Going digital

The advent of new technologies is always fraught with Luddite antagonism and economic realities. People suffer. But what’s discomfiting about the digital switchover is the way it’s being managed by the government. Going digital will not be a consumer choice, but a political imposition.

So far the Corporation has responded to the byte-sized revolution with some incredibly creative use of the licence-fee funds. As digital listeners we now have more choice than ever, from the advent of the Asian Network and Radio Five Live to BBC6 and BBC7, and those with only analogue receivers have not suffered as a result. Radios One and Two are booming while Radio Three’s coverage of music is broader than ever. Over on Four, the schedule’s fit to burst with programmes that titillate, infuriate, astonish and inspire. On Thursday morning I was intrigued by a programme about Samuel Smiles, The Grandfather of Self-Help.

Smiles published his book, Self-Help, on the same day in 1859 that Darwin’s The Origin of Species appeared. The first edition sold out immediately and by the time Smiles died in 1904 it had become second only to the Bible as the most-owned book in the country. Smiles advocated ‘The spirit of self-help’ as ‘the root of all genuine growth in the individual’ and that this should be ‘the true source of national vigour and strength’.

Nowadays much of what he said is regarded as the oppressive moralising of a Victorian Do-Gooder and the root of Margaret Thatcher’s misguided ideas about the defunct role of society in shaping the national destiny. There was, though, something disarmingly refreshing about Smiles’s clarity of expression, and his practical response to the harsh working lives of most of his readers. Take his crisp verdict on those with great riches, which are, he says, ‘no proof whatever of moral worth, and their glitter often serves only to draw attention to the worthlessness of their possessor as the light of the glow worm reveals the grub’. None of the talking heads interviewed for the programme could compete.