Noticing that the back gate had come loose in the gale and concerned about a sheep invasion I forsake my afternoon snooze and gathered together the necessary items with which to carry out a repair. I clamped my Bluetooth phones on my head to help keep the wind out of my ears and found myself listening to BBC Radio 4. I had switched on half way through The World at One, and there was an item about a junior school. The school was desperately short of money (because of Tory cuts). It had special problems that money could solve. Half the children were from abroad, and many of them didn?t speak English. There were also difficult cultural issues to contend with. About a quarter of the kids were Special Needs. Nothing was said about the fact that this could have been a perfectly happy school with adequate resources (like most schools) were it not for the difficulties resulting from the excessive and indiscriminate immigration this country has suffered for the past thirty years. And I did wonder how many of the Special Needs kids were the result of first-cousin marriages. So, no background, no research, merely the message that the government and everyone who voted Tory were a set of absolute rotters for allowing this school to be in such a bad way.
Next up was a little programme about GB Shaw?s Pygmalion. As it happens I had to learn about this play for A Level. However I hardly recognised it from this programme, which put a weird 1970s-style women?s lib slant on it. This programme wasn?t really about the work of one of our great playwrights; it was just the vehicle for fifteen minutes of rather stale right-on anti-man claptrap.
I didn?t really pay any attention to The Archers. I haven?t bothered with it since they reduced the farming issues to almost nothing in favour of storylines about homosexuality and global warming and similar inappropriate, incongruous, nonsense.
Next up, Glenda Jackson, wrinkled pin-up of the extreme left, featured in a drama ? which turned out to be a sort of general-purpose, one size fits all, omnibus exercise in left-liberal proslytism. They really did crowbar every woke issue known to man into this three-quarters of an hour. The anti-hero was a male (bad) white (bad) rich (bad) hard working (bad) ambitious (bad) entrepreneur (bad) with a knighthood (bad) who was in oil (bad) and plastics (double bad). Somehow racial prejudice, global warming, pollution, misogyny; the whole gamut of liberal-left sacred cows in fact, were crowbarred into this little drama. I seriously did start to wonder if it was a BBC attempt at self parody. In fact it might have been for all I know because the gate was mended before the programme ended so with great relief I switched off. I must have missed the bit about the glories of veganism.
As a Yorkshireman I hate to think that I?m wasting money, so when I?ve paid for my TV licence I do feel obliged to consume some BBC output. It?s getting harder and harder though. The BBC just doesn?t seem to cater for ordinary guys like me who haven?t swallowed their strange slanted take on life. I dip into Radio Four hoping for something that isn?t riddled through and through with leftist claptrap, and I?m nearly always disappointed. I endure a programme hoping the next one will be better and I?m nearly always disappointed yet again. I can?t take much more. I think I?m going to have to join the ranks of the many who listen exclusively to LBC, Talk Radio, and Classic FM, and who watch nothing but You Tube and Netflix. I?ll just have to accept that the TV licence is an unjust tax that I have to pay on pain of imprisonment, even though it buys me nothing, relentlessly propagandises views opposed to my own, and allows no contrary view.
Bill