A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
NOTHING I have heard on the wireless for a long time involves the B.B.C. in greater apparent discredit—I em- phasise the adjective for reasons that will appear—than the broadcast on P. G. Wodehouse on Tuesday night. The an- nouncement that the news would be followed by a talk on Wodehouse by " Cassandra," of the Daily Mirror, must have caused some surprise, but it was nothing to the astonishment every listener who heard the talk—cheap, slanderous, feeble- violent, calculated inevitably, if it had any effect at all, to create a reaction sympathetic to Wodehouse—must have felt that the B.B.C. should ever have passed such a script. " Pelham Grenville Wodehouse," we were told among other things—to be called Pelham Grenville is evidently a serious aggravation of other offences—when the war broke out, was living at Le Tou- quet " gambling." I should like to know the authority for that There are other things I should like to know too. Every listener I have spoken to so far had one word for the broadcast —outrageous. Disgust with the thing, I understand, at Broad- casting House from top to bottom was universal. If the B.B.C. had been a free agent it would have been turned down at sight. But over a wide and undefined field the B.B.C. must take orders from the Ministry of Information, and the orders in this case were imperative. Whether the mandate was Mr. Duff Cooper's personally, I have no means of knowing. But the responsibility is clearly his. If he has decided that the Daily Mirror is the glass of fashion and the mould of form, most of the hard things that have been said about his Ministry seem considerably too mild. As for Wodehouse, his case has been adequately dealt with in temperate comment from many quarters. To revive it at all was idiotic psychology.
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