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What a turn-off they have made of Radio 4
The point about this is the deep contempt the trendy young radio types have for anyone who is obviously middle-class or middle-aged.
It has been a bad week, once again, for the BBC. On Tuesday, in an unprecedented attack on BBC top executives, the entire staff of Radio 4's main news programmes wrote to the corporation's governors, warning them that standards were at risk. On the same day, radio programmes were disrupted when journalists and technicians went on strike, expressing resentment about pay awards and general disgruntlement. Also on Tuesday, several MPs on the select committee on culture, media and sport accused the BBC of being lazy and arrogant, after Channel 4's success last week in grabbing Test cricket from under the BBC's complacent nose.
Figures released on Monday showed that Radio 4 lost hundreds of thousands of listeners after its recent changes, widely seen as dumbing down. I was one of them; I no longer bother to turn it on. And it is widely believed that the quarterly audience research figures, which are due to be released this afternoon, will be even more gloomy. Finally, the writer Libby Purves, an old radio hand herself and one who has contributed a great deal to Radio 4, has said publicly that she thinks that, without some drastic action, there will not be a recognisable Radio 4 in 10 years' time; her view is that BBC Radio will not long be able to survive the contempt felt for it by the BBC Television types who now control it.
All this suggests the usual muddle and disarray that we have come, sadly, to expect from the New BBC - the ill-considered and high-handed pursuit of the trivial by the cynical. Personally, I have pretty much given up on television, which is sad, given that I spent so long training and working in it. But I find it hard, still, to give up completely on Radio 4, and to feel that it has given up on me. I cannot really understand, while we still have public service broadcasting, why Radio 4 should not be willing to continue to serve its large and loyal audience, but should be constantly seeking another, younger, different one. There cannot be many audiences in the world that are so coherent, yet so diverse, as Radio 4's, so concerned to learn and so interested in things quite outside their personal experiences - so willing, in fact, to be ideal Reithians, so willing to be informed as well as entertained. So civilised. Radio 4, in its quaint and unglamorous way, used to be part of the best of British and was very much loved.
Perhaps Radio 4 could put itself back together again, and perhaps it will. But why, meanwhile, have we had to put up with all this wreckage? What is the destructive sensibility behind it? Part of the answer lies in a programme called Radio Heads, shown on BBC 2 last week. It purported to be a portrait of Radio 4 listeners and their concerns; actually, it was a long-drawn-out, ignorant, cynical, spiteful, snobbish, ageist sneer at them. The listeners chosen were easy targets for a second-rate television producer cum second-rate satirist manque; they were distinctly eccentric and all too easy to portray as comic or pathetic. There was a lecturer who read out dotty poems in a silly voice, a dippy granny obsessed with quiz shows and Gilbert and Sullivan, a nasty PR man, a man with a bow tie and posh voice, all straight from Central Casting. The only contributor it was unable to mock was The Daily Telegraph's Gillian Reynolds, who spoke eloquently about the station. Otherwise, Radio 4 was presented as a small outpost of the Ministry of Silly Walks.
The point about this is not just the mean-spirited disrespect to the people involved. The real point is the deep contempt inherent in the culture of trendy young media types, not just for the Radio 4 audience, but also for anyone and everyone who might fit into the general category of "Radio 4 type". Anyone who is obviously middle-class, or middle-aged, or middle-brow, or who has unfashionable aspirations or interests - Gilbert and Sullivan, ha, ha, ha! - is, by their standards (and in their language), sad. And therefore not, in media terms, worth bothering about, except to sneer at.
This unthinking discrimination has a lot to do with youthism, to use their ghastly word. For as long as I can remember, everyone in the media has been obsessed with getting a bigger slice of "yoof". But why? There are some things yoof doesn't want that older people do, and it isn't always necessary to sacrifice all of them, or even always possible, in the unthinking pursuit of youth. What is wrong with the older market? It is enormous, and getting bigger all the time, for the young get older every day. The post-war generation, now comfortably of Radio 4 age, is vast and still immensely rich; its members are powerful both as consumers and as arbiters of taste; indeed, it has produced a great many of the misguided, middle-aged apparatchiks who are dismantling the BBC. But in the general obsession with youth, these obvious facts seem to have been forgotten.
Along with the obsession with youth goes the obsession with change. Any change. The nasty PR man on Radio Heads said complacently that Radio 4 would have to change "however uncomfortable we may find it. You've got to have change. Change is good". This, of course, is an article of faith of contemporary life. But it seems astonishingly silly to assume that all change must be good. We have seen all kinds of institutions change for the worse, starting with the Church of England and including the BBC. And what about the positive values of resisting change; as in loyalty, consistency and fidelity, in tradition and traditional skills?
