Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

My pronouncement on the BBC

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Radio 4 recently ran an adaptation of Albert Camus’s The Plague in which the protagonist, Dr Bernard Rieux, was transformed into a woman. A woman who was enjoying a lesbian ‘marriage’. Of course they did, you will be muttering to yourself. If the BBC can transgender a rabbit in Watership Down they can certainly put a lesbian in The Plague.

The boss of BBC audio drama, Alison Hindell, explained that the masterpiece had been altered to provide ‘contemporary resonance’. Does it resonate with you? Drama invites us to suspend our sense of disbelief for a while but needs to have at least a slender connection to reality. The original story is set in Oran, Algeria. Yet nobody thought it a bit rum that this well-to-do doctor batted for the other side. Openly. She was not harangued in the street, imprisoned, fined or assaulted. Her sexual preference was of no consequence at all — it was as if the drama took place at a dinner party in Muswell Hill in 2020 consisting entirely of BBC commissioning editors and their cringing catamites. It made one kind of urge the plague to hasten its arrival: come, friendly rats!

Hindell was interviewed on the BBC’s Feedback programme and tantalised listeners about a new series she had just commissioned. It’s called A Season of Nigerian Literature. Can you wait for autumn? I can’t. I hope one of the plays is about the bloke who contacts me via email every so often requesting my bank details so he can give me some money. Hindell had been asked if she was aware that some people thought BBC radio dramas a little metrocentric. A little bit too London. The Nigerian literature stuff was her answer to that accusation. If they ain’t Muswell Hill, they have to be Nigerian, then.

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