I've got a little list. . .
MICHAEL HENDERSON
One of the world's most original
paintings hangs in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna (about 300 do, actually, but one in particular commends itself). It is the 'Feast of the Bean King' by Jacob Jordaens, a pupil of Rubens, and it tells a most compelling tale. The servants of a titled gentleman are permitted an annual feast, and the cake baked for the occasion contains a single bean. Whoever finds it in his slice when the cake is cut becomes 'king' for the day, and can instruct others to do his bidding. Naturally. Jordaens shows the revellers in a suitable state of disrepair, with the king, a jolly-looking chap, quaffing an imperial measure of wine.
Wouldn't we all like to be that man? Wouldn't it be nice to hand out rewards for work well done, and apply a vigorous boot to those backsides we have longed to kick? Just think of all the ways one could improve public life. With that crown on his head the enlightened monarch could sum
mon the wretched Jane Root from her eyrie in White City and tell her, 'You're running BBC 2 into the ground, you silly woman, so you'll simply have to go.' As for the public toilet in Leicester Square, that needs a good clean. Let's see, Yes, of course! That's just the job for Yasmin Alibhai-Brown.
Never mind New Year resolutions. In the spirit of the bean king let's concentrate on New Year wishes. I'll settle for three: William Trevor to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, Lancashire to win cricket's County Championship, and Timothy Taylor's Landlord bitter to be available, free of charge, as part of the council services. (It would also be grand to see if Toby 'who is this Eugene O'Neill?' Young could get through one of his notices without betraying his frightful ignorance of the theatre, but that is like crying for the moon.) Can we settle instead for a more modest proposal: an improvement in the quality of voices and presentation on Radio Five Live? We can. Nay, we must. It is nothing short of a national disgrace that the world's biggest sponsor of journalistic talent should find it so hard to find enough people of sufficient ability, and the failure is most evident in the BBC's sports coverage. Listeners were treated last week to an excruciating performance by a man called Mark Saggers, who must be the worst presenter of a major sports programme in the history of the wireless. There he was, hosting the Saturday afternoon show. the 'flagship' of the whole enterprise, and he couldn't put one word precisely in front of another. Do they fish these people out of the pub? Be gone the lot of them, with their faux-matiness, their mockney demotic, their verb-free sentences, and their insufferable crawling to footballers.
And while we're about it, let's turn some heat on those footballers who walk into comfy jobs within the media to masquerade as experts. How much expertise has anybody heard during the Rio Ferdinand affair? Has a single footballer expressed the view held by virtually everybody else that the Manchester United player (who 'forgot' about a drugs test) got off lightly? No, they're all 'gutted' for 'the boy'. (That word, boy, tends to give the game away. Few footballers ever reach adulthood.) So there are plenty of targets to aim at as we enter another year. Fire away!
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