Does the BBC suppose that it will convert the public to a belief in equality if it does not, in its heart, believe in it itself? Unlike the genial guidance of wartime propaganda, this current stuff feels like snobbish contempt. Of course no one forces me to watch state television, and apart from snooker, darts, football or horse racing, I don’t. But the other day, I took a tray into the room where my mother sits slumped at an angle and the telly was on, and it was showing the terrier judging at Crufts. Crufts! Terriers! Wondering how this culturally questionable event has escaped the gimlet-eyed ideologues’ red pencil, I settled down in a comfortable chair to watch.
When I was a committee member of the south-west terrier, lurcher and ferret club, I occasionally stewarded the terrier show ring at our summer shows: perhaps half a dozen battered terriers in each class, all probably related; half a dozen weather-beaten owners, all probably related. Orange baler twine was much in evidence: marking the extent of the ring, holding up trousers, or standing in for a lead. On the walk up and down under the judge’s eye to determine the terrier’s ‘action’, it was not uncommon to see both man and dog limping badly. The terriers answered to the name of ‘Badger’ or ‘Satan’ or ‘Nelson’ and such like. But the judge, usually a terrierman of a neighbouring hunt, was always most respectful and meticulous, spanning the animal’s chest with his hands, for example, to see how small a hole the dog could go down, which is most important. When it came to the business end of the dog — the teeth— he was a private dentist in a tweed cap.
In contrast, the Crufts judge’s inspection was laughably cursory: a quick fondle and at most the apprehensive baring of a canine tooth on one side but never the other.
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