Michael Henderson

What on earth is a ‘professional Northerner’?

Hear the one about the ‘professional Southerner’? Of course not, says Michael Henderson, so why does the media keep trotting out this tired old cliché about Northerners?

Hear the one about the ‘professional Southerner’? Of course not, says Michael Henderson, so why does the media keep trotting out this tired old cliché about Northerners?

John Prescott is at it again. Embold-ened by his first assault on television, an ‘examination’ of social class that was unaccountably aired by the BBC last year, the man we must refer to as the former deputy prime minister has been invited back, this time (yawn) to help viewers understand the differences between North and South.

Having seen a bit of the first programme, which revealed rather more about Prescott’s notorious chippiness than the defects of his putative targets, I trust readers will not mark me down for missing the follow-up. Life is short. Yet, even if one were granted all eternity to reflect on the follies of mankind, half an hour of Prescott would remain 30 minutes one could never retrieve.

There are things to be said about the North-South divide (as well as about the one, hardly ever recognised, between the Eastern and Western parts of our disunited kingdom) but it would take a latter-day Jack Priestley or Ian Nairn to do the subject justice. Michael Parkinson or Melvyn Bragg could pull it off. Jeremy Paxman might make a decent fist of it. Prescott, who wears his cod-proletarianism like a suit of armour, makes a most unlikely witness.

That was the majority view of the television critics, though, sad to relate, Damian Thompson of the Daily Telegraph trotted out that shop-soiled phrase ‘professional Northerner’ as a stick with which to beat the hapless guide. Prescott is no such thing. At least, speaking as a Lancastrian who is happy to live in London, I hope he’s not. Professionalism implies accepting payment for work done, and if Prescott was paid 2/6 a month to represent the North that would still be a tanner too much.

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