books any more; and an article on beach reads (Kinsella beats Tolstoy) that seems to take that contention for granted.

About literalism

In the New Yorker, Namwali Serpell laments the excessive literalism that bedevils modern movies, exemplified by the Best Picture Oscar winner Anora, in which the viewer is not permitted to infer the narrative model for the story until a character actually bleats out the word “Cinderella”. Everything must be signposted, labelled, hammered home:

Artists and audiences sometimes defend this legibility as democratic, a way to reach everyone. It is, in fact, condescending. Forget the degradation of art into content. Content has been demoted to concept. And concept has become a banner ad.

No complaints from this end. Serpell is wary of endless perfect repetition (of themes, images, ideas) and calls on Freud to laud “the inexact reiteration of what came before”, the unpredictability of Nina Simone and Samuel Beckett, Andy Warhol and David Lynch, surprises, improvisations, imperfections. Again, all good. And Barthes and Baudrillard get invited to the party and I couldn’t be happier.

But... in castigating the generic, point-missing nature of fashion, she snipes: “we all wear Doc Martens but no one is actually goth.” Hang on? Are goths meant to wear Docs? Or more specifically, are Doc-wearers meant to be goths? Did I miss that e-mail? And then she says “da Vinci” when she means Leonardo. And you scroll to one of those deliciously deadpan New Yorker erratum notices that leaves you desperate to know exactly what horrible solecism has been excised:

An earlier version of this article incorrectly described the ending of “A Complete Unknown.”

In normal circumstances, I’d sneer at this catalogue of sloppiness and congratulate myself for knowing better. But I wonder whether Serpell is just practising what she preaches, embodying her enthusiasm for imperfection by getting stuff wrong.

On a similar theme, I’ve long despaired at BBC Radio 4’s habit – doubtless encouraged by the laudable aim of inclusivity – to gloss every cultural reference that might smell even slightly of high art. In other words, it’s never enough to say “Hamlet”; it has to be “William Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet” in case  someone somewhere thinks you’re talking about a cigar or a football team in Dulwich or an omelette. 

That said, in a recent edition of the lexicographical panel show Unspeakable (go to 04.45), Russell Kane explained that he uses “Immanuel” (the forename of the author of The Critique of Pure Reason) as a euphemism for, well, the surname. But if Kane had uttered the surname, this might have disturbed the guardians of pre-watershed taste, so the gag remained inexplicable to anyone not on at least nodding terms with 18th-century philosophy. Although only minutes before, Kane had felt the need to explain that Pride and Prejudice was written by Jane Austen.

PS: Bookmark time: in the New York Times, the career vicissitudes of Generation X; while Gen Z yearns for an internet-free past it never knew.

About tradition, etc

Recent stuff that doesn’t justify a post on its own, all sort of smooshed up together: an occasional series.

Alexei Sayle, from his current radio show: “Tradition is just peer pressure from dead people.” Which leads, in a way, to the food historian Alberto Grandi, who has declared that any number of Italian culinary traditions don’t really exist, or are American, whichever accrues the most media coverage.

And I suspect Dr Grandi would have got on well with Ashley Atkin, who was disciplined for turning up to her job in a Cheshire primary school having got outside a bottle of wine or more. Although, to be honest, I recall any number of teachers who could only function when rat-arsed....

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 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 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 In Our Time

This morning saw the 1,000th edition of what’s become my favourite radio programme, In Our Time. The format is simple; a single subject (usually from the arts, science or history) is chosen for each show, and Melvyn discusses it with three experts. Today it was Bergman’s The Seventh Seal.

But Bragg does something that few other presenters these days bother with. He researches. He bones up on the topic, so his questions are rooted in informed curiosity rather than bafflement. He never pretends to know more than the invited boffins, but he can hold his own. (For a more representative example of modern factual broadcasting, see Channel 5’s Lost in Japan, in which Jane McDonald stumbles around with the glazed expression of someone never even heard of Japan, let alone Googled the place. It‘s as if the producers are so terrified of going over the heads of the audience that they imagine the least-informed potential viewer, then pick a presenter who knows even less, or is prepared to feign that ignorance.)