The truth is that a great many things will do well enough left as they are, or at least without any radical change; besides, change will always come anyway, without anyone needing to hurry it along.
None the less, neophilia is rampant, not least in the BBC. Perhaps it is merely a response to the overwhelming and alarming changes that are taking place in communication technology generally. It may be that people embrace change precisely because they fear it, and I suspect the same goes for youth. Either way, this seems to be the sensibility that pervades the BBC and explains, in part, the lack of any real commitment to the Radio 4 audience. In part, too, there is the New Labour sensibility of suits and spin and PR and logos, and easy-care, people-friendly, audience-researched messages, as opposed to quirkiness and experiments and respect for the audience. Birtism is part of all that. One might say New Labour, New BBC. Not just a bad week for the BBC, but a bad week for Middle England.
The Daily Telegraph | Thursday, October 22, 1998 | Comments (0)
Bombshell called Venus
There were people who wanted to douse this conflagration
There has been a lot of fashionable chat recently about the famous phrase in Racine's play Phedre: "Venus toute entiere a sa proie attachee", or (more or less ) "Venus completely latched on to her prey". Diana Rigg is playing Phedre in a new production, and somehow this phrase, once known to every child who learnt French the old-fashioned way, has hit the imagination of writers of letters to The Spectator and others. Why is it so famous, people have wondered, and what does it mean? I agree that it is difficult to translate, but I think its meaning and its fame, even when quite out of any context, is only too easy to understand. It is a wonderful expression, and wonderfully condensed, of the tragic compulsion of love or, more precisely, of desire.
Love is not necessarily the sweetest thing; Venus is not necessarily a beautiful and langourous creature attended by a chubby putti. She can be a beast of prey, perhaps a wild animal, perhaps a spider, or even a cancer, intent only on destroying her victims, and indifferent, like any predator, to pain and squalor.
This might seem an unduly glum view, and much more to do with the extremes of classical tragedy than with ordinary life. But I don't think so. I was reminded of this image by watching Channel 4's documentary series Sex Bomb, which is a history of the past four decades of sexual revolution in this country. The final two episodes, on the Eighties and Nineties, will be shown this week. The story it tells is the democratisation of sex; the freedoms and pleasures and bizarre practices that were once only available to the rich or the secretive become openly available to everyone.
Most of what is shown expresses the excitement and the fun and the sense of liberation, which I felt myself through much of the time. But in retrospect I think they are really about something profoundly tragic. The title Sex Bomb itself expresses something of this, of violence and destruction, of explosive change and explosive emotion which must lead, partly, to devastation.
There were people along the way - and I disagreed with almost all of them - who wanted to douse down this general conflagration of desire, seeing something very dangerous in it. Victoria Gillick was one, with her campaign to prevent underage girls getting the pill without their parents' knowledge. I disapproved of her campaign; it seemed to me that since underage girls were having sex anyway, they ought at least to avoid having babies, and there was something very unpleasantly moralistic about her too.
All the same I couldn't help being touched by a scene in the television series in which she wept on ITN news at the failure of her long campaign; her husband put his arm round her and said "Calm down darling. It's not that important. It's only history". That seemed to me a very touching snapshot of a good marriage; insofar as there can be any protection against history, it must be found in a witty and consoling husband or wife, and in that rare thing - married love.
However it was really very important, as he knew. I don't mean the failure of her campaign. What was important was the enormous power of the forces against her, the forces of biological destiny, or of the cynical and amoral Venus.
It seems to me quite understandable that the ancient Greeks should see as a malevolent god or goddess - incidentally, I wonder why she had to be female - a force the drives people to such terrible and ridiculous extremities, which appear again and again in the series.
It led the Conservative MP Stephen Milligan to speak up on Newsnight, rather bleakly, for his Government's family values campaign, only days before he died in an auto-erotic accident involving fish net stockings and a tangerine. It led girls to abandon all sense of self-protection, and have sex with anybody. It led a boy in Aylesbury to have 200 gay lovers, starting in the public lavatories in the market square; "I didn't think there were sexually transmitted diseases in Aylesbury". It led all kinds of ordinary men and women to flock to fetish clubs, dressing up in insane combinations of spikes and chains and rubber, in black masks, cripple boots and nappies. "I could get used to being adored," said one apparently sensible young woman, talking about having her boots licked in an S&M club by a naked man on all fours.
It led people to group sex, and caring massage sessions; a sequence of flabby, overweight people lying about fondling each other was to me one of the most depressing. It led one man, among others, to be buggered by a stranger at a crowded bar, while no one around him seemed to find it odd or unusual, and to talk about it on television as a wonderful liberation.
