some estates need bulldozed, but they sink because of people

David Cameron’s vow to take the bulldozer to sink estates applies to England, but I thought some lessons from my homeland might prove a cautionary tale for him.

In Glasgow, there was a much-trumpeted slum clearance project in the 1950s. I’m sure it was proposed for the best of reasons, but what it turned into was an exercise in social cleansing, in that when the slums were knocked down – and they did need knocking down – working-class people were moved out of the city centre and relocated at its periphery. Talk about deconstruction at work! Unfortunately, not all went well in the new estates, and for a simple reason: the same people who made the slums worse than they needed to be turned the new estates into sink estates.

The borderline and more-than-borderline psychopaths who keep people divided and tied up in crises are fireproof: at best landlords are scared of confronting them, and at worst they are invaluable to landlords because they prevent effective tenants’ committees to form and stay stable long enough to hold said landlords’ feet to the fire.

This is, as I say, a Glasgow story, but I would be very surprised if it were just a Glasgow story.

The millionaire songwriters of Squeeze, who changed the lyrics of Cradle to the Grave to send a message to the Prime Minister on the welfare State, might have been lucky enough to get out of council housing before drugs took hold, more in some areas than in others. But I lived through it, so please forgive me for my lack of misty-eyed nostalgia. To make things worse, Glasgow Housing Authority (later Glasgow Housing Association) was so fiscally incontinent as to run up almost a billion pounds in debt, meaning it could do nothing to upgrade its stock, and GHA’s leader was forced to admit that nobody who could afford to live elsewhere was living in its stock. Again I’d be surprised if this were purely a Glasgow story, even if the scale of folly is unique.

Many housing estates do need bulldozing, because they were built not out of respect for human families but along the lines of battery farms, confining the maximum number of voters in the minimum space. But beware agenda contamination: will the new houses be smaller so there’s more of them, to disguise the overpopulation crisis arising from open-door immigration? Will the input of EU money be trumpeted in order to influence the result of the referendum and settlements thereafter?

The ball’s in your court, Prime Minister.

Gerry Dorrian

an international anthem for those who love their country

The civilised world has defeated communism in all but name – the Chinese government’s attempts to disguise the fact that communism is unworkable are increasingly lame, and nobody now seriously doubts that the regime in North Korea revolves around a strange god-emperor cult. (But doesn’t that also describe the worship of Lenin, Stalin and Mao?)

So it’s time that The Red Flag was taken by people who love their country, however they might describe themselves, as a reminder of the victory and a solace for the struggles to come. The following verses are sung the the tune of The Red Flag.

Replace "My country’s" with your own country, or keep the original on occasions where more than one flag is flying. There’s only one verse and chorus – who knows more than this in the original?

My country’s flag is flying here
And in my heart I’ll shed a tear
For those who in her colours fell
Their tales forever we will tell.

While with our minds and on the streets
There’s no surrender to defeat,
Let cowards flinch and traitors jeer
My country’s flag’s still flying here.

Gerry Dorrian

Al Stewart, Dave Nachmanoff and Tim Renwick at the Corn Exchange, Cambridge

In the early 1980s, aged 17, I went to live in Italy with my head full of vacuum-packed pop. Very soon I met a friend who played me Al Stewart’s Year of the Cat album, which knocked the other music I was listening to into a paper bag. Stewart’s work introduced me to a new world of music that was all around but not necessarily making the Top Ten, and I’ve bought his back catalogue and followed his career since.

So when I saw the ad for Al Stewart playing the Cambridge Corn Exchange with Dave Nachmanoff, missing it was not an option for me or for my wife, who’s heard me raving about Al for many years and become a fan herself.

Dave Nachmanoff opened both sets: he didn’t so much play his guitar as sing to the accompaniment of a six-string orchestra, so I knew this was going to be a good night. One of his songs really spoke to both of us: how he had come to sing Freight Train onstage with its composer, the remarkable Elizabeth Cotten. I love songs that tell stories.

