He loves Radio 2, and his show, where he mixes cultural debate with the likes of Richard Dawkins and Salman Rushdie alongside phone-ins on Daily Mail staples like teenage tearaways and the NHS.
(Jayne Thynny interviewing Jeremy Vine in The Independent)
It might sound harsh but there’s actually quite a lot of Daily Mail about Radio Two. While much of it is politically inert – pop music, pop culture – its news and talk content shares a great deal with the Rothermere’s ugly child. Both are pitched at similar demographics. Both conceive of a large swell of moralistic, patriotic, but politically shallow viewers and listeners, and each does its best to cater to it.
There is rarely anything deep in the Mail. While it covers the most important topics its contribution to understanding is worse than useless – all hysterics and no substance. Rather than teaching it functions by triggering existing beliefs and bigotries. It’s really all just sermons on the same few commandments: Wealthy people and wealthy countries deserve their wealth (apart from a few bad apples); the poor deserve to be poor; car-owners are an oppressed class; foreigners are morally and culturally inferior and perhaps genetically inferior too.
Although far less hysterical, Radio Two news is every bit as conservative and shallow. Like in the Mail, the righteousness of Britain and America goes unquestioned – our military remain heroes whatever the evidence, our leaders remain honest, regardless of past performance. Every report of our crimes is written in disappearing ink, each new day a clean sheet.
Like the Mail, Radio Two is desperately parochial. Foreign lives are simply not worth a jot, not unless they happen to be pawns in some grander western plan. The only rationale for running international stories at all is how events might affect British people – thousands of foreign deaths can be dismissed in a sentence, but only after a heartfelt analysis of our own cuts and bruises.
Like every national paper (bar the FT) Radio Two’s news-content is celebrity obsessed. Any known face elevates any old nonsense to the top of the hour. Indeed if you are one of destitute of Africa or Asia about the only chance of a mention on Two is from a chance encounter with royalty or a pop star (or heaven upon heaven, one of the BBC’s own stable of personalities. Then you might get your own series.)
Another way is feel-good patriotism. If you can get your plight highlighted in a way that shines warmly on British people and British character you might earn a mention on Two. As with the Asian Tsunami, and poor Ali Abbas, the central story is always British generosity, our rising to the challenge. The suffering of foreigners is really just a muse for our magnanimous spirit to play to.
One might wonder then, as licence payers, why this should be. Why should state-funded broadcasting stoop to emulate a commercial tabloid, particularly such a noxious one? The Mail is critically regarded as a sick joke, Private Eye can’t compete for parody. From health scares to politics, no more consistency of argument than the National Enquirer, Winston Smith would have trouble keeping up with it.
But of course the Mail sells, and that in itself is the BBC’s reason for wandering down this dark path. The BBC and especially Radio Two have a contractual debt to popularity. Every channel is committed to netting a certain size of audience and Radio Two is duty-bound to land the biggest catch of all. The whole purpose of our nationwide, advert free ‘adult orientated pop music’ station is to attract a huge number of listeners.
Why popularity should signal a right-wing news-agenda is another matter. The implications are not pleasant however you look at it. Either there really is a large swell of politically shallow people with a taste for fascist phone-ins, or it’s just that the BBC thinks that there is and is attempting to cater to it. Alternatively, perhaps BBC thinks the average listener is far more politically sophisticated than the average caller and only tunes-in for the fun of it, the voyeurism – you don’t have to be as stupid as a cockerel to enjoy a good cock-fight.
Like I say, not pleasant implications. Either we truly are shallow, or the BBC thinks we’re shallow, or it thinks we’re political sophisticates who get a self-righteous kick out of laughing at bigots.
I suppose all three posses some truth. We’ve all met Alf Garnett and Peter Cook’s cabdriver and Catherine Tate’s gran. There really are people who don’t pay any deep attention to political history but nonetheless feel qualified to explain to every stranger exactly what is wrong with the world and what needs to be done to correct it (and how many languages Enoch Powell can speak.)
But mere existence doesn’t mean mass existence. The fact that such people exist tells us nothing of their prevalence. Indeed certain factors act to skew the BBC’s portrait of the ‘average’ listener in this direction.
For one thing people who ‘know everything’ are far more likely to bother to phone-in in the first place. Alf Garnett would be far more likely to pontificate down the phone to Jeremy Vine than a left-liberal type like Warren Mitchell himself. Moreover the fact that conservative-minded loudmouths can be relied upon to say controversial things without saying anything controversial about the powerful (Gawd bless ‘em) also makes them much more likely to be the callers chosen by producers and DJs – the last thing they want is some leftie blurting the truth about Iraq across the airwaves and getting them into trouble with their managers, and getting their managers into trouble with the government.
The fact that the BBC anticipates a politically shallow general public is undeniable. It’s executives have spent the past two decades openly trying to think up ways of make lite of everything. There’s an ongoing campaign to dumb programming down, and hopefully dumb down our expectations in turn. As for people tuning-in just to laugh at other people’s opinions, and their manner of expressing themselves, well anyone who has ever listened to Two in a busy workplace knows the answer to that!
Which is why it is odd that any attempt to address these questions is usually dismissed as ‘patronising’, whatever stance you take. You are either patronising people by suggesting they are stupid, or patronising people by criticising things that they like, or patronising people by suggesting that they can be influenced by the media at all.
Odd when, as I say, the executives who produce radio and television have no qualms about theorising about us. They are at liberty to gather in boardrooms to discuss ways in which make culture more stupid so as to meet corporate demands, but we are being patronising if we try to recognise what they think of us, how they target us, what they are trying to do to us.
Alf Garnett exists but we shouldn’t all be tarred with his opinions, or feel obliged to cater to his appetites. The mere existence of a social group doesn’t make it a legitimate market for a state-funded broadcaster to target. This is not an affront to democracy or freedom. I defend the right of bigots to air their views, but I don’t defend the right of broadcasters to use bigots to skew public opinion in corporate-friendly, power-friendly directions. That, alas, is the worst consequence of Radio Two being like the Daily Mail.
