Celebrity culture
Michael Vestey
I’m glad I avoided listening to or watching any of the Live8 concert in Hyde Park last Saturday because the report about it on Radio Five Live’s Weekend Breakfast programme the following morning made it sound like a creepily schmaltzy affair, which would have been better renamed Luvvies Unleashed. The fact that so many thousands of people were drawn to it is a sad reflection of how so many of the young have been lobotomised by the celebrity culture which has engulfed the media. When showbusiness coalesces with politics it usually means another hopeless cause. The pop music world’s sentimentality and ignorance of the world is about as much use as Liberace’s candelabra. I heard on Today on Radio Four on Monday that some buffoon from the group Coldplay had described Live8 as the greatest event in the history of the world.
If I seem jaundiced about the occasion it’s perhaps because I’ve some experience of Africa and know exactly why most of it is in such a mess. According to the Sunday Telegraph, in the past 40 years the West has given $450 billion dollars in aid to Africa and yet, on average, Africans are poorer now than they were then. More aid will only be wasted or stolen. We all know why Tony Blair seeks to use emotion to help his cause but why does the BBC have to collude with him? Cowed post-Hutton, the corporation seems to have become a government lackey, broadcasting an almost obsessive and interminable Africa season on radio and television, part-sponsoring the Live8 concert and meekly doing what the government wants.
Wondering if the weekend was to become another Princess Diana moment, I listened to Five Live’s morning phone-in last Friday and was pleased to hear that not everyone had lost a sense of proportion about Africa. Some more realistic souls said in calls or emails that they were more than aware that many African leaders were to blame for their countries’ problems and that aid wasn’t the solution. The presenter Phil Williams wondered if the Make Poverty History slogan shouldn’t be Make Bad Government History, which is much more to the point.
What Africa really needs is not Bob Geldof but someone like Major Geoffrey Langlands, a truly remarkable man. At 87 he’s the only British resident remaining in the Chitral Valley area of the North West Frontier province of Pakistan, next to the border with Afghanistan. Clad in his blazer and tie, shoes polished, he works as the head teacher of the secular Sayurj school. He was the subject of the final programme in Aidan Hartley’s Plain Tales from the Commonwealth on Radio Four last week (Monday). Hartley, who writes for The Spectator, of course, looked at those people who stayed on in former colonies after independence, always a fascinating theme. Coming from a family of former colonial administrators, Hartley himself lives in Kenya.
In finding Langlands, he and his producer Jolyon Jenkins discovered a real gem. Hartley presented him with some Cheddar cheese and Harrods Earl Grey tea to remind him of England. ‘Oh! Excellent, excellent,’ he replied. ‘You get Earl Grey here but I’m never sure if it’s genuine.’ As for Marmite, you could get that anywhere. He occasionally received American army rations such as beef stew smuggled across the border from Afghanistan. Langlands has been teaching in Pakistan since he left the Indian army after the war, starting off at Aitchison College in Lahore, known as the Eton of Pakistan, before moving to remote tribal areas. In Chitral most boys are taught at religious schools, the girls hardly at all.
While at a previous school in a more dangerous area, he was once kidnapped during a local electoral dispute and taken off into the mountains, but later freed and taken to the house of a man who turned out to have been one of his pupils, a former head boy. After America first attacked al-Qa’eda’s camps in Afghanistan, Westerners were evacuated from the area but Langlands chose to stay and, held in such awe and respect locally, he’s under the protection of the people of Chitral. He likes them, finding them friendly and open. He regards himself as British but in an oldfashioned 1930s way. Listening to this lovely programme I couldn’t help thinking that Chitral must be more like 1930s and 40s England than the country we live in now. When Hartley interviewed the pupils about him they answered respectfully and kept calling him ‘sir’. I can’t see Langlands coping with the crime-infested, celebrityfixated, Labour-corrupted hell that is England today.
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