And that’s why I adore Al Stewart’s corpus of narrative songs, many of whose stories are historical. Flying Sorcery, for instance, is a meditation on the history of flight, while Palace of Versailles compares the 1789 revolution with the 1968 riots.

An unexpected guest was Tim Renwick, serial session player, Stewart collaborator and Cambridge resident. Although it was the first time he and Nachmanoff had been onstage together, the two swapped acoustic lead parts as if they’d been born playing together. Then came the curtain-closer: what else could it be? Year of the Cat!

This was the first date of Al’s 2013-14 tour. If you’re able to catch him at any of the other dates, I thoroughly recommend that you do.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Click for more details of Al Stewart's tour

we rightly celebrate Stephen Lawrence's legacy: now what about Charlene Downes'?

It was good to see the Stephen Lawrence Unity Concert, on the 20th anniversary year of his brutal murder at the hands of racist thugs. Doreen Lawrence (Baroness Lawrence of Clarendon), who appeared near the end of the concert, has patiently waited for justice for her son through a process that has, thank God, renewed black-white relations.

Would that all campaigns for a murdered child so electrified the media.

This is the anniversary year of another foul ethnicity-based murder; On November 2003 Charlene Downes, aged 14, was declared missing.

The case is depressingly familiar to those who have followed it and shocking to others for whom it is news.

Following Charlene’s disappearance the police investigated a Blackpool kebab shop and two of its workers - Iyad Albattikhi and Mohammed Reveshi (from Jordan and Iran respectively) – linking them to the grooming of up to 60 girls from the town. Albattikhi and Reveshi were secretly recorded discussing murdering Charlene; but despite this two trials collapsed and the pair were awarded compensation for having been prosecuted.

Mick Gradwell, a former chief detective superintendent with Lancashire Constabulary, later claimed that police were well aware of Blackpool’s grooming gang problem but "investigations were being hampered by political correctness".

I’m not the first to compare Stephen’s and Charlene’s killings; Telegraph writer Sean Thomas, praising the "remorseless, dignified campaigning" of Baroness Lawrence, then asked why Wikipedia had taken down Charlene’s page – following this the so-called encyclopaedia published a page called "The disappearance of Charlene Downes".

I wish Stephen Lawrence hadn’t been killed. I wish Charlene Downes hadn’t been killed. Maybe one day her mother will be ennobled and given help to start a Charlene Downes Foundation; but while British girls continue to be targeted on ethnic and religious grounds – even as Charlene’s relatives are prevented from raising awareness of her death – don’t count on it.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

Click to watch the Stephen Lawrence Unity Concert on BBC i-Player until 8 October 2013

Stars perform in Memory of Stephen Lawrence - bbc.co.uk

60 girls groomed for sex at takeaway shops in Blackpool - Nick Collins, Telegraph

Mother of murdered girl ‘put into kebabs’ runs from court after gruesome testimony - Mail

The murder of Stephen Lawrence and the strange case of the missing Wikipedia entries - Sean Thomas, Telegraph

Charlene's gran upset by T-shirt ban - Julia Bennett, Blackpool Gazette

The People's Songs: tubthumping

"They paved paradise, and put up a parking lot". This was Joni Mitchell’s farewell in Big Yellow Taxi to a middle-class apartment block in Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles. So it was fitting that the song closed BBC Radio 2’s latest documentary in The People’s Songs strand, entitled Tubthumping – Environmentalism and Anti-Globalism. In case we missed the Beeb’s cultural enclosure of environmental matters, presenter Stuart Maconie prefaced the song with the remark "being kettled has become as much of a modern middle-class youth experience as a gap-year in Asia" (I know middle-class people who have experienced neither).

I’m not trying to do down environmentalist issues and concerns. As Margaret Thatcher once remarked, “we are not only the friends of the earth, we are its stewards and guardians”. But any BBC presenter who unearthed that quote without audibly dripping with sarcasm would soon be sidelined.

Maconie was, in my view, totally right to play Robert Wyatt’s Pigs (…In There). Battery farming is a vile practice – but can only increase while our population is augmented from without virtually unchecked. So why not use the broadcast to suggest common land be used for keeping pigs and other animals who would otherwise be intensively farmed, while keeping a modicum of land free for those who have ethical or religious objections to humanely slaughtering animals for food?

