Top of the Pops, BBC Four and the hierarchy of art forms

Going back through my offairs from BBC Four's early years - when it unashamedly celebrated many of those (Robert Wyatt, John Martyn, Vivian Stanshall, Ivor Cutler, Mark E. Smith, Penman/Morley-era NME) who most joyously and defiantly refuted the semi-feudal structure of popular art and society in England - and comparing them with its current hierarchical separation of documentary classicism and a certain kind of Friday night pop (Paul fucking Carrack) and Top of the Pops reruns is a painful experience which, in many ways, says much about the change from NuLab to ConDem.  Whatever other horrible things happened during those years - and there were many, of course; God save us from any kind of sentimentalism of that long period of missed opportunities and money that didn't exist - there was a definite sense that the hierarchy of art forms, the idea that pop must Know Its Place, had been comparatively broken down, or at least that those who would enforce it as an absolute, unswerving, unchangeable rule were marginalised, licking their wounds on the fringes (that joke about selling the Telegraph as if it were the Socialist Worker was real, once).

Now the divisions and rules about what each art form can do and what it cannot are being as viciously reinforced as they can be in our present society - which is more viciously than some of us would have imagined, then - and the BBC is powerless because those doing the reinforcing hold the key to its very existence.  The Top of the Pops reruns were, from the start, an attempt to render a suspicious product of the Labour years acceptable to those reignited gatekeepers casting their noses over it, to say "look, BBC Four's alright, really, it may once have thrown the barriers down, but now it's put them back up again and this forgettable fluff is all it thinks pop ever was, or ever can be".  Contrary to popular myth, most of pop's greatest enemies always rather liked Top of the Pops - because pop's greatest enemies aren't, and never have been, the Thomas Winnings or Peter Hitchenses or John Tyndalls of this world, they are the patters on the back, the extreme centrists, those who love it as long as it is content to play a minor, unobtrusive role.  They are The Sunday Times in 1996, praising Status Quo for their changelessness and as a front for demonising the young generally and the global unity of the proletariat in particular.  They are Chris Dunkley, nudge-winking at Channel 4 daring to make The Hip Hop Years in 1999 and doing far more to back up the BNP than crude send 'em-backery ever could.

Top of the Pops was perfect for them, because most of the time it reassured them that, in direct contradiction of all the other evidence screaming in their faces, the working class generally (then identified with pop in almost everyone's minds in a way we cannot now imagine) were perfectly happy to play along with a ruling-class agenda.  Top of the Pops' very existence was always conditional on most, if not all, of the music in it knowing its place in the Reithian hierarchy of art forms, never challenging the feudal role pop had been ordained.  Its constant appearance where Wyatt and Stanshall and Smith once got the serious celebration they had so long deserved is a sign, of a piece with DJ Q or Young Lion's "not on our money" dismissals, of the re-establishment of that hierarchy, that structure, that certainty.  Those who regard it as BBC Four's highest priority should be aware that they are, in fact, being used by those who hate pop music and all it has ever done and all it is still doing.  This is why the dark shadow that now hangs over it, with editions presented by two of its most familiar faces considered unshowable and a vaguely sleazy, nasty-tasting feel to much of the rest of it, is entirely appropriate.  The Cameronite biter bit, and it's all Top of the Pops really deserves in the end.

Fragments of Elisabeth Murdoch

Yes, yes, of course the full speech for the most part is nothing like the bits everyone has quoted, being mediaspeak incomprehensible to anyone else.  And it's easy to be cynical about the positive citations of "the best of the old Britain" and Lord Reith, Dennis Potter and Alan Bennett, easy to say that she's only saying that now the Olympics have put "Old Britain vs New Britain" if not to bed then at least taken it up the stairs, now it's safe, now some of the old battles and hatreds by which her father thrived don't feel quite so raw.  And yes it is blindingly obvious and realised by some of us long before it would have occurred to her that, once they had won all their battles and usurped the old paternalistic order in every part of British society, The Sun lacked the absolute purpose it had, rightly or wrongly, had from (say) 75-87 and Sky likewise lacked the purpose it had from (say) 89-95; because they weren't really for anything to anything like the extent they were against the older elites, they had nowhere left to go after their triumphs, and were simply the embodiment of a much greater problem that the new capitalism, defined by its piratical rebellion, reached once the Keynesians and the Reithians were the ones locked outside the party - a problem of self-definition which could only have ended in the crash (and is also shared by almost all the babyboomers Murdoch got rich by targeting in their young adulthood when nobody else dared).  But even though it isn't a (counter-)(counter-)revolution, it is the closest we've got so far to the "Suez moment" that suddenly became possible in July 2011.

