‘Terrifying’ climate Prom faces criticism
A BBC Prom billed as a “unique event for all the family” has been criticised for delivering a climate change warning “designed to terrify”. Ivan Hewett, The Daily Telegraph’s reviewer, described Sunday’s concert, which was based on the illustrated book The Lost Words, which aims to revive disappearing words relating to the natural world, as a “statement of the most extreme form of ecocatastrophism, designed to terrify and intimidate the mostly young audience”.
IT was billed as a “unique event for all the family” but instead the BBC Proms delivered a catastrophic climate change warning “designed to terrify” the young audience.
The celebration of classical music opened its 49th Prom of the season with a new composition based on the words of Swedish climate activist, Greta Thunberg, warning: “We are in the midst of the sixth mass extinction.”
The concert was based on illustrated book The Lost Words, which aims to revive little-used or disappearing words that describe the natural world.
A spokesman for the BBC said the Proms team believe music should “react to the times in which we live”, so that it is “not divorced from reality”.
But Ivan Hewett, the Daily Telegraph music critic, said Sunday’s concert was instead a “statement of the most extreme form of eco-catastrophism, designed to terrify and intimidate the mostly young audience, who clearly lacked the maturity to challenge it”.
“It’s unfortunate that the supposedly impartial BBC turned a promising event into an opportunity for ecopropaganda,” he said, in a two-star review, accusing the broadcaster of the “blatant politicising of an event aimed at children”.
The concert opened with the voice of 16-year-old Greta, who has become the face of youth climate change activism, on a loop with excerpts from her speech to the EU Parliament in Strasbourg in April.
“You need to listen to us, we who cannot vote. What we are doing now can soon no longer be undone,” she said.
Robert Macfarlane, author of The Lost Words, said he was “so thrilled” when he heard Greta’s words would be used in the Prom, praising her “voice ringing with force and need and urgency but also breaking”.
The concert was said to have received a rapturous response from some members of the audience with some tweeting to say they had been moved to tears.
A BBC spokesman said this year’s Proms were celebrating 50 years of the moon landings, the earth and the influence nature has had on composers present. “It’s important for art to reflect topical debate and to bring this to the attention of the audience,” he said.
In July, The Guardian described how this year’s Proms is “sounding the alarm for a planet in peril”, interviewing director David Pickard about what it called “this year’s theme, nature, and our part in destroying it”. Mr Pickard said: “When you ask someone to write about nature now, they are not necessarily writing about it in a romantic way, in the way Beethoven did. They’re writing about the danger of loss.”
‘It’s unfortunate the supposedly impartial BBC turned a promising event into eco-propaganda’
The BBC’S Poldark came to an end as a new series of Bake Off begins, which prompts the thought that Aidan Turner would never have looked that sinewy if he ate more cake. Poldark supposedly made Sunday nights sexier with its lead character scything without a top on, but some expert scythers were incensed. With his excessive grunting and aggressive technique, they complained that his hacking at the hay was poor form – and he ought to have kept his shirt on to protect himself from the sun. Indeed.
Older viewers will remember that when Mr Darcy slipped into a lake in 1995’s Pride and
Prejudice, he did so in his shirt, trousers and boots. That’s how Sunday television ought to be: handsome but nothing to lose a night’s sleep over. Some people do have a job to do in the morning.