The stars of the show were Chumbawamba and their 1997 hit Tubthumping, which they publicised by drenching John Prescott in water at the next year’s Brit Awards. I can understand that – Prescott occupied his position near the top of New Labour to market it to its traditional voters, while laying plans to abandon those voters in favour of a mass-imported electorate. Which is how predominantly left-leaning environmentalists seeking to protect green spaces were stabbed in the back by the party they worshipped, and which the BBC still does.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

Tubthumping – Environmentalism and Anti-Globalism - BBC Radio 2

The People's Songs homepage on bbc.co.uk

Pigs (...in There) - Robert Wyatt

Tubthumping - Chumbawamba

The Joy of Easy Listening: what you hear is what you get

BBC Four’s The Joy of Easy Listening was a welcome repeat. From Percy Faith to Adele and passing through Herb Alpert, the Carpenters and many more, it offered valuable historical and cultural insights into why and how this broad musical church developed from 1945 onwards. I was particularly glad to see Richard Clayderman, whose version of Let it Be in the early 1980s was my gateway to the Beatles.

The inclusion of Guardian journalist Paul Morley puzzled me, as his function seemed solely to voice the BBC’s cultural Tourette’s. He complained that easy listening music was "non-ironic"; Maybe he was thinking of the Beeb’s in-house definition of irony:

An ironic statement must appear as if you are sincere, [and] the line must be delivered straight, so that the recipient misses the hidden message but onlookers get it loud and clear.

Is it so insulting that with Easy Listening what you hear is what you get?

What really annoyed me was his comment that Easy Listening represented a parallel world where pop music is "non black" – shortly before the start of Easy Listening Hits at the BBC, which included Aretha Franklin, Johnny Mathis and The 5th Dimension, none of whom appear in the credits on the programme’s webpage. Is the implication that performing in a genre the BBC disapproves of abrogates black artistes' ethnicity?

The crack was probably a reference to the old saw that popular music was stolen from black people. The irony is that if any music was stolen from black people it is modern jazz, with rich and complex time signatures unheard of in the West until the 1940 Dennis-Roosevelt expedition to the Belgian Congo brought back and analysed recordings of music by Watusi, Batwa and Bahutu peoples, to name but three. Cue herds of privileged white BBC executives stampeding to justify their Dave Brubeck collections.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

The Joy of Easy Listening BBC Four webpage

Easy Listening at the BBC BBC Four webpage

Irony h2g2 (BBC)

Denis-Roosevelt Expedition: The Belgian Congo Records of the Denis-Roosevelt Expedition Hip Wax (12th record down)

Shipbuilding - was it worth it?

"Every conflict, every war that’s been waged in our time, has had its soundtrack: calls to arms, calls to lay down arms, but nothing like Shipbuilding."

Thus Annie Nightingale (right) introduced Is it worth it? showcasing Robert Wyatt’s Falklands War-era song, written by Elvis Costello. It was named after the first line, and by halfway through the hour-long documentary I'd heard those words sung so often I was asking myself the same thing.

My heart sank from the moment Nightingale mentioned "the controversy over who the Falklands Islands – or Las Malvinas – should belong to". Then followed paeans to music’s ability to express anti-capitalist sentiments as well as Pat Kane of Hue and Cry declaring that to have people building ships for the navy to prosecute war from – the theme of Shipbuilding – was both "dignified and shameful" and an offshoot of "the poisonous need to create contracts" for industries that supply the military.

The second half-hour was balanced by contributions from shipbuilders, veteran Andy Eakins and war-widow Barbara Macauley. But it failed to present the Falklands War as more than a product of Margaret Thatcher doing things that annoy the BBC.

For instance, scriptwriters might have mentioned that while Britain and Spain had often disputed ownership, the Islands never belonged to Argentina. That the Islanders are predominantly of British and American descent. Or, indeed, that Pope Alexander VI prepared the ground for conflict in 1494 by arbitrarily delcaring where the line dividing the future Atlantic territories of Spain and Portugal would lie.