Consider that Murdochism was, at heart, the radical Right claiming for its own purposes a set of anti-establishment ideas on democratisation and opening up of the media which had originated on the radical Left of the 1960s and 1970s (search any New Society from that era and you'll find similar language on media reform to the sections of the 1989 speech she now selectively quotes, without the naked-capitalist bits she leaves out).  Consider that much criticism of it from the Left, however well-meant, has appeared barely distinguishable from Tory paternalism in its attitude to working-class tastes, and has thus merely worked towards Murdoch's grand plan; to split and divide the Left by rendering it the true voice of fogeyism, inherently resistant to every aspect of the modern world, simply a stooge for the stuffy old buffers it once raged against.  Through accepting the legacy of the people her family has for so long caricatured, as though the only Britain that existed before '69 or '89 was the stuffiest, most class-ridden 10% (the idea that Potter and Bennett were indistinguishable from some fire-breathing shire colonel was the single greatest myth The Sun and Sky alike had to create to get where they got), Elisabeth Murdoch, probably without even knowing it, has opened the door for the Left - however reformist, however cautious - to reclaim ideas on organisation of the media and society which it originated and developed in the first place.  That has to be some kind of important moment, however compromised and shrouded.

Radio 4 as a cover for cultural apartheid

It seems as though we have had the sort of debate we have at the moment - about what role Radio 4 should play, and how it should respond to the inherently relativist and uncertain nature of our age - at least every couple of years for as long as I have been conscious of these things. Where the current debate is concerned, though, I wonder more and more whether it's about Radio 4 at all, and whether it is really about a deeper and far more disturbing argument dressed up as "maintaining standards" and "sticking to what we do best" - that the BBC, through retreating into one kind of ghetto, would confine a significant section of British society, now making unprecedented excursions into mass consciousness through the kind of pop music that is measured by the singles chart, to another, far less privileged and protected ghetto.

Consider how William Rees-Mogg, who has used the Mail on Sunday to attack what seems a reasonable adjustment to the fact that people can no longer be guaranteed to grow into either an "elder" culture as they age or a "host" culture as they assimilate, sees himself - the benevolent squire, the protector of his Somerset minions' right to decent social conditions within the Big Society, as long of course as those conditions are on his terms. Ignore and forget, for a moment, the fact that Tinie Tempah's second hit was an insulting clone of his first, and all his subsequent singles have been pretty dreadful. Consider how British urban pop, however watered-down ("we" register that, "they" don't, it might as well all be "Next Hype" to them) becoming, without ambiguity, pop music seems to those - including those like Quentin Letts who are happy in their role as minor functionaries within Rees-Mogg's feudal universe - for whom an inoculated and frozen-in-time vision of the shires (which can somehow, for some reason, fit perfectly within dramatic cultural and technological changes if they exist entirely in the private sector) is absolutely crucial and politically central. Consider that a BBC without the remit of universality within which Radio 4 has to exist - and why it has to evolve (as it has done impressively well in recent times - its schedules of the 1980s, as those of us who've actually looked back at them recently know all too well, are full of wholly non-Reithian middlebrow drivel, most of which would thankfully never get under the radar now) - would also, almost certainly, be a BBC stripped of Radio 1 and 1Xtra, in which there would not be the platform for someone like Tinie Tempah to register in the minds of the Somerset pre-teens over whom Rees-Mogg sees himself as feudal lord ("Pass Out" came up in a way that Global Radio would never have the structure or the commitment to non-commercial values to dream of: specialist 1Xtra shows, 1Xtra playlist, Radio 1 playlist, supernova). Channel AKA and the like are merely numbers hidden deep on the EPG, with no national importance or real ability to spread those they promote beyond their own niches. The BBC still has that importance. And that is why conservatives want it to retreat into a world that is already largely gone.

