Do you want tracts or tracks? Quentin Letts has gone for the tracks and Radio 3’s politician-free zone detoxing from the Today show’s politicised take on everything from sliced bread to bent bananas.
Virtuous teetotallers boast about going on a ‘detox’ for a month. Well, bully for them. Mind you, I just did something similar and truly feel a lot better for it.
But this is not because I forsook alcohol. Go without hooch for a month? You must be joking. No. My detox routine concerned early-morning listening habits.
I switched from Radio 4 and instead tuned in to the BBC’s classical music station, Radio 3. Yes, I gave up the Today programme.
It began in the second week of January and it is bliss. Instead of being assailed by the latest Project Fear alarms about how Brexit is going to consign us to ruin, I have had my horizons expanded by top-class music.
Today’s programme would not have changed his mind as it ticked every right-on box from Project Do Fear about Brexit to Project Don’t Fear about Islam.
We had an Imam comparing the shooting in Florida with the actions of the ex-British Jihadis, presumably trying to reassure us that the Jihadis are driven by the same temporal demons of the non-Muslim killer and thus their murderous rampages have nothing to do with Islam. And anyway…forgive and forget…let’s be more compassionate and forgiving…they were driven to do what they did by circumstances, malign influences and world events…they’re not bad lads really.
Ironically we then had Today launch into Project Fear telling us we will be terrorised by Jihadis if we leave the EU. They liberally quoted Sir John Sawers, ex-head of MI6, oh, a Remain voter, not mentioned by Today, who has consistently briefed against Brexit and wants it reversed….as any old chum of Tony Blair might do of course.
They also had Robert Hannigan on, ex-Director of GCHQ. He was previously interviewed by Emma Barnett a couple of weeks ago. She was rather stunned when she asked him if Brexit has made us less safe, she obviousy thought he’d say it would, but he replied no, in fact there has been more co-operation with Europe since the referendum…the only concern was to make sure we maintained the data sharing of intelligence. He also said that most intelligence work was bi-lateral between nations and not the EU itself…thus Brexit would make no difference.
How times change…I imagine someone has had a quiet word as an almost completely different picture was coaxed out of him today. Of course it helped that Justin Webb avoided asking if we would be less safe after Brexit and went straight for the data question…were the questions shaped to avoid embarrassing truths? Webb cherry-picked subjects that were of minor concern as Hannigan admitted but which could be sensationalised to alarming heights. It’s like the BBC reporting WWII by only looking at Dieppe, Dunkirk, the Blitz, Singapore and the fall of Tobruk and leaving the audience to think we lost the war….and of course failing to mention the Americans and all the other allies we had to help us win in Europe. Much like today where our major intelligence partner, the US, wasn’t mentioned…nor all the other countries around the world.
‘Any Questions’ was trailed telling us they would be asking if ‘leaving the EU would make us less safe, and how do we stop it making us less safe?’…..Hmmm…seems like the first question is pretty redundant in their mind. And of course then there is that important question…processed food, it gives us cancer and an early grave right, especially if you’re poor? Yes, it’s really all about class war…it’s an ‘issue’ that’s been hijacked by the Left and turned into a narrative about the rich living longer and the poor dying early due to the rubbish food they have to eat due to poverty….never mind people are fitter, bigger and live far, far longer than ever before due to this food….and that is why the NHS is having to cope with so many old people now….processed bread and chicken nuggets….maybe we should feed the lower classes gruel and the odd turnip for a treat and let them die even younger….leaving only the rich, educated and intelligent who can then vote against Brexit in any future referendum and keeping the NHS for the healthy and wealthy. So many problems solved with a bit of lateral thinking. ‘Toxic’ chicken nuggets are a liberal/fascist’s wet dream really…like Zyklon B for the dirty, unwashed, stupid masses who dare to think for themselves….it is after all Big Business force-feeding us these things…and they all want to Remain….suspicious or what? Let’s face it Remainers are not shy about wishing death upon Leave voters.
Anyway…here’s some more of Quentin Letts’ thoughts on detoxing from Today…
Without Radio 4 winding me into a bate, life has become much less itchy. Instead of having to hear ministerial half-wits trying to claim the HS2 railway is a good idea, or professional grievance-mongers moan about the health service, or a gloopy-voiced reporter trotting out cliches about food banks, my mornings started with music from various centuries and cultures.
For a newspaper reporter to write that is, you may feel, self-harmful. Is Today not an agenda-setter?
That has always been the received wisdom in Fleet Street and elsewhere in British public life. At big investment houses, in government departments, in the lobbying and public-policy worlds, Today has long been de rigueur.
Maybe I’m imagining it, or maybe I’m just getting old, but since the EU referendum, the output of many BBC current affairs shows has become markedly shrill. Hour after hour they broadcast neuralgia — gripes from the modern Establishment that Brexit is going to bring all manner of disasters.
While prisoners of Radio 4 were being subjected to yet another fist-chewer of an interview with Labour’s robotic Remoaner Sir Keir Starmer MP, or while they were wheeling out yet another retired mandarin or professional secularist or social-mobility hand-wringer, I was being captivated by a Rachmaninoff cello sonata. The cello sang deep and lonely to the piano’s trickle. Mesmerising.
While Today listeners were probably having to endure some big-state propaganda about Whitehall impact assessments or NHS winter pressures or EU immigrants’ rights or Legal Aid cuts or Heaven knows what else, I was having my mind opened to the modern English composer Jonathan Dove’s In Beauty May I Walk.
If I’ve felt a smidgeon of regret it is only because an old friend of mine became editor of ‘Today’ last year and she said she was going to try to make the programme less metropolitan. She quickly ran into flak from the BBC establishment and Labour MPs.
I had been losing patience with Today for some years. I thought the programme was dreadful during the Leveson inquiry, after the Cameron government had caved in to centre-Left demands to bring newspapers under political control.
How could the BBC’s flagship radio programme sympathise so gleefully with such an authoritarian move?
During the Coalition years, when our country’s finances were teetering close to the abyss, Today eagerly promoted voices demanding greater spending by government. We rarely seemed to hear from the taxpayers who crave greater restraint by the Treasury.
Maybe I am being unfair to Mishal Husain and Nick Robinson & Co, but they seem imprisoned in the Westminster bubble, which, with every day that passes is further removed from the real world most Britons live in.
Life is so much bigger and more interesting and full of possibilities than Today suggests.
Can I keep up my abstinence from Today? Possibly not. Journalistic curiosity is inescapable and there is really no one better for skewering our awful politicians than John Humphrys.
But at least I now know where to go for relief when the cacophony of luvvies becomes too much.