To argue that proximity renders the Falklands Argentinian exemplifies outdated colonialist thinking. This was by no means the most biased documentary the BBC has come up with but, with the prospect of British Armed Forces members going in harm’s way not receding, it needs to reappraise its student-union internationalism and remember why it’s called the British Broadcasting Corporation.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

RESOURCES

Click to go to the BBC Radio 2 webpage for Is it Worth It

Click to view a Falklands Islands timeline

Click here to see Robert Wyatt's video for Shipbuilding on YouTube or watch it below:

open letter to Fearne Cotton: the BBC's a bully too

Dear Fearne,

I am sad that you have been subjected to personal abuse on social media that you were right to label as bullying. You were undoubtedly under orders to comment on Diamond Jubilee sick bags.

I have to tell you that your employer, the BBC, is also a bully.

It’s not your fault. Many of us have worked for bullies, and some of the nastiest are among your bosses.

Take the misogyny. I hope you enjoy your very good looks for a long time before you start to learn, alongside colleagues like Mariella Frostrup and Anna Ford, that when the lines start you’re no longer required front-of-shop.

And the racism. Race is a chimera, but discrimination on grounds of characteristics once associated with race abounds, with the BBC a major offender. On one hand there’s Greg Dyke’s remark that the BBC is "hideously white", and on the other Lindsay Johns hits home when he attacks the corporation for thinking it’s connecting with black people when Radio 1 Xtra plays rap, and asks "where’s the black Radio 4?"

Last in a selection of the BBC’s many bullying traits is the licence fee. If something upsets me on a commercial channel I switch over and don’t get too bothered; but if the BBC transmits offensive material like Jerry Springer: The Opera or the Ross and Brand débâcle (which was pre-recorded), whether or not I watch it, I am forced to pay for it by being blackmailed with a £1000 fine should I withhold my licence fee in protest.

I hope you take this letter in the spirit it was written, which is one of solicitude for your future well-being. You are a highly talented media personality, and I think your interests would be best-served by ditching the BBC before it ditches you.

Yours

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Here's FEarne's Bullyproof tips on YouTube:

The Diamond Jubilee weekend

So how was your Jubilee weekend?

I’m glad to say that rain didn’t stop play in our village, gazebos having been donated for Sunday’s street-party. The turnout, comprising all ages, was great. A hog-roast was supplied by the butcher for cost price (if that) and his staff volunteered to clean up the High Street afterwards.

On Monday our local hall put on A Queen is Crowned. Laurence Olivier had done a workmanlike job of narrating the colour record of the Coronation – another rainy day! – marred only by his occasional inability to control his enthusiasm. We were then treated to a 60s cover band performing note-perfect renditions of some of the best popular music produced during her Majesty’s reign.

Afterwards my better half and I watched the Thames Jubilee Pageant on i-Player, and thought: come back Laurence, all is forgiven. Only the BBC could turn an event on a scale unparalleled since 1662 into the apotheosis of banality. As one letter-writer to the Telegraph noted, "the viewing numbers reflected not quality but monopoly". The same went for Tuesday’s coverage of the National Service of Thanksgiving in Westminster Abbey, where the nadir was surely provided by Fearne Cotton extolling the virtues of a Diamond Jubilee-themed sick bag.

Some redemption came with the Diamond Jubilee Concert, especially Gary Barlow’s Sing, starring musicians from across the commonwealth, with the Military Wives’ Choir providing a thoroughly British touch. Furthermore, in Barlow’s Making Of…, the absence of celeb tears when in the Dagoretti settlement to recruit Kenyan percussionists the Slum Drummers was refreshing.

