BBC rules out all hope of irony
RHUGE good wishes to the ex-Girls Aloud star Sarah Harding, outrageously outed on social media after being spotted in hospital having treatment for advanced cancer. She’d had no intention of going public over her chemotherapy but the internet left her no choice. Shame on her pursuers: I hope they are very proud of themselves. In the meantime, Sarah, we’re all thinking of you and rooting for you.
RSOME national characteristics are pretty subtle. British irony is one of them. It’s an elusive little thing. Few other countries fully understand British irony – though the Americans make a fair stab at it – and even we can have trouble nailing it down, probably because we’re so up-close and personal to it. But it’s part of our national DNA.
Take the current furore over the Last Night of the Proms, and the nonsense over Rule Britannia being performed minus the, er, actual words, which makes it a singularly pointless exercise.
Actually, this happened once before – but unlike now, for the right reasons. In the days immediately after 9/11 it was quickly agreed in London that the boisterous Rule Britannia and Land Of Hope And Glory would be completely out of tune with the sombre mood of the moment.They were both quietly removed from that year’s Proms, and no one with a pulse complained about it.
Now the BBC says it’s dropping the vocals to both arrangements this year because of Covid. Nonsense. Covid has merely provided the BBC with an excuse to cave in to decades of right-on pressure over what are perceived to be “jingoistic” songs. Yet Jerusalem, You’ll Never Walk Alone and the National Anthem WILL be sung in the Albert Hall this year.
So some lyrics are safer to sing in a pandemic than others, are they? Do our intelligence a favour,Auntie.
JI’M one of the generation teenagers mock with the phrase: “OK, boomer”. In fact, I’m such a boomer that my emails are as obsessively punctuated as a school essay. Paragraphs, semi-colons, hyphens, commas, and yes, full stops.
Which means, apparently, that I’m “intimidating” poor Generation Z: snowflakes who think full stops are “negative and passive-aggressive”.
Since most email addresses are full of “.co.uk” and “.com” I’m not sure how these darlings even get through the day. But from now on, I’ll end sentences with an “x”. They’ll think it’s a kiss... bless ’em.
Of course the line from Rule Britannia that’s causing all the trouble is “Britons never, never, never will be slaves”.
Sorry, how exactly is that an endorsement of slavery? Answer: it’s not. It’s a clarion call to freedom. It’s an ANTI-slavery lyric.
And while we’re on the subject of Britain and slavery, can we just remind ourselves that it’s this country that took the decision to abolish it? And then spent a great deal of national treasure backing that policy up? We sent warships around the world to disrupt slave routes, intercept slave ships, free their shackled prisoners.
Yes, once upon a time we ourselves were slave traders. But we changed our ways and we forced others to change theirs, too, at gunpoint.A little credit, perhaps?
Back to British irony. Does anyone seriously think those last-nighters, bobbing up and down ridiculously from the knees, arms linked, silly hats on, getting ready to bawl “Rule Britannia”, are projecting sinister nationalism across the airwaves?
Of course not.They’re being ironic.As are we, watching at home.
If you want proof of that, go back to 2016. Peruvian tenor Juan Diego Florez sashayed on to sing Rule Britannia dressed, not in formal evening dress, but as King of the Incas, with feathered cloak and sun god helmet. It was camp as Christmas and everyone loved it.
I wish I could say the BBC was being subtly ironic in its ruling on Rule Britannia. But it’s not; there’s no room for irony in wokeness.That’s what makes it so terminally depressing.