Consider also, at this point, that much of the population still only has access to analogue radio when at work or in the car, and that outside the metropolitan areas there's nothing else on the FM dial that will even consider bringing these things into the national consciousness (of the FM stations I can get round here, the only time I've recently noticed any of them pushing something that isn't already culturally embedded in the UK is The Coast playing Sugarland, and they're country so - however modern, however mainstream, however pop - representative of the America that the Right desperately wants to have a bigger share of the British mass conception of that country). I remain convinced that the fixation on Radio 4 is a cover for something worse. That their idea of Radio 4, and of what it and the BBC supposedly once were, is built on a myth should be obvious, just as the BBC never "united the country" wholly around Received Pronunciation as certain people on certain forums would have us believe (the closest it came to doing that was during the Second World War, but Tommy Handley got the biggest audiences of all in that era and he certainly didn't sound like that). But I don't think they really care what the background of contributors to Woman's Hour or the settings of the Afternoon Play are going to be in, say, five years' time. That's just a convenient public face for them. Their deeper agenda, especially if they're Rod Liddle taking Murdoch's money, is to hand every single aspect of British mass culture to the same unholy alliance of multinationals and a reconstructed but essentially unaltered British elite which created and dictates every policy of the Cameron administration - which would be the inevitable result of the BBC "sticking to what it does best" and confining itself to timewarped, eternally protected versions of Radios 3 and 4. Do not believe for one moment that these people would stop at "preserving" Radio 4 "for them". If they succeeded in that aim, they'd then want to go a lot further - and that, more than anything else, is why they must not succeed.

Commercial radio says ...

... that 6Music has to be closed because it interferes with their business.

NME Radio, the most similar commercial station to 6Music (the FM commercial stations come from a completely different world), is to disappear from DAB and satellite television and will only be available online.

That went well, didn't it?

A cursory listen - mainly in taxis - to other FM commercial stations reveals that, once again, choice is a neoliberal fiction: a smaller station now thrust into competition with Heart is playing "Lost in Music" and "Fame", pure Heart fodder. Admittedly it only used to play all the 90s ILR standards, "Over My Shoulder" and "Sugar Coated Iceberg" and so on ad infinitum, and yes I know "Lost in Music" is a much better song than any of the Mondeo staples, but even so. I have no great enthusiasm for the daytime output of Radio 2, but to even begin to compare that fairly balanced and varied combination of old and new with its direct competitors is beyond grotesque. The BBC must be wary of Tory blandishments attempting to secure their supposed "heartland" with talk of public service - from Cameronite mouths whose owners don't understand the meaning of the phrase, that only means ghettoisation and marginalisation, and then oblivion.

In the middle of the most depressing ride for aeons

(though for reasons I could not have controlled, and I beat myself up for thinking I could)

Dale Winton was thrust in my face, playing "Maggie May" and "Get It On".

And I thought that a BBC which regards such things as more justifiable and more sustainable on public funds than 6Music and the Asian Network has lost something very, very important along the way

Beware the ides of March

(Revised January 2012 to add links to two YouTube uploads of Living for Kicks in full: one is here; the other is here)

50 years ago tonight - the same spring Blue Streak was cancelled and the Times gave up the imperial ghost, while Lonnie retrenched to the old CockErNee world having already created a new one, Cliff opined the new suburban pseudo-perfection and Max sang "I've got words for Elvis P" knowing that they would remain forever unheard - Britain's post-imperial humiliation was manifested on ITV, its single biggest platform at that moment, on two fronts. Barcelona's utter humiliation of Wolves, in the very same Molineux mud where only half a decade before they had been proclaimed the de facto world champion club side, exposed the old ways of English football for the antiquated facade they had become, and after a brief break for the news (really not a break at all, then) Daniel Farson's Living for Kicks exposed - with an almost unique sympathy for mainstream media at the time - the frustration and alienation of the first generation of clearly-definable teenagers, caught in a decrepit political state where exhaustion was everywhere in denial.