Two things from an interview with Bragg broadcast shortly before the show. One is that when choosing his guests, he tries to get teaching academics, who have real, recent experience of communicating their insights to 18-year-olds, rather than just talking to other professionals. The feel should be that of an undergraduate tutorial, which may sound exclusive but since well over 30% of teenagers now go into higher education, really isn’t. And then, asked to sum up the show, he used the delicious phrase “never knowingly relevant”, an implicit up-yours to the Gradgrindian tendency infesting education and politics. No, it’s not to any practical purpose, it’s not going to get you up another rung of any professional ladder. It’s just about Bergman (or chromosomes, or the Thirty Years War, or Hildegard von Bingen, or...)

Here’s to another 1,000 episodes of irrelevance.

About English

You’re wading into murky waters these days if you call someone out for misusing the English language but I think it’s fair enough to hold the self-appointed gatekeepers, the teachers and the editors, to a higher standard.

On the other hand... I just heard a radio play in which a teacher referred twice to Derek Bentley being hung (rather than hanged) and I thought, “wouldn’t a teacher get that right?” and then I thought, no probably not. And while the play was still running I saw this tweet

As a 2nd-language writer, I often get corrected on my use of conditional sentences. People routinely strike out my "were" to replace with "was." I stand by: "If she were a musician" & "If she were a dragon" & "If she were a prime minister"
sigh. is this a British thing?

— Olga Zilberbourg (@bowlga) June 12, 2023

and realised that, in more than 30 years as an editor, the only time I’ve ever discussed the subjunctive voice was with people who didn’t have English as a native language.

And the only question remaining is, if the gatekeepers have stopped keeping the gate, what exactly are they for?

About actors’ names

I chanced upon an enjoyable play this afternoon, about an (invented) encounter between Syd Barrett, leader of Pink Floyd before they got boring, and EM Forster, a novelist now better known for the spate of movie adaptations of his works that erupted in the 1980s/90s than for the books themselves. It wasn’t an entirely implausible meeting, since they both lived in Cambridge at the same time, but the connection was more how they responded the end of their period of creative genius. Forster settled into an amiable semi-retirement in King’s College; Barrett slipped into mental ill health from which he never fully recovered.

But the aspect of the play that really tickled me was the casting, or more specifically the names of the actors, which felt deliciously appropriate to the characters. “Simon Russell Beale” might well have been a character in one of Forster’s books, perhaps a first draft for the Reverend Arthur Beebe in A Room With a View. And “Tyger Drew-Honey” is surely a Blakean rant, chorus to an outtake from The Madcap Laughs. And if not, it should be.

PS: If you haven’t seen it, another encounter between Syd and the old guard, and one that actually happened:

About age

Wailing and gnashing over a public broadcaster making the classic mistake of trying to lure younger listeners now, rather than just waiting until they get old:

I hear that in a BBC radio staff meeting yesterday, management told staff to reduce the age of people listening to @BBC6Music by 5-10 years, with an optimum of listeners in their early 30s. If true, this is madness: an utterly skewiff corporate notion of who might listen or why.

— Chris Thorpe-Tracey (@christt) April 6, 2023

But then, searching for something else, I come across a theatre review from last year (of a show that sounds disturbingly as if I might have written it, but also pretty bad, which tells its own tale), where the writer appears to accept this logic, even if he’s old enough to know better, and to get the joke: 

I detest clever-dick plays that make the audience struggle hard to find meaning but allows them the warm glow of self-congratulation for getting an obscure reference. I studied Eliot in A-level English and devoured the Marx Brothers films at what was then the National Film Theatre in the 1980s. Is The Waste Land on the curriculum now, in its centenary year? And who under 50 knows about Groucho and his siblings and will therefore get McGuinness’s oblique references to old routines and one-liners? Writers can write what they want, of course, but it’s odd to pitch a play exclusively to an ageing demographic.

Any odder than pitching it exclusively to the young, who apparently don’t want to watch a play, or listen to a radio station, that would have them as an audience?

About Ingres

I’ve been yelling at Radio 4 more than ever in recent days. First, because the tautology “[N]-year anniversary” seems to have been deemed acceptable by continuity announcers; and this week, when the presenter of the network’s flagship arts show pronounced the name of the painter Ingres... well, you listen (around 32.30). There are two levels to this, I guess. First, should the presenter of such a prestigious show be expected to know how to pronounce the name of a fairly important 19th-century artist? And then, if he does drop the ball (and even the best of us makes the occasional fumble), should there not be people around who know how to catch it?