Almost all the people in this series talked about sexual liberation. Most of them remembered a sense of joy and exuberance in these new freedoms. And that was there. But actually the consequences for many people have been a different kind of imprisonment, in poverty, single parenthood, and terrible disappointment. It is because Venus can be so destructive that civilisation has set so many constraints upon her. Without those constraints she can turn into a monster, and often does. And so far from liberation, there seems to me in retrospect to have been a miserable kind of compulsion underlying the sexual revolution.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, October 18, 1998 | Comments (0)
The oxygen of privacy
People who cannot have secrets are easily controlled
It is odd that our insistence on individual rights, personal space, personal empowerment, personalised computers and customisation generally should coincide so startlingly with the death of personal privacy. For privacy, if not dead, is certainly moribund, and not, it seems, likely to be much mourned. People seem to have given up on it; we seem to prefer peeping and prurience and self-exposure, and to find privacy only interesting as something to destroy. But how can the individual long survive the death of privacy?
The newly-published diaries of Woodrow Wyatt are only the most recent betrayal of privacy. A great deal of fuss has been made about them, and what they said about whom, including his own daughter. But what is shocking is not what he said, but that he said anything at all about what were understood to be private occasions, with all the freedom and trust that was once involved.
The same goes for Diana, the Princess of Wales's public betrayals of privacy, via Andrew Morton, and for Prince Charles's, via Jonathan Dimbleby. The same goes for the whole culture of confession, revenge and kiss and tell. And the same goes for the disgraceful betrayal of Monica Lewinsky's privacy by Linda Tripp, or of President Clinton's by both of them. And there cannot have been many more revolting spectacles than the obsessive cross-questioning of Monica Lewinsky about every last, intimate, supposedly private detail of her encounters with Clinton. This was the public rape of privacy.
A remarkable film has just opened in London that takes the violation of privacy to its logical extreme. The Truman Show, directed by Peter Weir, is about a man whose life, from the moment of his birth, is a carefully directed soap opera, filmed in the most intimate detail round the clock, watched by billions of people, but all unknown to him. Only Truman fails to realise that his entire world is a collection of film sets, and everyone in it an actor, even his wife, and that everything he does is observed. He has no privacy. This is reminiscent of the terrifying gaze of George Orwell's Big Brother who stared from millions of screens into almost every corner of everyone's life, watching every move. What is worse, however, is that no one chooses to switch off. No one in the supposedly free world respects Truman's privacy. His most private moments have become public entertainment.
This is a perfect story for our times. Dazzled by the bright lights shone into the private corners of people's lives, we have been blinded to the central importance of privacy. But privacy is not just an out-of-date convention. It is not just the refuge of people with something shameful to hide, though it may also be that. Privacy is essential to intimacy and trust and also to individual independence and to dissent; privacy is the oxygen of freedom. It is no accident that all totalitarian societies do their best to destroy privacy. They seek to break up intimacy and families, turning children and lovers and neighbours into state spies. People who cannot trust one another, who can never risk a subversive thought, people who cannot have secrets, are people who are easily controlled.
Perhaps it takes someone who has lived in a police state to value privacy more than we do. The Czech exile Milan Kundera has often written about it, particularly clearly in an essay published in the New York Review of Books in 1995, which I kept because it struck me so forcibly. He explains that in his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being he describes two well-known and important dissidents who drink and talk together, under heavy surveillance, after the Russian invasion of 1998. All their private conversations are being recorded by the police, who then broadcast them as a radio serial in order to discredit one of them, Prochazka. At first it works. Prochazka is discredited, because in private he says, as people do, all kinds of things he would not dream of saying in public; he swears, badmouths his friends, tempts his companion into laughing at terrible ideas, tells dirty jokes.
Before long, however, the public begin to realise that the scandal is not the way Prochazka talks. It is the rape of his private life. They realise that "the private and public are two essentially different worlds and that respect for that difference is the indispensable condition, the sine qua non, for a man to live free; that the curtain separating these two worlds is not to be tampered with, and that curtain rippers are criminals". But the curtain rippers seem to be everywhere these days, and widely accepted. The general response to Woodrow Wyatt's revelations was to say that everyone ought to know that the rules of discretion were abandoned long ago, and it is daft to imagine otherwise.
When Kundera fled Czechoslovakia and its bristling microphones, almost the first thing he saw in France was a picture of the dying singer Jacques Brel, hiding his face from news cameramen who wanted to intrude into his private confrontation with death. "I felt I was encountering the very same evil that had made me flee my country," he wrote. "When it becomes the custom and the rule to divulge another person's private life, we are entering a time when the highest stake is the survival or the disappearance of the individual."