25 years ago this week, the old working class as a definable political or social force - and the whole idea of a Britain where everyone was somehow working towards shared ends within the public sphere - finally died as the miners succumbed, and "Material Girl" hit the Top 5 as the first song after Newsbeat (Bob Stanley carmodised that only 5 years later, by the way).

It may be that the historians of a quarter- or half-century from now will look back on early March 2010 with the same ominous sense of a turning point - the beginning of the end of the public sphere in British broadcasting, the moment the BBC lost what remained of its nerve out of sheer fear of a government that hadn't even been elected yet - and backed out of its universal role, finally allowed the pseudo-choice and pseudo-freedom of market brutalism to dictate everything. Maybe I am being too bleak in my assessment. But on a night when BBC Four - BBC Four, for heaven's sake - showed programmes about animals in TV and Skippy the Bush Kangaroo - it is hard to resist the temptation that the BBC almost has a death wish, has lost its nerve, has lost all confidence to speak up for itself and what it ought to be out of sheer paranoia that it may be completely dismantled if it shouts too loud. Maybe Birt should have taken the "Himalayan Option" after all. We may not have had So Solid mixed in with Britney or whatever, but at least we wouldn't have risked losing everything once the Tories regrouped. Maybe we might see a return to "purer" public service principles. But I fear we won't, because 6Music and the Asian Network - unlike the suspiciously untouched BBC3, Cash in the Attic or Holby City - represent the epitome, duly updated and redefined, of what public service broadcasting should be about. They could never be provided by the market and are exactly what needs to be retained. While there may well be a case for spending less on US imports (but, I would venture, more on European ones) and less on sports rights (some events certainly should always be on free TV, but it would be wrong to alienate non-sports-loving licence payers any more than at present) there is no case at all for removing services like these. There is an ugly set of reactions being played to here - a desire to further increase NuTory control of British pop (and who can seriously dispute that 1Xtra would be the next target?), to further atomise the British population so as to strengthen elite power in the guise of FAKE "democratisation", to decisively separate Britain from its European neighbours and effectively complete pseudo-American "restructuring", and to isolate and silence all non-white voices and influences, to create by stealth the pure white state many Tories still secretly dream of.

As the reliably excellent Andy Beckett states in the Guardian, it was only Birt's reforms - which fatally compromised the old independent public service spirit, and may only have postponed the evil day - which managed to save the BBC last time. There are many in the Tory party who still feel let down by his skilful politicking of 16 years ago, who wish he hadn't come up with sufficient internal marketisation and a shift in priorities towards global sales and formatting to convince their leaders that a PBS/NPR ghetto wasn't the only way, and they are if anything more dominant in the party than they were then, as the old guard who felt a psychological tie to Reithian values have almost all retired and are now dying off. There is a determination, as there was with Bush over Iraq, to complete unfinished business.

The relevance of what happened 25 years ago should be obvious. But I think a look back at Living for Kicks is just as telling, because those teenagers - probably now mostly dreading a further fall in what is already Europe's lowest state pension - were dreaming of some kind of escape from the post-war state, some kind of shift towards the privatisation of the mind which for them wrongly equated with freedom. That was the "element of sadness, a wistful hankering after better things" that Farson mentioned at the programme's end. Seeing how the majority were probably only ever after the main chance and their own interests - obviously there were left-wing idealists, and one such speaks at length in Living for Kicks, but that was in Brighton, an unusual, bohemian-London-like place even back then, and even there they didn't seem like the majority - it is safe to say that they eventually got their way. But I know many of them regret it, and the way it has left their descendants in many important ways less genuinely free - in the senses that truly matter, not how much you can watch on YouTube or how much you can say on Twitter - than ever. They were indeed trapped in many ways, but the escape route they chose was fatally immune to exploitation by economic forces who pretend to care for everyone but in fact care for no-one. I will mention without comment that one of the newspaper front pages that appears in Living for Kicks is from the Daily Herald.

