What the Papers didn’t Say –and What They Did

Some readers here have mentioned the treatment meted out to me on the BBC Radio 4 programme ‘What The Papers Say’ on Sunday night, 29th July. It is still available on i-player for those who wish to see what the discussion is about. And I now have to interrupt my holiday to initiate various necessary actions, do a lot of transcribing,  and make a lot of inquiries about what happened, so I shall be limited in what I say here, especially about the presenter of the programme, a person reasonably well-known to me called Mehdi Hasan. He has, let me just say, some interesting views.

 

Once upon a time, when ‘What the Papers Say’ was still a TV programme on BBC2, I used  occasionally to present it about 15 years ago. I counted this a great honour, as I had watched the giants of my trade, such as Paul Foot and George Gale, presenting it in my teenage years and later, when it had a prime-time slot on ITV, and when I was starting out in Fleet Street in the late 70s and early 80s.  I had to stop presenting it when I went to work for a Sunday newspaper, which made the enjoyable but hard-working  Friday trip to Manchester , for final filming, impossible. It was then shown on Saturday, though I think it used to move round the schedules a bit too much for its own good.  I was sorry when it vanished from our screens, and pleased when it was revived for radio, even as a late night Sunday event, way past my bedtime.

 

I don’t listen to it that often because I am, genuinely, usually asleep at that time. I have for many, many years been an early riser because I have had to be. But for one reason or another I was listening on Sunday evening. I noticed how Matthew Norman, Christina Paterson, Giles Coren and others were all quoted at length, and respectfully,  in normal voices, on the Olympics. They were all full of joy about it, and the actors involved were using their normal voices, in some cases imparting a  sympathetic warmth which might well have been taken to imply approval of the sentiments expressed ( this was particularly so in a quotation from a London Evening Standard editorial). then, in a departure from the practice of the old days (when you had to use quotations form newspapers – and I had to make a special fuss one week to have excerpts from American ones), the quotations diverged into Twitter. Toby Young’s complaint that the Olympic opening ceremony was a Labour broadcast was quoted and – tellingly – Mr Hasan had a few words of rebuke for Toby (I rather agreed with him, actually. Toby’s party-political  plaint was a bit weak given that several Tories had endorsed and backed the whole thing). But I wondered at this stage whether I would have been allowed by the producer  to editorialise so strongly in the days when I presented it, and thought not. I was permitted to make points, but mainly through my selection of excerpts and my choice of subjects.  There was then a reference to the Tory MP , whose problems with Nazi fancy dress were quickly alluded to. He was awarded a rather silly voice.

 

But it was nothing like as silly as the one I was awarded. It is true that there was a stage Australian voice in one excerpt, talking in a sort of ‘Waltzing Matilda’ Strine; and an attempt to reproduce Boris Johnson’s patrician tones, plus a rather accurate rendition of Andrew Rawnsley which almost amounted to mimicry.  There was also the standard raucous pearly king tone used for a Sun headline, not intended to portray any individual. But the voice which was used to read out a rather brief passage from my Sunday article was, well, judge for yourselves here.

My voice has been described as a plummy baritone, and it certainly isn’t Estuary English, but I don’t think that I or  any living Englishman, speaks as I was portrayed as speaking on that programme. It was the sort of voice used in 1960s satire programmes to denote the thoughts and opinions of a ludicrous tweedy old buffer. It might do for a very old-fashioned butler in a provincial Agatha Christie stage production.  And I was the only individual writer singled out for this caricature.

 

But that wasn’t all.  I was not accurately quoted. The change was trivial in a way, and less trivial in another. I had complained that the event reminded me of May Day in Soviet Moscow, which it did (I witnessed this event in 1991, the last time it took place, and had a special  ticket for a rather good position in Red Square next to Lenin’s Tomb). It was the awful feeling that one had to be enthusiastic, that jollity was being enforced, that you could get into trouble for not being keen. But the BBC version left out the words ‘May Day in’.

 

Reasons of space? If you like, though the quotation from me already seemed much shorter than the extracts from the pro-Games writers (I haven’t had a chance to check this yet) , and only a second can have been saved. But the odd thing was that Mr Hasan then went on to rebuke me for something I hadn’t said – that is, for comparing the London Olympics of 2012 with the Moscow Olympics in 1980. I made, and intended, no such comparison. (I wasn’t at the Moscow Games in 1980, and they didn’t happen on May Day anyway)  and if he had been in any doubt, he knows how to find me.  Now, if the reference to ‘May Day’ had been left in, this neat ending would not quite have worked. Once again, I invite readers to draw their own conclusions, and above all, to listen to the programme while it is still available.

 

The really funny part of this is that a few years ago Mr Hasan and I had a brief and unsatisfactory internet exchange about whether the BBC is biased to the Left. He seemed to be claiming that it was biased the other way, an idea I found so preposterous that it was hard to summon up the strength to oppose it. I don’t enjoy Mr Hasan’s approach to debate, which in my view lacks generosity of spirit, and mistakes forbearance for weakness. But whatever he or I think about the BBC, its official position ( enshrined in its Royal Charter) remains that it is impartial, and I am sure that the producer of the programme, and the management of Radio 4 in general, are aware of that.  It is, in itself, an interesting example of that impartiality that Mr Hasan is presenting ‘What The Papers say’ and I am not. As to the impartiality of this particular programme, I have many inquiries to make and words to transcribe.

 

Meanwhile, on the subject of  the legitimacy and reasonableness of my view of the Olympic ceremony, let me quote to you from an article by Chris Blackhurst, a former colleague of mine, and no fool,  now Editor of the Independent newspaper. You can read the whole thing here.

 

Chris (who I do not think would describe himself as a man of the right)  said : ‘Did I think I was being preached to? Was I aware that the director was ramming his vision of a leftie Nirvana down all our throats? Yes to both. Did I mind? Not in the least’

 

He also conceded :’There could have been more use words, more acknowledgement of our contributions to the arts and our faith in individual liberty’(these are my principal complaints about what was lacking. But he added ’This was an occasion for television, more than those lucky enough to be present’.

 

He makes a curious comment about multiculturalism, mistaking it – as so many seem to do – for multiracialism, a wholly different thing. He said ‘swathes of the population, not those perhaps in the stockbroker belt or secure in their gated communities, those of different ethnic origin living side by side is how it is’. Let me say it again. Multiculturalism is nothing to do with race. It is to do with abandoning the idea of one unifying national culture to which all are expected to belong, and choosing instead to promote a series of solitudes with their backs turned upon each other (some readers say, trying to be clever, that we no longer have much of a British culture to offer, but that is precisely because we abandoned it so long ago). Those who have sought to defend a unified national culture have been, and are still being, smeared as racial bigots, when this is the opposite of the truth. I am sad, but not amazed, that this still needs to be explained.