Inverted snobbery has left Desert Island Discs marooned
Unless you have been sharing a cave with Jeremy Corbyn you must know that Desert Island Discs, the Radio 4 programme which has a wonderful future behind it, is unrolling the red carpet this very day for David Beckham. They’re blowing out 75 candles, and who better to extinguish them than a footballer who lost his spark when Sir Alex Ferguson kicked him out of Manchester United 14 years back?
He could surprise us, of course. Maybe the ageing starlet has spent the past month in earnest conclave with his wife lending an expert ear to favourite recordings of the St Matthew
Passion (“Harnoncourt has the better singers, my dear”), The Rite of Spring and even the East St Louis Toodle Oo. “That Ellington. Different class”.
It’s a showbiz event, so they won’t be disappointed. The BBC have been plugging it all week, to persuade us that this is something not to be missed. Such is Desert Island Discs these days: a parade of people who fit snugly into a producer’s idea of what constitutes celebrity, teed up by Kirsty Young, whose over-advertised romantic charms are all too resistible.
As people have noted, there are fewer selections of classical music these days, and that is not a hanging offence. It is better for guests to make honest choices, related to people and events in their lives, than come up with a shopping list of “approved” picks designed to impress listeners. Enoch Powell once chose no fewer than four operas by Wagner, the kind of thing that gives Wagnerians a bad name. A blast of Booker T and the MGs would have broken it up.
At least Powell loved music. Ed Miliband, famously, presented an assortment of records that seemed to be cobbled together to show what an “inclusive” chap he is. It was the behaviour not so much of a man who has no life beyond politics, but who doesn’t even know there is a life beyond politics.
On the other hand, Denis Healey put Yves Montand and Edith Piaf alongside Chopin and Bach. Kenneth Williams, the brilliant comedian best known for
Carry On sauce, chose Schubert’s B flat piano trio: “such prodigality!” Bruce Forsyth – hurrah! – went for Bill Evans, Oliver Sacks for the Grateful Dead, and Stephen Fry, while giving Wagner the crown, also chose
Barwick Green, the Archers theme tune. In their differing ways they showed independence of thought.
Increasingly, when guests select pieces from the world of orchestral music or opera, they issue a caveat. Frank Skinner, the not terribly funny comedian, revealed that he had once seen The Magic Flute at Covent Garden but didn’t sit in the top seats with all those, you know, posh folk. Why not? He’s got a million washers in the bank. He can sit where he likes. He does when he goes to watch West Bromwich Albion.
That kind of inverted snobbery has tainted so much of modern life so it’s hardly surprising that it has infected
Desert Island Discs. An interest in pop music shows you’re with it. Any association with music of the 18th and 19th centuries suggests you’re a fuddy-duddy.
It begins at primary school, where musical appreciation classes were part of life until the early Seventies. It continues at secondary school, where learning to play an instrument, for most pupils, means banging a drum or strumming a guitar. Pop music, in its many forms, is held to be “democratic” in a way that orchestral music, with its sense of hierarchy and its greater emotional and intellectual demands on players and listeners, is not.
When Nietzsche wrote that “without music life would be a mistake” he was not thinking of the ephemeral sounds of teenage passion. He was referring to the immortals: Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Wagner. The ones who show us the essence of life, and why the struggle is worth it.
How is it possible for anybody who contemplates his or her own life not to choose something from the great composers if they are asked on Desert Island Discs?
“Some people can see farther than others.” The words belong to Bob Tear, the great Welsh tenor, who died six years ago. Bob, a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, was the least snooty of men. He had many intellectual interests, and was happy to share them with others who were not quite so sharp, because a lifetime’s experience in music had taught him that “the brandy of the damned”, as Shaw called it, was the best way to connect with the world.
Isn’t that so, Kirsty?