Meanwhile, all I can recommend is a well-worded and thoughtful (hysteria will simply strengthen our enemies) email to srconsulation@bbc.co.uk, or similarly expressing your views here. We may never get another chance to say it.

Everything that needs to be said

far better than I could say it

I'd never have watched or listened to him - but I'm still worried

I never bothered with Jonathan Ross, either on radio or television. I always found his shows tediously smug and self-centred, musically either actively bad or just plain irrelevant. But I am still nervous about the implications of his departure, because it represents a victory for a section of British society which simply does not understand the concept of mutual tolerance, which alone has kept the BBC going since Reithianism became untenable. Dacre's mob genuinely appear to resent any of their money going to anything they do not personally like, a frightening level of intolerance which I don't think is shared, on the whole, by those on the other side (of course you get posts on certain forums opining that Radio 3 should be axed, but I don't think it runs to anything like the same extent). Quite apart from the fact that the people who think "their" newspapers want to save at least a high-cultural, hierarchical idea of the BBC simply don't understand that those papers are in fact owned by market fundamentalists who, if they had their way, would end all funding of the sort of broadcasting they pretend to care about. And they, riddled as ever with lies and contradictions, have just achieved a major victory, which will render them far more confident to destroy at some future point - or at least fatally marginalise - those who genuinely are culturally and politically subversive.

Jonathan Ross was not even remotely comparable to anyone on 1Xtra - his shows, unlike those on that station, were full of the new elite and its footsoldiers. But that does not mean that those involved with 1Xtra should not be frightened.

Why do they still feel the need?

Looking through the new Radio Times - yes, yes, I know it's a bit like fucking a corpse, but it has to be done - I notice repeated derogatory references to "snobbery", and even one to (good grief) "lingering European hauteur". What makes these constant allusions so much less defensible than similar references in, say, the NME of the 1970s would have been is that they're condemning something that no longer really exists anyway. Mass demands being the only ones that matter and the market deciding everything are now so absolutely embedded in the structure of British society that you wonder why anyone feels the need to so constantly denounce something they themselves have long since decisively defeated.

There are two possible reasons, and I suspect it's a combination of the two. If the new rulers of the modern BBC were so confident and assured of the rightness of their ideology - commodified anti-elitism in lieu of real democratisation (if that much-abused word can ever be reclaimed) - then they surely wouldn't be so anxious to constantly denounce that which they have destroyed. Could it be that, somewhere underneath, they know that much of value has been thrown out and are secretly full of shame and regret over their own involvement?

But I suspect there is another, less reassuring, perhaps bigger element. These people really are riddled with obsessive hatred and intolerance of anyone who doesn't conform to their creed. Their contempt for anyone who dares to transgress - whether towards Reithianism or socialist-utopianism, or any ideology which isn't built on popcult fundamentalism - is, if anything, far deeper and nastier than the contempt of at least post-Reithians (who didn't really die until 15 years ago) for those who went against their principles, and far more dangerous because it is couched in terms of inclusivity and tolerance. It is far, far off those aims. It is the antithesis of true democratisation.

A harbinger, I fear

"This week on the BBC" trailers on BBC Four. "Part of the thousands of hours of Arts and Culture programming the BBC produces every year." (I suspect there are variants for other fields, on the relevant channels.)

The last time the BBC ran promos like that was in the early 1990s. There can be no better indication of the political times coming.