It was the Queen and her people who saved the Diamond Jubilee from the BBC’s efforts to reduce this remarkable woman to the status of a sofa-surfing celebrity. When looking back on it, I suspect A Queen is Crowned will be the high-point - along with, of course, the subject of the film as she was on the day: her own inimitable and dignified self.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Eurovision 2012: Graham Norton's BNP remark spoils the show

Many acts in Eurovision 2012 that were probably discreetly told not to win because there was no money to stage the 2013 contest, but I’m sure Engelbert Humperdink wasn’t one of them. So it was disappointing to see him come second last – but nobody can say that he didn’t belt it out like a good’un.

There was more Euro-mediocrity than usual, probably because of the aforementioned fiscal diffidence. But Ukraine’s entry was reassuringly nuts, and I hope the Buranovskiye Babushki – the Russian Grannies – manage to rebuild their village church, destroyed by Stalin. Turkey eschewed its usual belly-dancers for a testosterone-charged piece about piracy in what looked unsettlingly like a declaration of intent.

Sweden’s techno entry didn’t float my boat, but as the only performer who met Azerbainjani human rights activists, perhaps Loreen (right) deserved her victory.

However, Britain’s TV host Graham Norton spoiled this year’s contest for me. Co-host Leyla Alieva had been good enough to go up to speak to Engelbert in the Green room and ask how he was. Then British fans did the same as those of any other country, ie raised the national flag and cheered. Norton’s summary of the report was, "there’s the British contingent – they sound like a BNP rally".

Norton (left) thus revealed himself as a leftist BBC toadie, totally unlike his predecessor, Sir Terry Wogan. In comparing flag-waving patriots to racist extremists, especially as the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee approaches and Union Jacks proliferate, he himself flies the flag of middle-class internationalism so necessary for success in the contemporary BBC.

Concerning Britain’s ranking, radio Eurovision commentator Ken Bruce (right) hit the nail on the head: "as long as voting for each other’s neighbours goes on, can we do much better than [second place]…the UK must question if it wants to be in the UK in the future".

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Click for BBC1 coverage of Eurovision 2012 - Graham Norton's BNP comment starts at 1.00.00 (exactly 1 hour in)

Click for BBC Complaints

support Engelbert first, then let's get out of Eurovision

On 1 March, the BBC announced that Engelbert Humperdinck would be representing the UK at the Eurovision song contest in Azerbaijan. And now he’s been asked by the BBC documentary strand Panorama whether he should be attending the contest due to Azerbaijan’s human rights abuses, which were publicised when Nicki and Ell won last year.

It was sad to see the oppression on Panorama: Eurovision's Dirty Secret, especially the chap who was detained by police merely for voting for the country’s rival for the land of Nagorno-Karabakh, Ominously, there were reports of a wave of sabre-rattling over the region after the win.

This isn’t the first controversial Eurovision; in 1968, General Franco bought votes throughout Europe, forcing Cliff Richard into second place with Congratulations.

Given that Spain is one of the Big Five that fund Eurovision (along with Great Britain, France, Italy and Germany), it would have been difficult for the European Broadcasting Union to kick the country out, fascist or not.

But can’t the EBU learn from its mistakes?

Azerbaijan is another fascist country, and shouldn’t have been allowed to enter the contest in 2008. The administration will use Eurovision as propaganda, just as the Argentinian junta did with the 1978 World Cup and 1981 Queen concert, mounting the Falklands War as a last attempt to distract Argentinians from its abuses the next year.

A Eurovision official told the documentary that the EBU had to play by the rules. But there’s the rub: the rules, when dealing with a country that can produce victories of over 90% for the ruling party with every plebiscite, are meaningful only to the patsy that plays by them.

I hope Englebert belts it out for Britain. After the contest, and whatever bloody epilogue might ensue in the region, perhaps the Big Five could secede from the EBU and mount a song-contest where nobody legitimises far-flung tyrants?

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Click to go to Panorama: Eurovision's Dirty Secret at the BBC website

Look up Azerbaijan on the CIA Factbook

protest songs: Nearer my God to Thee

Amid the myths most "experts" agree that the Titanic's band (as they say) played on with Nearer my God to Thee.

