Radio
Youth training
Noel Malcolm
Who would have thought that Top of the Form had so many friends and admir- ers? The news of its impending death has got enormous coverage in the newspapers, but I cannot believe that many of the journalists writing about it have ever lis- tened to the programme. In New Society, of all places, there was a leading article on the subject which was so fogeyish and elegiac that it was hard to tell where tongue ended and cheek began. It was a sign of the times, the leader said, that there was no room left for Top of the Form in today's world. The modern mind craved trivia, not facts; a programme which tested the know- ledge of modern schoolchildren without asking questions about pop music and other ephemera was doomed to failure, especially when it was presented by such an old-fashioned figure as Geoffrey 'Songs of Praise' Wheeler.
Well, that is a point of view, I suppose. But my own view is that the programme is too full of questions about trivia, that the questions it frequently asks about pop music are obviously too easy, because the contestants always get them right, and that the two presenters of the programme, Tim Gudgin and Paddy Feeny, have never really seemed suited to the job, since they simply do not know how to talk to chil- dren. Their words of encouragement al- ways sound shamelessly synthetic, and they both have a regrettable tendency to laugh at wrong answers. The questions on Top of the Form have been getting easier .every year, to the point where there is now a section of the quiz in which the contestants have been given the answers in advance, and are just tested on whether they can remember them. An enterprising journal- ist on, I think, the Mail on Sunday un- earthed some of the original questions from the first edition of the programme: they included 'Who was Ned Land?' and 'What was Elizabeth Fry famous for?' In recent weeks I have heard children unable to give the correct answers to 'Who is the Foreign Secretary?' and 'How do you spell "gnat"?'
The fuss in the newspapers originated with the claim that Top of the Form was being abolished on ideological • grounds because it was 'competitive': I ' doubt whether this particular ILEAlogy has penetrated very far into BBC Radio. If it had, they would be concentrating instead on the fact that the programme dares to acknowledge the existence of independent schools. But in any case, there is surely a simpler reason for abolishing Top of the Form: nobody listens to it. The only people who might are the schoolchildren them- selves; but they are all too busy listening to pop music, or writing leaders for New Society.
Political bias is in the air at the moment, with Mr Tebbit threatening to go over the BBC's news coverage with a toothcomb. At least it's easy to say what is wrong with having politically biased news; with works of fiction it is much more difficult. A recent Saturday Night Theatre play on Radio 4, 'Marge', by David Parker, has set me thinking about this. The heroine was a schoolteacher who had led a 'privileged' life as the wife of a successful self-made businessman. She took a job teaching unemployed teenagers in the Youth Train- ing Scheme, and gradually her eyes were opened to the real world. The teenagers explained to her that the whole scheme was a meaningless charade, that there was no point in learning skills because there would be no jobs for them when the scheme ended, and that in every case the work they did while on the scheme was some sort of fiddle organised by wicked factory-owners as a source of cheap labour. When she tried to expose these scandals she was warned off: first by the head of the college, who did not want to offend one of his governors, a woman with a double- barrelled name whose husband owned the local paper and depended on the firms for advertising; and then by her own husband, who received heavy hints from the wicked factory-owners when he met them at the Freemasons' lodge. Only Mick and Joe, the other socially aware lecturers on the course, showed any sympathy. One of them explained that the system was too powerful, and added in an undertone that a previous lecturer had been summarily dis- missed for talking to his class about 'the most important thinker of the last 200 years', Karl Marx. Meanwhile the husband was getting more and more brutal, expect- ing her to cook a dinner for an important client and so oil. The play finally ended on a happy note when she left him and went to live with Joe, or was it Mick, I forget which.
What made this a bad play was not the dialogue or the acting, which were well done. It just ceased to be believable as drama as soon as it became clear that the ideological enemies were always going to be nasty as well, and that the ideological heroes could never be responsible for doing anything wrong. At one point Joe explained why one teenager's father had deserted his wife, leaving several children and a mountain of debts: 'It wasn't his fault, really. He had two things, a job and a taste for beer. When the job ended, he was just left with the taste for beer.'
The BBC like to think of balance in terms of having something right-wing to balance something left-wing. So the puzzle I am left with is this. Consider a pl4 in which those who were in the right were not good and those in the wrong were not all bad, and in which both good people and bad people were to a similar extent re- sponsible for their actions — would such a play be described as right-wing? Or just as a good play?
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