The Dispossessed

RA D 10

By HENRY TUBE

Pro take the temperature of a newspaper one I need only read its letters. Sharply and with uncompromising truthfulness they reflect the pre- vailing level, the tone of the whole outfit; not, of course, because they are selected and doctored by the .;ame people who select and doctor the articles, but because readers like other human- beings are extraordinarily suggestible. It is easy enough to be civilised among the civil, but how many of us can shake off the contagion of in-

civility? Just so, badly-written articles will elicit badly-written letters, cheap points cheap counter- points and ill-digested thoughts equally ill- digested retorts. A writer must tremble at his post, not for its contradictions of his views but for its fatal echo of his tone of voice—`mon semblable, mon frere.'

Listening Post, the letter-column of the Home Service, was started not so long ago in the hope, I believe, that it might rival or even displace The Times as a platform for important public people. If this was Listening Post's original ambition it would be churlish to mock at it for falling so unhappily short. The fault may lie not in itself but in its stars, the other programmes in the Home Service whose level and tone it faithfully reproduces. But it is not quite so simple. If you listen to Ten O'Clock, and instead of switching smartly off at ten-thirty remain tuned in for Lis- tening Post, you enter a different world. The latter in no way reflects the tone of the former: Ten O'Clock, like most of the BBC's current affairs programmes in sound, is serious in intention, in- formative, even stimulating; Listening Post is a witch's brew of irritation, envy, triviality, loose- thinking and spite. Which then represents the true Home Service? Or does neither? There are two possible answers.

The first is that the Home Service suffers from a sort of dualism : paved with good intentions, dedicated still to the arts and muses, it yet believes deeply and desperately in the original, irredeemable stupidity of its listeners. So that, ironically, what Lord Reith complained of in 1928 is still true today: 'On most problems of immediate interest, the service is silent, and if controversial subjects are broached at all it is done in a halting, inconclusive and even plati- tudinous manner.' Ironically, because Lord Reith

was attacking a clause in the BBC's licence which precluded topics of political, religious or industrial

controversy. Current affairs has pulled itself out of this pit, only to have its place taken by the rest of the Home Service output. In effect, those 'prob- lem; of immediate interest,' those 'controversial subjects.' have been ghettoed, roped off for cer- tain times of the day, as gardeners and motorists, farmers, old people, children and Christians have also been roped off, reasonably enough, each special interest to its own sideshow. But the dif- ference between current affairs and the rest is not just one of subject-matter. The approach is dif- ferent, the level. To put it plainly, the audience is assessed at a different standard of intelligence.

It may seem far-fetched to claim that 'contro- versial subjects' are being kept out of, say, Motor- ing and the Motorist, and in a sense they are not —they appear there in name, though not in sub- stance. Would a scandal over safety factors in certain cars, for instance, be given the same strong lighting in Motoring and the Motorist as it would in The World At One?

Nor is it simply a question of specifically con- troversial subjects. Of the two comico-satirical programmes, Round the Home and Listen To This Space, the second appears to tackle the issues of the day hand-to-hand. the first to run a mile. Yet Round the Horne, with its zany queers, its outrageous puns, double entendres and dizzy bathos, aims neither below nor above anyone's intelligence. It is still the world we live in, trans- mogrified, carried to absurd lengths, but not softened for soft heads. Whereas Listen To This Space. having formed a low opinion of its audi- ence, is content to feed on second-hand ideas and to satirise so crudely that the abuses it purports to expose are lost under indiscriminate mud.

The truth is that by assessing thet level of its listeners in this way, by deliberately putting out material cut to that level, the Home Service estab- lishes a closed or vicious circle. It alienates the fastidious altogether and, on the principle of suggestibility, creates a low mentality in the rest. Then. challenged on the poor quality of their goods, these sly merchants can retort that the consumers would only blink at anything better. Pointing triumphantly to Listening Post or to the letters in Radio Times, they can say : this is our audience, just look at it. What can we do? We are bound to consider it, though, of course, like you we privately deplore. Still, try the Third Pro- gramme, that may be more your level.

The second answer to our question about the true Home Service is more melodramatic : it re- presents a battleground in the civil war that is just now raging all over our society. An article by Anthony Lejeune in this week's Telegraph colour magazine explores the plight of those he calls 'the dispossessed': Perhaps never before has a whole large sec- tion of the community felt as alienated as these people do now. Certainly never before in this country has there been a sense of alienation among people so essentially worthy, patriotic and honourable. . . .

They felt dispossessed, not so much materially (though many had been) as spiritually. Every- thing they had been brought up to value and believe in had been taken from them, under- mined, transformed. derided.

For all the sunset poignancy of these remarks, surely we glimpse here the very lineaments of Listening Post? Mr Lejeune confirms it : 'But the times we are living through now do tend to make these good people bad. They make them . . . un- charitable, class- and colour-conscious, resentful, despairing, -grasping and even pettily dishonest . . .' And the real headquarters of this outlaw band, the heart of the 'dispossessed' country, is of course Any Questions, which returned to the air in both Light and Home three weeks ago. The audience plays a significant part, asking the ques- tions, applauding when pleased, laughing when amused and silent when uncertain or mortified. The questions are not innocently phrased, but rather raise pennons and roll drums, tempting the unwary on to the pikes of prejudice. A well- reasoned answer against the bias of the question hardly ever elicits applause, while the grossest piece of rhetoric with the bias is a sure-fire show- stopper. One senses that the audience is following a line of argument not for its logic, but to extract the vital tenor--for them it is really a panel game, with a right and wrong answer already written down, and right rings the bell, collects the applause.

But this is no mere relaxation, like the other panel games-- My Word, Twenty Questions, etc. —there is an atmosphere of suppressed excite- ment, of the front line, of wounds given and re- ceived, and the four public figures who answer the questions are quickly drawn out of their rela- tively Olympian detachment into the thick of the fray. Those in sympathy with the bias of the questions are adepts at the emotive catchword: `a jolly good training for living.' 'a sort of bogus element about the town,' ordinary folk like you and me'; those not, are sometimes betrayed into extraordinary outbursts, as Lord Boothby was the other day : 'The Smith regime is absolutely damn-

able ... a disgrace ... a Nazi regime . a police state . . . no truck with them whatsoever . . . until they've really come to heel.'

What is explicit in Any Questions and Listen- ing Post is implicit in a great part of the Home Service, not so much in what is said as in what is avoided, in magazine programmes, in plays, in turns of phrase, in the cult of the amateur and the `plain man.' No one,' says Anthony Lejeune of the dispossessed, 'offers them comfort.' He is wrong. The Home Service is, or was, dedicated to doing just that; but those current affairs pro- grammes are the vanguard of their persecutors. At ten thirty each weekday night, we cross an armed frontier.