During a recent interview on Steve Wright’s radio show, Julian Fellowes, creator of the ITV series Titanic, addressed the issue of why we’re so obsessed the centenary of this leviathan’s demise. His reply: just as the "unsinkable" Titanic headed inexorably towards its nemesis with every sector of pre-war society represented, that civilisation, which considered itself unsinkable, had less than ten years.

Fellowes points to the elaborate parade that would be held in Russia the year after the sinking to celebrate the Romanovs’ 300th anniversary on the throne: most of them would die in a hail of Bolshevik bullets in Yekaterinburg 4 short years later.

In truth, just as the iceberg flooded too many compartments for the Titanic to stay afloat, so the slow-burning disaster that Europe was sleepwalking into was too damaging to survive. For example, Eric Hogsbawm points out in Age of Extremes that the trenches, barbed wire and machine-guns that defined 1914-18 were all present in the 1904-5 Russo-Japanese war for anyone who might have cared to take notice. The Ottoman Empire provided a blueprint for industrial-scale massacre in Bulgaria in 1876, and would do so again in Armenia, starting in 1915. Europe’s iceberg, the First World War, was virtually unavoidable after Germany finally forced France to recognise its existence in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles following 1870’s Franco-Prussian War.

Again Europe faces an iceberg, symbolised by the Ottomans’ heirs avariciously eyeing our lands once more. Will our patriotic parties and defence leagues be ready to act as lifeboats when we are too flooded to float? We can only pray, and Nearer my God to Thee is as good a prayer as any.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

This post is dedicated to the 1,514 victims of the Titanic, the millions left dead following Europe's iceberg, and all the past, present and future victims of the iceberg currently at Europe's hull.

Click to hear Julian Fellowes intervied on Steve Wright's radio show

Click here for the ITV series Titanic

The Voice versus Britain's Got Talent

The first disbled pop-star I saw on the BBC was Robert Wyatt, performing I’m Believer on Top of the Pops in 1974. Wyatt had been paralysed from the waist down following a party thrown by June Campbell Cramer (Lady June) the year before. The producer hadn’t wanted Wyatt to appear in his wheelchair because it wasn’t “rock and roll” enough, but Wyatt won the day.



Things have changed, and now the BBC dictates what is and isn’t appropriate for us, its funders, to see, hear and learn.

Which is why I’d had high hopes for The Voice, a new talent show where the four judges – Tom Jones, Jessie J, will.i.am and Danny O’ Donoghue – cannot see the source of the voice they before they decide whether to take them on for further training.

While this much was true, it soon became obvious that the contestants had already been through a pre-show selection process that the viewing public, ie licence-payers funding the show, were not invited to witness, much less comment on or participate in.

One good thing was that the ageist, sexist BBC hierarchy would see Tom Jones as merely the token older person and Jessie J as merely the token woman. But these two ended up with three artistes each, jointly leading the pack.

But where were the very British eccentrics that make talent shows in this country such fun? Acts of the sort that you can see every week on Britain’s Got Talent, the ITV behemoth that competes with The Voice for the same slot? The public-school, high-culture BBC decision-makers decided that they are not suitable for us to see.

Meanwhile, on BGT, blue-collar Brits (and Europeans) entertained us, finishing with operatic teens Jonathan and Charlotte who blew the opposition away. I know what I’ll be watching in coming weeks.

Tony Urquhart
300 words

Military Wives: did Simon Cowell scuttle his own single?

I’m not sure why music-buyers were so resentful of Simon Cowell’s hits machine that they let Rage Against the Machine swear their way to the top in Christmas 2009. Cowell’s progenies were certainly manufactured; but so were, say, the Monkees, Cream and the Spice Girls.

The Girls managed to bag the Christmas number one three times consecutively, the same as The Beatles – although after a year’s hiatus they got Christmas back again with Hello Goodbye.

X Factor winners had four consecutive number ones until Rage in the Machine, then winner Matt Cardle scored with When we Collide, powered by the well-oiled media machine that is Cowell’s record label Syco.

So why did this year’s winners’ record, Cannonball by Little Mix, get released just in time to peak a week too early? Did the skilled media manipulator make a mistake?

