Aggers and the oiks
Michael Henderson
HOW wonderful it was to return from Australia to find our civic life in such safe hands. A town council in Dorset has banned Bernard Manning from its theatres, fearing riots in the streets of Weymouth if he took the stage to tell any 'racist' jokes. And the government has decided to ban the word 'homosexual' in its official communications. Our rulers haven't got round to rewriting Christmas carols yet (We three queens of Orient are'), but don't imagine they're not working at it.
Some things, gloriously, have not changed. Not content with the disgrace of Great Britons, the BBC is planning to find the nation's 'favourite book', no doubt with endorsements from the usual cast of show-offs. And the quality of news-reading on the corporation's many outlets remains abysmal. Is there nobody in Radio Five's teeming sports department who knows which syllable or word in any given sentence needs to be stressed? Certainly not Susan 'Can you hear me at the back?' Bookbinder, who mistakes the mike for a megaphone.
Miss B., who likes to wear her Manchester City shirt at work, now has a fierce rival, one Juliet Farrington. Listening to her garble her way through a sports digest the other day, it was obvious that the poor lass had absolutely no idea what she was talking about. For all the sense it made, she would have been better off reading the thing backwards.
This column has taken Bookbinder and her pals to task before, and there must be a fair chance that they will appear again. It would take an alert producer one week, no more, to sort out the nonsense at White City. But, as nobody seems to listen to what the presenters get up to, listeners will have to endure a lot more illiterate rubbish before anybody does anything about it.
Help is at hand, if only they would use their ears. In order to raise standards immediately, the senior sports producers have only to issue all members of staff with tapes of their cricket correspondent at work. Jonathan Agnew may be a bit precious (though he's a shy boy compared with that relentless self-promoter, Alan Green), but he has become an outstanding radio broadcaster, in the finest traditions of the old BBC, that superb public-service organisation we would happily trust with our licence fee.
To hear Agnew (like his predecessor, Christopher Martin-Jenkins) is to recognise those attributes that the finest radio reporters bring to their work: colour, clarity, rhythm, precision, articulation; in a word, sense. They have classical English voices: gentle, measured, but, when the occasion demands, they can also be lyrical. If you listen to Agnew this week, as he commentates on the Test cricket in Australia, you will recognise a first-class broadcaster.
As he is a middle-class chap who doesn't try to pretend to be anything else, he stands out in the brave new media world where it is fashionable for reporters to play the oik, knowing that it is the surest way to the top. One BBC sports reporter answers to the sobriquet 'cab driver', and, at 2001's Christmas party, his colleagues presented him with an A-Z of London, This Christmas, some kindly producer should have slipped a cassette of Aggers at the mike into his stocking, and into every other one. You never know. From little acorns. .
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