The interesting question is whether people will notice, before it is too late to do anything about it.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, October 11, 1998 | Comments (0)
The kindest feelings can be the cruellest
Mentally handicapped people cannot take on all the rights and responsibilities of adult life. They cannot have equal rights. Sad, but true.
Good feelings do not always lead to good ideas. On the contrary, and like good intentions, they all too often lead in the very opposite direction. A remarkable new development at the charity Mencap is a case in point, and a sign of some alarming tendencies in contemporary thinking in this country about equal rights. Mencap is the largest charity in the UK serving people with mental handicaps, or, as they and others prefer to say, people with learning disabilities. At the end of September, the members of Mencap voted with an overwhelming majority for a very radical change in their constitution.
From now on, every member, whether a mentally handicapped person, employee, parent, or anybody else who has decided to join Mencap, will have an equal vote. They will be able to use this vote to appoint a new, enlarged policy-making body, to be called the national assembly. One third of the members of this assembly will have learning disabilities. The national assembly will then elect a smaller group of 11 trustees, whose job will be to ensure "effective governance". The fashionable jargon rings alarm bells. It follows from this that there is no constitutional reason why some mentally handicapped people should not be elected trustees of this enormous, complex, multi-million pound organisation, and every democratic reason why they should. In short, under this new Mencap constitution, mentally handicapped people could become trustees.
Astonishing though this development must seem, I am quite certain it is based on the best and kindest of feelings. For too long, mentally handicapped people have been seen as unpersons; indeed, the days of jeering at the village idiot are not long behind us in this country. Growing up with a mentally handicapped sister, I was made all too well aware of that. For too long their needs and wishes have been decided by others. For too long their needs were seen as less than other people's, and less important. For too long their difficulties in communicating have been taken to mean they have nothing to communicate. I am very proud of my mother that she stood courageously against these attitudes, at a time when fashion and convention were against her. Now, unfortunately, fashion has swung very much too far in the opposite direction, because once again feeling, not reason, has prevailed.
The good-hearted feeling of revulsion against this unkindness has led many people into a kind of wishful thinking - especially those in the professional social services, many of whom work for charities at some stage in their careers. They now talk a language of equality, and of equal rights. In the midst of great theories of "normalisation" and "social role valorisation" they insisted that the phrase mental handicap should be dropped in favour of "learning difficulty" and even got the Civil Service to take it up. But this was a euphemism too far; the official phrase has now been changed to "learning disability", which isn't actually much better. One can understand the dislike of a harsh phrase, but the reality is harsh. Mental handicap is a tragedy - and changing the phrase will not change the reality or magic away a painful inequality. It will only confuse, by blurring the reality. The reality is that mentally handicapped people have permanently damaged brains that do not work very well, one way or another, and therefore cannot take on all the rights and responsibilities of adult life. They cannot have equal rights. That is intolerably sad, but true.
It seems to me to be the worst kind of sentimentality, the worst kind of wishful thinking, to pretend that they can. If they could, after all, they wouldn't have a problem, and we wouldn't have charities and public funds dedicated to them. Yet there are many groups, including Mencap, which think they should be "equal citizens in all respects", should have the right to marry, to have children and to vote in general elections, and should be actively encouraged to do so. The chief executive of Mencap has made this very clear to me and indeed has said publicly in the past that he finds my opposing view very offensive. I suggest it is not my view, but the reality, which he can't bear, and his anger (and the anger that I have so
often provoked) reflects this conflict.
Whatever ambiguities there may be about marriage, or voting - one might say that it hardly matters if a few more incompetent voters are added to the rolls - the equal right of a mentally handicapped person to be a trustee is once again a euphemism too far. It is wishful thinking run riot.
Under the Charities Act, the responsibilities of trustees are very great, particularly when a charity is very large and complex, like Mencap. Essentially trustees are responsible for managing, and they are morally, legally and sometimes personally financially liable if anything goes wrong. The Charity Commissioners' booklet on the responsibilities of charity trustees gives a very sobering account of what it all means; I doubt there is a single mentally handicapped person in the country who could even pretend to understand that booklet, even with help. Still less could a person of very low intelligence understand the complexities of running a major company in practice, even with help.