Fighting the conservative within, fighting the conservatives without

Some years back - I forget precisely which year it was now, the mid-2000s all merge into each other - I destroyed a certain number of CDs and books in my posession.  Now I'm no great admirer of most of the material I wanted rid of, but I still think it was a deeply regressive, backward, insular and wrong-headed act to destroy it.  This is partially because I now think it's immensely important to keep some representation of everything you've ever liked or believed, every phase you've ever been through, every ideology you've ever touched, and partially because at least some of the CDs were - for all their often questionable merits - representative of the world which the Right fear most viciously and vociferously (and at least one of them also stands as a foundation stone for much that I listen to now).  I may have tried to dress it up in all kinds of portentous clothing - the music represented selfishness, the antithesis of socialism and even social democracy, arrogance, a warlike mentality, the oppressed fighting each other rather than their oppressors - but deep inside, I have a terrible fear now, what motivated me was pure conservatism, a base-level revulsion at the cultural shift these people's very existence represents.  And the knowledge that I destroyed these things now fills me with the deepest shame, and may have helped me on the road back.

For there is a conservative hidden within me, and the desire to fight it runs in parallel with my desire to destroy similar forces without.  And that desire is the reason why I did not listen to a pre-recorded freestyle (but of course) on Cameo's 1Xtra show this evening.  I simply could not stand being reminded of the way the petty-minded bigotry of a certain part of British culture and society, a part which I was once willing to sup with, even make allegiances of convenience with, has been imposed on the tastes of a quite different part of British society and on stations which no non-specialists would ever touch, has been allowed to overpower the basic cultural principle of laissez-faire (which I only now truly believe in - I will not start on the implications of at least some of those petty-minded bigots' hypocritical support, still dragged on through its ashes, for the economic version of that idea).  I did not want to think of the way they not only attempt to impose ridiculous criteria on every single thing the BBC does (as if there was still "one" nation, one broadcasting audience, which there wasn't even when the pretence that there was was at its height) but are - in several cases - taking such a stance as a cover for a quite different, even more unsettling ideology (to bring in the obligatory Hitchens Minor reference, I suspect that an Anglo-paleoconservative such as PH genuinely does believe that there should be a BBC, he's just too naive and stupid to see that imposing the criteria on the BBC which he dreams of would be the surest way of destroying it).

At least The Sun is honest enough to come out openly against any public service broadcasting, a position it knows will not offend its younger, less literal-conservative readership.  The Mail, Times and Telegraph, read as they are by significant numbers of older BBC loyalists, cannot take the same stance, so they have to be nastily twisted and roundabout in their reasoning: their current great scheme is, I think, to cow the BBC into such submission that it becomes simply a public service broadcaster for the public of 50 years ago (what Mail readers in particular wrongly think both their paper and the Tory party want), to the point where everyone younger and/or freer of thought simply goes elsewhere - in the case of grime to pirates in London, to the internet elsewhere - at which point they can say that the BBC no longer has universal appeal, so a universal licence fee is no longer justifiable, so ... and then, too late, the readers of the more literal-conservative right-wing papers will discover that they have also lost the programmes they like, that their "friends" were disguised enemies.  During the Brand/Ross witchhunt, an entire cultural world was led - as we have rarely seen before in this country - into believing that those who also want to take away their personal preferences wanted to defend them.

(incidentally, re. my comments in that post, I am still no personal fan of either Brand or Ross - but this is a wider issue, and the naivety of David "my grandfather wouldn't even have a Freeview box in his house because you could potentially get porn on it, even if it wasn't free-to-air" Lindsay over this issue pretty much forced me away from his blog and from the wider romantic / trad-left-meets-trad-right / ostentatiously pre-pop view of Britain, probably the right decision on my part.  I also think, in another comment there a couple of days earlier, I should have been much harder on Quentin Letts.  But these are the lessons you learn: there are friends I have lost - through my own mid-2000s ideological fanaticism and desperation for absolute, unattainable, risible levels of emotionless human perfection, mainly - who I genuinely miss, but people like Lindsay are fundamentally anti-me, although for too long my conservative streak was strong enough that I could believe they weren't.)

