Thewitch is Dead hits No 1 in download chart
DING Dong! The Witch Is Dead, the song taken up as the anthem of the antiThatcher movement in the wake of her death, reached number one in the UK’s leading download chart last night, writes Judith Duffy.
The controversial song from the Wizard of Oz film has sold by the thousands since Thatcher died on Monday and is now number one in the Apple iTunes Store UK Top 10.
It will be revealed today if it has made number one in the UK Official Singles Chart, played on Radio 1, which is based on combined record sales and download numbers up to midnight last night.
The last update from the Official Charts Company, published on Friday, indicated Ding Dong was selling around 2000 copies a day.
At that stage it was still 12,000 copies behind the current number one, Need U (100%) by Duke Dumont and A*M*E which had sold more than 40,000 copies as of Friday.
The BBC has already said it will not play the song in full during this weekend’s Radio 1 chart show.
It said a news item will instead be broadcast explaining why the 70-yearold song is in the charts, during which a short clip will be played.
The corporation’s director general Tony Hall called the campaign to promote the song “distasteful”.
“However, it would be wrong to ban the song outright as free speech is an important principle and a ban would only give it more publicity,” he said
The decision provoked divided opinions on Twitter. Scottish author Gerry Hassan wrote: “#DingDong decision the worst of all worlds: play extract from song & then a newsreader ‘explains’. Pathe News lives!”.
Other Twitter users criticised the decision to play the song.
Tory MP John Whittingdale, chairman of the Commons Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee, called for the song not to be played.
But he later backed the BBC’s decision, saying: “I don’t think it would have been right to have allowed the Chart Show to have been hijacked for political purposes and had they played the whole song that would have been the consequence. But on the other hand they couldn’t have just ignored the fact that it does feature amongst the most downloaded singles of the week.”
On his BBC blog, Radio 1 controller Ben Cooper said he had been “caught between a rock and a hard place”.
He said: “Nobody at Radio 1 wishes to cause offence but nor do I believe that we can ignore the song in the chart show … I’ve therefore decided exceptionally that we should treat the rise of the song, based as it is on a political campaign to denigrate Lady Thatcher’s memory, as a news story.”
He added: “To ban the record from our airwaves completely would risk giving the campaign the oxygen of further publicity and might inflame an already delicate situation.” Video interview with Everything But
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