I am not a teetotaller, believing (though with frequent mis-
givings, when I see what alcohol can do to some of my own friends) that temperance is on the whole to be preferred to abstinence. But I feel considerable sympathy with the protests which I see expressed in various quarters at the gratuitous advertisements of drink as drink so lavishly dis- seminated in B.B.C. programmes. Half the trouble of drinking comes from making a kind of cult of it, with treating as its most pernicious element. A writer in the British Weekly has analysed the references to drink and drinking (none of them, I gather, adverse to the habit) in the National and Regional Programmes in a recent fortnight ; the number in the first week was I16, in the second 130. If they were all cut out we should no doubt miss some good jokes ; most of us have laughed at in our time Mr. Robey's insistent affirmation that another little drink wouldn't do us any harm. That happens to be the brewing (and distilling) trade's affirmation too, and in at least two cases out of four it isn't true. I can hardly see the B.B.C. doing for any other trade—the tobacco companies, for instance—what it is consciously or unconsciously doing for the brewers. Another little joke, meaning another kind of little joke, wouldn't do us any harm.
* * * *
Previous page
