We should be worried. The announcement that BBC 6 Music is going to be saved from the cost-cutter’s axe may sound like a victory for Everyman, as opposed to the mindlessness of the Jobsworths in Finance.
We should be worried. The announcement that BBC 6 Music is going to be saved from the cost-cutter’s axe may sound like a victory for Everyman, as opposed to the mindlessness of the Jobsworths in Finance. But the money to keep Lauren and her team going will have to come from somewhere, and the most likely target, as ever, will be those departments whose budgeting can’t be accounted for in noughts and crosses. Will there be enough money in the pot to fund the ambition of series like The History of the World…? What will happen to the World Service, whose output of drama and documentaries has already been drastically curtailed on the basis of ‘not enough money’.
In these recession-hit times, the future of those things from which our hearts and minds are shaped is at stake. Do we really want to see the creativity of our thinkers, musicians and programme-makers thinly spread over a quantity of radio stations? Why, when BBC 6 Music has been saved for its million or so listeners, has the Asian Network been given the chop — with its far more significant potential of reaching out to the millions of British people of South Asian extraction? The noisy repartee of the Asian Network’s DJs jars on my ears — and maybe on the ears of the audience it is meant, but fails, to reach. Maybe there has not been enough commitment to the station? Certainly, it has failed to rally the kind of celebrity endorsement which has been given in recent weeks to 6 Music. But wouldn’t its survival somehow be a more creditable outcome? A provoking acknowledgement by the fledgling BBC Trust of the ways in which Britain has changed in the past few decades, rather than an uninspired caving in to the screeching demands of the Twitterers?
On London Nights this week (Radio 4), the novelist Andrea Levy has shown a refreshing diversity of thought in her late-night portraits of the capital, buzzing with life under the purple skies of a balmy June evening. Levy grew up on a redbrick council estate close to Arsenal’s football stadium, earning sixpence a time for minding the cars of those soccer fans too foolish to realise that by ‘minding’ she meant pocketing the money and skiving off home until the noise of the crowd warned her that the game was over. She knows and loves the city, and gave us not the predictable sights of Downing Street, the Tower, Oxford Street and the Southbank, but those hidden corners known only to those who truly roam the city, by day and night.
She took us to Soho Square, on the borders of the West End and the City (or, as we were reminded, page 21, grid 4L in the AtoZ). You may have already discovered this green, leafy oasis where on a summer night you can escape the shoppers’ frenzy and on a wooden bench gather your thoughts, lulled by the cheeping of the sparrows and the age-old solidity of the buildings which surround the dusty garden, a couple of them surviving from the first square to be built on this virgin land south of what was then called the Oxford (or Tyburn) Road. But Levy also took us up north to a housing estate on the fringes of Islington where we met a group of young men just ‘chilling’ as the clock ticked past midnight, smoking and drinking and ‘getting our minds off everything’. By day they sleep or mix music, by night they come out to take over the urban space and make it their own. On a wall nearby are listed the RIPs of those friends no longer with them, their lives lost to gang violence or just misfortune. Stabbed in a moment of haste. They have the same dreams as the keen young media people hanging out in W1, but the reality of their prospects is very different.
A bizarre interview with the Duke of Edinburgh on that ever-intriguing stalwart of Sunday-morning listening, Broadcasting House (Radio 4), reminded us of the ‘absolutely bloody lunatic’ attempt to salvage Brunel’s great ship the SS Great Britain. In the summer of 1970 she was towed 8,000 miles across the Atlantic from the Falkland Islands, where she had been abandoned in 1937 almost 100 years after her triumphant launch from Bristol. A rusting hulk, she had to be stuffed with old mattresses donated by the islanders to stop her filling with water during the trip. It was a madly expensive venture, perhaps even a folly, but it turned out ‘a marvellous job’, preserving a jewel in our island history, a reminder of Brunel’s vision and of our one-time respect for engineers, and for ideas that at first appear no more than idle fancies.
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