It was a story that Rishi Sunak was not saying what he would decide about the future of HS2. But was it the story? The BBC thought so. On Tuesday, Today’s reporting of the Conservative party conference consisted chiefly of Nick Robinson and Chris Mason gleefully commenting on how the Prime Minister was avoiding their HS2 questions. The explanation, which they chose not to recognise, was that he would have been idiotic to pre-empt his own conference speech on Wednesday. There he did announce his big HS2 change. The only other thing that interested Today, especially Robinson, who specialises in this theme, was that ‘the Tory right’ were being supported at the conference by GB News, partly in the form of its presenter Nigel Farage. Both these points are matters of legitimate interest, but where they sit in the BBC’s public service remit of neutrally conveying what was said at the conference is less clear. In the case of the GB News angle, the BBC ought to declare its own potential interest here, which is to destroy a rival. If GB News is what Robinson calls ‘a Tory-backing news outlet’, then it would be equally fair to call the BBC an ‘anti-Tory news outlet’. As so often, the BBC was asserting its media dominance more than reporting news.
Sitting in the National Theatre foyer this week, I studied an enormous notice staring at me, entitled ‘Everyone is welcome’. I reproduce it in full, because its length (more than half that of the Ten Commandments) is part of its oddity:
We are all part of making the National Theatre a welcome, inspiring place where everyone can feel they belong, whatever the purpose of their visit. Discriminatory and intimidating behaviours have no place here. If you experience any, we’ll take action. Speak to any member of staff who can refer you to a manager. We’re here to be proactive and to help. We take pride in acting with care and compassion, and everyone who visits and works here is entitled to be treated with dignity and respect. This place exists to spark creativity, conversation and thought, although please don’t assume that other visitors and staff will necessarily agree with your point of view.
Finally, in red letters, ‘Please be open, patient and kind.’
What is the purpose of this notice? If it wishes simply to say that everyone is welcome and should behave politely, a subeditor’s traditional blue pencil could cut the verbiage by 95 per cent. Other factors must be at work. What are they? One, I guess, is pressure – perhaps from unions and other workplace groups – to tell visitors to be nice to staff, particularly ethnic minority or LGBT staff; hence the warning against ‘discriminatory and intimidating behaviours’. Possibly management is worried that if it did not display concern by erecting such notices, disgruntled staff might sue it.
But there lurks a weird tension here. The National Theatre wants to say it loves everyone, while at the same time seeming to believe significant numbers of its visitors to be unpleasant. It might, while ‘acting with care and compassion’, have to frogmarch such ‘discriminatory and intimidating’ persons off the premises. Staff will be ‘proactive’ about this. They won’t necessarily wait for a complaint but might just go in hard. As it proceeds, the notice gets in a terrible tangle. The National Theatre ‘exists to spark creativity, conversation and thought’, it says, but then comes the anxious ‘although’: when we visitors have our sparky conversations, we must not ‘assume that other visitors and staff will necessarily agree with your point of view’. Speak your mind, but watch your lip. This is strange. Why would any visitor to the theatre assume that other visitors or staff would necessarily agree with him/her? Why would it matter if they didn’t? By telling us that we need to be ‘open, patient and kind’, the National Theatre is suggesting that we aren’t. So this notice about welcome and respect is actually rather rude to theatre-goers.
Of course, it could be that theatre behaviour is deteriorating. There are growing reports of unruly audiences, especially in musicals. Such a trend is likely if, as now happens, you can turn up wearing anything you like and bring food and drink into the auditorium. This invitation to put your own convenience first provokes discourtesy to others. I have just read Lance Morrow’s eloquent account, in the New York City Journal, of his time as a teenage pageboy in the US Senate in the early 1950s: ‘Massachusetts’s Leverett Saltonstall, of Mayflower stock, stood ramrod straight, with neat, steel-gray hair and a pronounced Plantagenet jaw: he looked like an aristocratic lobsterman. Not far away sat Clyde Roark Hoey (pronounced HOO-ee) of North Carolina, an upcountry Confederate antique who wore a wing collar and a black string tie.’ Then there was LBJ: ‘The Senate minority leader, Lyndon Johnson, was radiant with the vulgar opulence of Texas – expensively tailored in dark silk suits and wine-colored Countess Mara ties and shined cowboy boots. His shirts were monogrammed with his initials on each French cuff.’ And today? The current majority leader, Chuck Schumer, has ruled that senators may now wear pretty much anything in the chamber. This gesture, says Morrow, is ‘intended to appease one highly peculiar man: John Fetterman, the 6ft 8in freshman senator from Pennsylvania, who goes about his daily business wearing gym shorts and a hoodie. Pennsylvania’s electoral votes may be crucial in 2024. I know how Lyndon Johnson would have responded to the sight of 54-year-old John Fetterman skulking into the chamber dressed like a disturbed adolescent.’ Morrow records: ‘The Senate of those days had its flawed characters but despite all, a formality – an archaic dignity. Senators Schumer and Fetterman have invited their colleagues to turn the place into a smelly gym or a psychiatrist’s waiting room.’ Such trends, thespian or political, inevitably reduce the dignity and respect which the National Theatre says it wishes to defend.
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