Or does it not really matter any more?

PS: Previous musings on what Front Row presenters should or shouldn’t be expected to know.

PPS: (June 28) And today the same presenter (Nick Ahad) repeatedly said “asterix” when he meant “asterisk”. And that was only because he didn’t want to say “fuck”.

About classical music

An article in the Telegraph marking the 30th anniversary of Classic FM (inadvertently?) exposes an ideological divergence in the way modern conservatives deal with culture.

Ivan Hewitt takes what one might describe as the market-based approach, arguing that Classic FM gives the punters what they want – “delicious treats of an aural kind” – and by doing so attracts twice as many listeners as Radio 3. So that’s good, then. And there’s a passing dig at the BBC licence fee, always a dog whistle to Telegraph readers, even if radio listeners aren’t obliged to pay it. This is the Thatcherite model of culture, free of both state subsidy and a self-appointed elite telling you what’s good. And it has achieved its apotheosis in recent years with the appointment of the ludicrous Nadine Dorries as Secretary of State.

Simon Heffer, meanwhile, takes what to me is a more authentically conservative (as distinct from classical liberal) attitude, in the tradition of Arnold and Eliot: some things are just better than others, even if not many people like them. He grudgingly acknowledges the popularity of Classic FM but...

...it cheapens classical music by treating it as a commodity; worse, it patronises its audience, lulling them into a sort of cultural Stockholm syndrome where they mistake mediocrity for excellence, and where boundaries are seldom pushed out. 

The example he gives is the poll of listeners' favourite music, which places the Star Wars theme 250 places above Elgar’s First Symphony. But to define this preference as being objectively wrong, as Heffer does, takes him to dangerous ground. “As a measure of the taste of the most gullible element of the British public, it is invaluable,” he argues. But couldn’t that in turn be applied to the antics of the modern Conservative Party, including the way Liz Truss panders to the prejudices of the party members who are probably going to elect her in the next few days, and indeed to Brexit – which Heffer supported?

(Incidentally, the weight of opinion in the comments section seems to favour Hewitt and Classic FM — which, paradoxically, tends to prove Heffer’s point.)

PS: On a vaguely related theme, quiz show contestant turned researcher Lillian Crawford on what knowledge is for (and which knowledge needs to be known). “Competing on University Challenge made me realise that I quiz not to perform knowledge, but to acquire it.”

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 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 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 Fergie

Today I was (very briefly) on Radio 4’s Feedback programme, among several grumbling about their imbecilic interview with Sarah Ferguson, who was briefly famous in the 80s.

About hyperbowl

I remember the first time I said it. My English teacher, Mr Martin, asked what a particular rhetorical effect was being employed by some dead white male or another and, having seen the word used in a book, 13-year-old me volunteered, “Is it hyperbowl?” and he said something along the lines of, “It’s a Greek word and it’s actually pronounced ‘hyperbole’ but yes, that’s right.” He didn’t poke fun at my wonky pronunciation, he didn’t crush my creative soul, he just put me right.

That was that for a long while. I barely heard the word for years (in most cases, “exaggeration” serves just as well) but when I did it was usually pronounced in the proper, Mr Martin-approved manner. In the past few years, however, I’ve heard “hyperbowl” creeping into the most unlikely places, not least that repository of educated English speech, BBC Radio 4. Things came to a head a couple of days ago when the government minister Nadhim Zahawi used it. I hesitated in responding, especially because Mr Zahawi presumably doesn’t have English as a first language, having come to Britain at the age of nine. But then I checked his Wikipedia page, calculated how much his parents must have spent on his private education once they got here, and did what Mr Martin would never have done. I pointed and I laughed. On Twitter.

Hyperbowl? #bbcaq #bbcradio4

— Tim F (@CulturalSnow) February 26, 2021

 It did make me wonder, though. When such solecisms occur these days, do people – those who taught young Nadhim at Ibstock Place and King’s College School, for example – not intervene because doing so would be seen as rude or snobbish or discriminatory? Or do most people think “hyperbowl” is right? In which case, in the normal order of the development of language, it actually is right, and Nadim Zahawi is right, and I’m wrong and so is Mr Martin. Which is an earth-shattering catastrophe.