When I expressed this concern, a Mencap spokesman reassured me repeatedly that it was highly unlikely "in practice" that a person with a learning disability would become a trustee. But when I asked how could anyone stop it he could not say. He agreed that it depended on the vote of the national assembly, a third of whom would be mentally handicapped (incidentally I am not sure how, under a free vote, that could be achieved either). Presumably the mentally handicapped will effectively be talked out of such things by their helpers - easy enough since they are usually very suggestible. This whole project seems to me not only wishful thinking, but also tokenism and window-dressing. It is an unthinking attempt, in the name of inclusion, in the name of giving them a voice, to encourage vulnerable, suggestible people to play at being adults. Or if it's not that, surely it must be irresponsibility. Good feelings are not enough.
The Daily Telegraph | Thursday, October 08, 1998 | Comments (0)
Why men are miserable
I think a depression rate of only 8 per cent shows resilience.
BRITISH men are the most miserable in Europe, or so we were told last week by the Royal College of Psychiatrists. According to a study done in 1996, 8.2 per cent of our fellow countrymen suffer from depression, whereas in France the figure is 5.9 per cent, the Netherlands 4.9 per cent, Spain 4.1 per cent and in Germany only 2.9 per cent. What on earth have the Germans got to be so happy about? This was all announced as a very serious new problem, not least because men's rate of depression in this country is beginning to approach women's, at 11 per cent. However, I think that this news, for what it's worth, isn't bad at all.
When you think of the tedium and frustration most men experience in this country, I think a depression rate of only 8 per cent shows a commendable degree of resilience. It is true that this survey was done before New Labour came to power; doubtless the gloom quotient would have been much higher if the research had been done after May 1997, after people had begun to experience the profoundly depressing reality, or rather unreality, of caring Cool Britannia. And maybe Shroder's election would have bumped up the German rate too. Who knows? And who knows the real value of such surveys anyway? It is almost impossible to quantify depression; it is hard enough to define it, or even to identify it. And unless it is broken down more carefully, into income and occupational groups, it is hard to draw any reasonable conclusions from it.
The truth surely is that British men, though traditionally stoical, have a great deal to be depressed about. First, the British live in a depressing climate, with very little wilderness or natural beauty left; that must be partly why, as a medieval once said, the English take their pleasures sadly. Northern Germany and northern France can be overcast and glum for much of the year too, but most other Europeans enjoy months of bright light and cafe society, including large parts of Germany, which also have winter sunlight and mountain scenery. Some of the least glum European men are the Spanish, and anyone who has spent summer holidays in the sunnier parts of Europe will understand why.
Bright light burns out gloom. The depressive illness SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) is treated in dolorous northern climates by doses of fake sunshine. Conversely, warm weather entices people out of their houses, out of their clothes and their inhibitions, on to the street and into company. However, while other European streets are usually attractive, since they have wisely looked after their beautiful cities, we have ruined almost all of ours. And perhaps, as my husband always says, men are more finely tuned aesthetically and mind more about the ugliness with which our planners have surrounded us.
However, the real cause of distress of the British male is the British female and/or British feminism. Feminism is much more pronounced here than elsewhere in Europe. It began here and has remained uncompromising. Far more British women with young children go out to work than their European counterparts, and this despite the fact that other Europeans generally get far better state childcare provision than working women here. Far more British women seek divorce, or avoid marriage altogether.
At the same time British women seem much less at ease with their own femininity, much more at odds with the nail polish and flirting side of life, much more assertive of their rights yet far less confident of their real power than their much less emancipated sisters elsewhere in Europe, less able to set up any kind of entente cordiale with the enemy, yet oddly much less independent of men. The result is that British women, from a man's point of view, have very little to offer. This is depressing.
British women take men's jobs. They employ double standards. They accept positive discrimination as a right. I read a report last week of a male student in a university town who couldn't find lodgings to rent because landlords prefer girls, assuming they are cleaner and quieter. Women blame men for all aggression and they confuse them terribly about sex. They take a man's children and at least half his wealth if they decide to dump him. And worst of all, they expect men to put up with the feminisation of culture without complaint - with the dumbing-down of newspapers and television and university life; one professor of literature I know, expert in the Romantic poets, had to apologise in his inaugural lecture for preferring Wordsworth and Shelley to the equally good women poets of the period. I find all that deeply depressing.
IT IS widely acknowledged to be the most ridiculous vanity of the part of a journalist to imagine that anybody remembers for more than 30 seconds anything that she has written. However, vanity is irrepressible and I cannot resist saying that I was taken aback by last week's headline above this column - "I'm a Portillo Woman". It was not at all the impression I wanted to convey, though I do indeed admire Michael Portillo. The role of the groupie is one that has never appealed to me; joking aside, I think it's demeaning. If I felt any overwhelming party political loyalties, I would go into politics. I don't. Besides, while I am lucky enough to live in a free society, and to be solvent, I am nobody's woman but my own.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, October 04, 1998 | Comments (0)
