ANOTHER VOICE
Are we crazy to rank a minor Cabinet minister above the donkey nappies of Great Yarmouth?
MATTHEW PAR RIS
When I served on the Broadcasting Standards Commission, the others were always talking about something called 'news-values'. Apparently, the topic occu- pies a good deal of attention at the BBC wherever a few are gathered together to discuss public-service broadcasting.
I used to be unsure what news-values means, but Thursday morning last week helped me make up my mind. Just after 8 a.m., BBC Radio Four's Today programme broadcast two live interviews consecutively. For the first, the Rt Hon. Dr Jack Cunning- ham MP, Cabinet 'Enforcer', was in the stu- dio to talk about the Prime Minister's recent Cabinet reshuffle. The second, on the telephone, was with a Mr Peter Eng- land, carriageman, and concerned the Great Yarmouth Town Council's decision to make horses in Great Yarmouth wear nappies.
The discussion on horse dung was infinitely more important and interesting. Whatever news-values might be, there can be no doubt that manure in Great Yarmouth has more of them than Dr Cun- ningham. This is not meant unkindly to Dr Cunningham. Nobody could have given a worthwhile interview about a minor Cabi- net reshuffle in late July. Yet in this strange country we persist in identifying high-mind- ed seriousness with an eagerness to talk about such trifling, gossipy nonsense. Why? No adult person with a mind and a life of his own, a garden to cultivate and a vast, mysterious, beautiful and endlessly absorb- ing universe wheeling about his ears to marvel at, could possibly want to exhaust four precious minutes of his too short life listening to a radio interviewer and a minor member of the unremarkable Cabinet of a workaday government at a time of peace and economic stability talking ill-tempered- ly about things which had not happened after a prime minister's summer review of the allocation of administrative posts. Are we crazy in Britain?
Peter England was altogether another thing. Sue MacGregor conducted the inter- view with her habitual, delightful, wry frosti- ness. She began by explaining that the car- riage drivers of Yarmouth were taking their council to court over its impending new requirement that horses wear a kind of nappy. Representing the council during this interview was Mr Chris Skinner, its solicitor. Miss MacGregor turned to Mr England and asked what exactly this nappy for horses was. 'That's jus' una'visable; he said. 'That's su'ffin' they never 'ad to 'ave on, and that's jus' su'ffin' you can't pu' on 'em.' He was as mystified as Miss MacGregor about what the nappy would look like: Woo-body have sin it.'
His interviewer reminded us that these nappies have been accepted in other parts of the world. Mr England was having none of it. 'They keep sayin' what they got abroad, but abroad is abroad and we're in Great Yarmouth and things are different.' To this incontestable truth Miss MacGre- gor had no reply.
She turned to Mr Skinner, the town solici- tor. Could he please explain? Taking uncon- scious retreat in the mis-emphasis of prepo- sitions (always a sign of a secretly human individual obliged by his job to recite official pap) Mr Skinner said that licences to oper- ate carriages would be withdrawn unless the drivers used 'a device fitted behind the horse's tail to collect the dung'. There would, he explained, be 'bins at each end of the seafront' to tip it in. With 'all this dung spread about', added Mr Skinner, there had been complaints about the smell. 'Vehicles are squashing it all and spreading it about.'
In chipped Mr England, indignant. The story about a councillor allegedly finding a piece of dried dung on his restaurant table was ridiculous. Anyway, the council cleared up all kinds of other seafront rubbish with- out complaint — 'papers, burgers, oice- cream . . . Oo's payin' for that?' Only the other night he had encountered a council workman steam-cleaning a pavement, to remove bird droppings. 'I did ask the bloke 'ow often 'e had to do it, an' e replied, "As often as possible".'
'I mean, 'orse dung is grass, dried grass. By the time cars squash it it's in the tar- mac. . . .' This, too, Miss MacGregor chose not to contest, instead allowing Mr Skinner to insist that 'in other countries similar devices are fitted to horses and I don't know why it shouldn't work in Great Yarmouth'. Nor do we. But listeners will have felt an instinctive sympathy for Mr England's posi- tion. 'Whatever happened to little boys with buckets?' wondered John Humphrys, mov- ing on to the next item.
Spectator readers who chanced to hear may have been asking the same question. One reader had just been in touch following my column here about the changing face of the English street (26 June). Mr Tom Green- wood-Pryor writes from Bergerac in France to recall his job as a lookout boy on the horse-drawn covered vans of London. I could print his whole letter and amuse you better than by anything of my own, but let me at least quote Mr Greenwood-Pryor on dung:
In the City, packed with horse traffic, the problem of manure was solved by a troupe of teenagers who darted in and out of the traffic scooping up as they ran with oversized dust- pans which were emptied into iron bins on the street corners. They were called 'Brush and Pan Artists' and it was an entrance to a job in the City Corporation.
But what, I wonder, did the civic fathers do to make bearable the roads through the Rotherhithe or Blackwall tunnels under the Thames? All were filled with horse-drawn traffic. The stench must have been vile. How many millions of tons of manure must have fallen on to our streets and bridleways every year? Where did it all go? How did ladies in dainty shoes and fine skirts man- age? Were there myriad ways, now forgot- ten, by which the problem was kept under control, or were our grandparents inured to a level of unpleasantness this generation would find intolerable? Was there a Minis- ter for Ordure or — as he would be now — a Dung Tsar?
Such questions raced through my brain as I listened to the Today programme. The subject is worth a half-hour radio documen- tary. Within the space of three or four min- utes, Radio Four had amused, entertained, informed and stimulated thought. But the longer interview beforehand with Dr Cun- ningham had simply bored and trivialised. Debate, if you will, the supposed `dumbing down' of the news media; berate, if you like, the undermining of 'news-values', but never suppose that the measure of a broad- casting channel's seriousness is the time it devotes to what we call politics.
Matthew Pan-is is parliamentary sketchwriter and a columnist of the Times.
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