I don’t think so. He’s had what he wanted: a number one from them. I reckon he scuppered their chances to get this Sunday’s top spot so that the Military Wives Choir have a clear run with their single Wherever you Are, going so far as to "concede" their victory.

As choirmaster Gareth Malone explained to Chris Tarrant on Radio 2, the frequency of repatriations of bodies coupled with the tenth anniversary of our engagement in Afghanistan has concentrated minds upon the plight of serving and former soldiers and their families in a fashion unprecedented in modern times.

If Cowell’s act were seen to be fighting the Wives for Number 1, the national repercussions could shake his shows to their foundation on both sides of the Atlantic, so it seems he’s wisely decided to fight another day.

But there’s still competition out there, and the Military Wives will only succeed if we buy their song – listen to it below, then DOWNLOAD from iTunes or Amazon!

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

BBC "tastemakers" decide what you'll hear next year

It’s not 2012 yet, but the BBC has decided what next year’s pop music radio will sound like. It has decided who 2012’s top artists will be, and produced a playlist picked by 120 "tastemakers", most of whose names left me asking: "who?"

You could say that the BBC’s controlling tendencies are holographically-coded. On one level it decides what those of us who care to listen to its radio will listen to next year. On another Bruce MacGregor (right), presenting BBC Radio Scotland’s flagship folk show Travelling Folk, found himself unable to say the title of one of his tracks, Mairerad Green and Anna Massie’s jig Malteser Madness, in case he might be accused of "product placement".

National DJs willing to unilaterally introduce new music have been systematically distanced from prime-time – for example, "whispering" Bob Harris has been moved to midnight on Sunday morning on BBC2 – and the legendary John Peel’s shoes remain unfilled.

Perhaps closest to Peel is Stuart Maconie on the digital station 6 Music with his twin shows The Freak Zone and The Freakier Zone. What grates about these shows, however, is the frequency with which Maconie reveals his BBC-friendly assumptions by describing an act as "left-field", as song as "coming out of the left wing" or applying his highest accolade to an outfit by cooing it’s "a collective".

Much of what BBC Radio does is world-class, but its decision to hand £1,000,000 of our money to U2 in free publicity summed up its strategy: to decide what people should want then set about "educating" them as to why they wanted it. Privatising the fascist media monolith’s radio services and selling advertising where the interminable trailers now lie would serve a double goal: it would save us money, and let hugely talented individuals get on with being world-class.

Tony Urquhart
300 words

is diabetes a laughing matter?

Soul singer Linda Jones can be an acquired taste: her allmusic profile describes her oevre as "probably the most gloriously histrionic soul records of all time", while blogger 4thpip states that "you just want to reach through your speakers and hold on to her for her own, dear life".

One of Jones’ songs turned up this week on one of my favourite radio shows, Stuart Maconie’s Freakier Zone. It and its sister show, The Freak Zone, are among the only places where you can find music that just doesn’t get airplay: they’re both on the digital station BBC Radio 6 Music.

The context in which her song, Your Precious Love, appeared was in a presentation by "poet, artist and songwriter" Edward Barton, entitled "Profound Failures". While airing the sort of music Maconie does demands a certain lack of cynicism, Barton was not encumbered by any such impediment. Informing us that Jones "died of diabetes exacerbated by excessive drinking shortly after making this record," he goes on to add that "you can feel God grimace, knowing that this woman is about to land on his doorstep".

I had to listen to that part – starting at 11 minutes into the programme – again. Is diabetes now one of the subjects that self-styled entertainers feel empowered to have a pop at? Given that some subjects are fireproofed by the BBC, it is all the more frustrating to hear others ripped apart.

Stuart Maconie had the good grace to sound uncomfortable during Barton’s tirade, to the point of remarking after the song that "you want to give her a cuddle". Will he now demonstrate the even-handedness that the BBC was once known for, and invite Barton back to explain to an audience of diabetics exactly what is funny of dying from complications of the condition?

Joe Daniels
300 words

Click to listen to the episode of the Freakier Zone discussed until midnight GMT on Friday 9 September.