The vox pop on BBC vox pops: Oh, stop wasting our time!
Good morning! Today we’re talking about vox pops. For some reason, the BBC appear to be hell-bent on cramming them into every single one of their news items about Brexit. But are they a worthwhile use of viewers’ time and money? Or are they just a load of lazy old filler?
I went out on to the streets of Britain to ask the public what they thought.
“I’m sick of the BBC’S obsession with vox pops,” said Barry Stereotype, 53, a market stallholder in Stoke-ontrent. “They never tell you anything interesting or insightful about Brexit or the political process. It’s always just an endless succession of boredlooking members of the public saying, ‘They should just get on with it.’ The BBC’S job is to report actual news. They should just get on with it.”
“These vox pops on the TV are always so tedious and predictable,” said Gladys Madeupname, 82, a pensioner in Sunderland. “Here’s an idea for the BBC: don’t bother broadcasting a vox pop unless it actually seems to indicate a newsworthy change in public opinion. If everyone in Edinburgh tells you they’re now gagging for a no-deal Brexit, or the entire population of
Essex is strolling through Basildon town centre whistling Ode to Joy and wearing a Jean-claude Juncker mask, then fine, show us. But otherwise: stop wasting our time.”
“I’ll tell you what annoys me about vox pops,” said Ted Gruff, 76, an ex-miner in a working men’s club in Mansfield. “They all seem designed to perpetuate this narrative that every single one of the 17.4 million people who voted Leave is workingclass, and lives in a desolate ‘left-behind’ town in the north of England or the Midlands. But actually there are loads of Leave voters who are well-off, middle-class southerners. Then again,
I suppose the ‘leftbehind’ narrative is quite useful, for certain politicians, because it helps them argue that opposing Brexit is snobbish and cruel. If you think Brexit’s a bad idea, you must be a wealthy metropolitan elitist trying to trample the dreams of the poor, and so on. Curiously enough, the politicians who make this argument always seem to be ones who had never previously shown even the faintest concern for the poor, and in fact have a lengthy track record of making them poorer.”
“What depresses me most about vox pops is the level of ignorance they expose,” said Linda Imaginary, 41, a shopper in Boston, Lincolnshire. “There was a terrible one on the Today programme the other morning. They asked this silly old duffer what the Government should do about Brexit, and he clearly didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. David Davis, I think his name was.”
Small children have an insatiable curiosity about the world around them. They’re always so eager to draw on their parents’ wisdom and knowledge. Which is great. But they do ask an awful lot of questions. Last Saturday, I was taking my five-year-old son to his swimming lesson, when we walked past a little shop. “Dada,” said my son. “Do you know what that sign on the door means? It means if you’re a dog, you can’t go in.”
“That’s right,” I said.
My son looked thoughtful for a moment. “Dada,” he said, after a pause. “Could a spider go in?”
“Well,” I said. “Yes, I expect the shop probably does have the odd spider in it.”
My son looked thoughtful again. “What about a monkey?” he said. “Could a monkey go in the shop?”
“Well,” I said. “There isn’t a sign saying ‘no monkeys’. Or any other indication that monkeys are expressly forbidden from entry. So I suppose that were the shopkeeper to order a monkey from the premises, the monkey could reasonably argue that it was well within its rights to be there, and refuse to leave until it had finished its shopping.”
My son looked at me. “Don’t be silly, Dada,” he said. “Monkeys can’t talk.”
You can imagine what a fool I felt.
In dark and lonely times, poetry can offer both comfort and inspiration. Perhaps that’s why so many politicians turn to it. The day before the EU referendum in 2016, I attended a press conference during which Steven Woolfe – at the time an MEP for Ukip – unexpectedly read out a poem he’d written to mark the occasion. The poem envisioned a Britain that had voted to remain in the EU, and was now bitterly regretting it. As he read, Mr Woolfe’s voice became choked with emotion, and his eyes welled with tears. “Free-born men and women cry,” he intoned. “Why, oh why, oh why, oh why?”
At last year’s Conservative Party conference, Geoffrey Cox, the Attorney General, quoted Milton in support of Brexit. “Methinks I see in my mind,” boomed Mr Cox, “a noble and puissant nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep!” And this week, Mark Francois – the Conservative MP for Rayleigh & Wickford – treated a rally of Brexiteers to an impassioned reading of a poem by Tennyson. “It could almost,” said Mr Francois solemnly, “have been written for our current situation.” He then launched into Ulysses, a poem in which the great warrior-king of the title, now in old age, proclaims his longing to set boldly forth across the seas in search of one last adventure before he dies.
Mr Francois’s performance was deeply stirring. I did wonder, though, whether he’d accidentally read out the wrong poem.
Alongside Ulysses in any respectable anthology sits an even more celebrated work by Tennyson. The Charge of the Light Brigade honours a courageous but doomed mission in which the British were totally illequipped, hopelessly exposed, and utterly let down by blundering leadership.
“O the wild charge they made! All the world wondered.”