KINDLY LEAVE THE POLITICAL STAGE
there's no busybodies like showbusybodies
SUCCESS in showbiz is a heady cordial. The shrill cries of excited teenagers, the chorused demands of a great concert hall for a return to the podium, a dozen curtain calls in a famous West End theatre, the instant recognition a television performer meets wherever he goes — these are liable to intoxicate even the most sober-minded. And pop stars, actors, playwrights, musi- cians, drolls are not, by the nature of their work, particularly balanced people in the first place. All too easily, they turn into exaltes, and begin to believe that the fame accorded to their success in performing a specific, often narrowly defined, task su- perbly well applies to everything they do, say and, not least, think. There's no busybodies like showbusybodies. If a re- cord is top of the pops, why should not the man who made it hold forth on the environment? Does not a stunning per- formance as Lady Macbeth entitle an actress to tell us about the rights and wrongs of the Gulf? If a man can force us to laugh till our guts ache, can't he tell us how to vote too? So they kid themselves. In fact the average dozen men and women you stop in the street are far more likely to produce political wisdom, or at least com- mon sense, than showbiz personalities overburdened with self-importance, and soft touches for any kind of charlatanism around.
The BBC has recently become a bit tired of those it has helped to fame getting too big for their stage boots and trying on political ones for size. Television com- panies are perhaps less mesmerised by stars than others since they know, from experience, how easy it is to magnify a modicum of talent into what looks like imperishable genius by projecting it repe- atedly into millions of homes. No televi- sion star is a hero to his producer. Telly fame is easy come, easy go, and only the real giants, who do not lose their heads so easily or seek to instruct us in political morals, can survive long when the cameras move somewhere else. The networks hold the cards and it surprises me that they put up with political tantrums by performers as much as they do. The BBC, the most consistent Pygmalion of them all, which has created countless celebrities from no- thing, is right to show a bit of muscle, especially when the stars, or 'stars', adopt an inconsistent or humbugging posture. A sports commentator who used his celebri- ty, acquired through the BBC, to urge people not to pay the community charge did not have his contract renewed. Quite right. If the charge is, as its critics com- plain, a poll-tax, then so is the BBC licence fee. A man whose munificent fees are paid from a compulsory tax levied on virtually every family in the land — and Labour's Arts spokesman, Mark Fisher, has lately discovered how difficult it is to exempt Old Age Pensioners from it — is in no position to oppose fixed charges on those who enjoy local government services, especially since, in this case, the less well-off do get reductions.
The BBC has also taken Mark Elder, the conductor, off the Last Night of the Proms, after he suggested he might remove 'Rule Britannia' and 'Land of Hope and Glory' from the programme, as `callous in the extreme', if British forces were fighting in the Gulf. What annoyed the BBC most, I don't doubt, was this unilateral threat to alter the selection of music to be played, which they decide, pay for and broadcast. The BBC does not like that kind of thing. Also, the entire controversy has been gone through before, and it has been amply proved that the concert-going public and viewers want to keep the old tunes. Mr Elder is rather fond of promoting his political views. Three years ago he used the Proms to accuse the Government of not giving enough money to the arts. As the Times put it on Monday, 'Nothing is less attractive than an artist using a privileged platform to demand money with menaces 'No, he certainly doesn't feel his mother is too domineering.' from the tax-payer.'
`Rule Britannia' and 'Land of Hope and Glory' arouse particular distaste in prog- ressive music circles, and it is even put about that Sir Edward Eiger himself grew to hate the latter. I can find no evidence for this in Jerrold Northrop Moore's immense Edward Elgar: a Creative Life (Oxford 1984), and it seems pretty unlikely. As Moore shows, Elgar co-operated closely with A.C.Benson over the composition of the `Coronation Ode' (1902), of which it was a part; and when Boosey & Co published `Land of Hope and Glory' as a separate song, it brought him `his first really big royalty cheque'. The argument that such songs, which reflect a particular mood and period, are no longer 'relevant' is absurd. You might have said the same about the Eroica, conceived in admiration of Buonaparte the First Consul, whom Beethoven repudiated the moment he transformed himself into the Emperor Napoleon. Fine tunes, great music, trans- cend their origins. Empires come and go, but as Dr Johnson says, nations are re- membered for their poets. Rome fell, but Virgil remains. Mr Elder, be it noted, did not raise the question of 'relevancy' when he was offered, and accepted, the Queen's invitation to become a Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
All the same, the controversy serves to remind us that the kind of patriotism which those of us who were children in the 1930s took absolutely for granted does not really exist among people born during or since the 1950s and 1960s, when the Empire was dismembered. They go to the Last Night of the Proms and sing the old songs, because they are good ones, and no others have taken their place. The adversarial culture of the past — our side and their side — has gone too. Saddam Hussein gets at least as much time on television news bulletins as Mrs Thatcher. If the second world war had been fought in the television age, would Hitler have been battling with Churchill to have the last word on the Nine O'Clock News? I fear so, and getting it, often enough. How do you write stirring verse and martial airs about such abstract con- cepts as a Security Council resolution, or collective security, or the Economic Com- munity? 'We Shall Overcome' and other Sixties ditties have not caught on, except among the politically sectarian. Even the Greens, who arouse a lot of emotion among non-political folk, have failed to produce an anthem which masses of ordin- ary people want to roar out. I wish, quite seriously,that the Prince of Wales, who is good at getting constructive arguments going, would turn his mind to the idea of a new national song for the 1990s, and perhaps hold a competition among our poets, professional and amateur, to pro- duce one. Then we can set our musicians to work, to see if any has the Elgar touch. In the meantime, leave us our trusted tunes, Mr Elder, and stick to your baton.
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