Radio 4’s Goldie Jubilee

At last, BBC Radio 4 has reconciled itself to the great importance of the graffiti artist and music performer Goldie. He has been named as one of the station’s ‘New Elizabethans’, alongside the likes of Sir Edmund Hillary, Graham Greene, Margaret Thatcher and the Queen. The qualification for admission to this gilded list is as follows: they must be ‘men and women whose actions during the reign of Elizabeth II have had a significant impact on lives in these islands and given the age its character, for better or worse.’ I think Goldie qualifies for that, don’t you?

But then, I was always ahead of my time. Whilst editor of Radio 4’s The World Tonight I tried to put Goldie on air to talk about something or other — possibly graffiti, possibly the Kosovan crisis, I can’t remember — thinking it might liven up the sound of this somewhat staid and respectable programme. I was thwarted by the presenter that evening, the excellent Isabel Hilton, who, having enquired as to who Goldie was and what he did, listened to my rather vague answer, waited for several seconds and looked me fixedly in the eye and said: ‘Rod, let me put it simply. I am not interviewing somebody who has the same name as my daughter’s hamster.’ And so Goldie didn’t get on air.

Of course, Isabel was right on any number of levels. It was a pathetic attempt by me to gain for the programme an iota of what I fondly thought was street cred, and it would only have made us look ridiculous and embarrassing. As ridiculous and embarrassing as the moment Jim Naughtie interviewed Afroman on the Today programme in order to explore the social content of his hit song, ‘Because I Got High’.