But I have this profound fear that, far from being a short-term ideological diversion to "get that n***** off the front page" (although even that is before one even begins to discuss the irony of Andrew Sachs' background, and the fact that, had the British government always been in hock to the Mail, he might well simply have been another of the "six million screaming souls"), the Brand/Ross episode was merely the first battle / blow of a political era that hasn't even really begun yet (why else would I still be writing about it, half a year on?).  The Tories of the 1980s and 1990s, having been raised largely in the era of monopoly or at least duopoly broadcasting, had an instinctive emotional attachment to the BBC which, when it came down to it, ultimately overpowered their antipathy either to its supposed leftism, its overt populism, or both.  The new lot - Murdoch's children, every one of them - don't even have that.  No doubt Ann Widdecombe does actually want the BBC the Mail's readers think the Tory party want.  But she has no power, and never will again.  Those who actually do have power in the party don't want the BBC to exist at all.  The worst is yet to come, I fear.

Who writes this shit?

According to the current Radio Times:

"Rock'n'roll's remit has always included riling the establishment and shocking older generations."

(from the listing for a programme called, yawn, Lock Up Your Daughters - Sex, Drugs and Rock'n'Roll in the UK, a title which feels, now, rather as The Genius of Eric Coates would have felt in the UK of 1959.)

The very fact that Radio Times - 30, even 20 years ago a sober, essentially pre-pop guide to the BBC's activities - is as it is should, in itself, confirm just how played out and misleading every assumption behind that statement is.  The complete absorption of pop/rock culture into Britain's ruling elite culture is confirmed, among much else, by the mutation of the very magazine that feels the need, for its own dubious reasons, to attempt to keep the old myths going.  This would be comparatively acceptable, if still deeply depressing, were it not part of a deeper, long-term cross-party campaign to dress up profoundly reactionary, anti-progressive politics as vaguely "hip" because At Least We've Given Robert Plant A CBE.  At least with the old Radio Times, as with the establishment in general at that time, when it was conservative it admitted it.  Nobody could think that a magazine that printed a letter moaning that gay people ought to be happy to be called poofs, as it did in 1976, was particularly progressive, and indeed it was not.  But don't let yourself get fooled into thinking that a magazine which prints the above is, inherently and of itself, dramatically better.  The same BBC that held within it the Curran/Trethowan lineage also had space for the Greene/Milne tendency - Birt destroyed both. Listings such as the above are practically made for those who will regard themselves as "rebels" while blaming "immigrants" for the economic crisis.

it was never really about those two men, you know

One lesser-publicised byproduct of the Ross/Brand witch-hunt has been that, since then and specifically since the BBC submission it led to, Tim Westwood has been unable to feature live freestyles on his generally unmissable Sunday night 1Xtra show.  These have instead been pre-recorded, with the sheer power (because music radio never sounds as good when it's not live, whatever its field) inevitably weakened and the show cut up with already overplayed jingles and trailers for other presenters, who are undoubtedly born more deeply into what they do but who lack the sociological heat to turn good radio into transcendent cultural history.

The implications of this (check page 9 of the Christmas issue of Private Eye - unlikely source, I know - for further proof of what I'm getting at) are precisely what the self-appointed censors were aiming at.  Unlike the shows of Ross and Brand, which were made up very largely of music by fully-paid-up members of the New Establishment, or even his own Saturday night show, which is often incredibly exciting radio (in a way that ideologically-sound rap radio could not be today or at any time since Public Enemy's peak) but is made up largely of aggressively anti-socialist, anti-collectivist messages, Westwood's Sunday night show was (and even in its diluted form still is) genuinely socially subversive.  To have neutered him was probably the Mail's ambition all along.  The British Right's view of him is, more than anything else, reminiscent of the view of Peter Hain (before he was Blairised) once held by the South African Apartheid elite and its lickspittles in Britain - for the Right, an heir-turned-traitor is always the ultimate hate figure.

Had I been blogging at the time, I would have said that even people who hated Ross and Brand needed to stand up for them because of the deeper issues at stake - that while neither of those characters have a millionth of what Dennis Potter had, the arguments being used against them are the same arguments that would be used against someone of that calibre if such a person ever appeared again.  That's what happens when someone keeps silent as long as I did.  You get what needed to be said two months ago.  But I fear that we will need to say it many more times over the next few years.  I hope we will not still be saying it, knowing our voice is futile but with no other idea of what we can do to overcome it, when it's all too late.