Radio
Royal loathing
Michael Vestey
The most chilling piece of radio I have heard for some time came at the start of last week's The Moral Maze on Radio Four (Thursday). A newspaper photographer called Brian Harris was explaining his atti- tude to taking photographs of the royal family. For Harris, there were no frontiers, no moral dilemmas or doubts about what he was doing except that he made sure he Observed the law by positioning himself in a public place.
Once in position he felt he had the right to take pictures of royals in their gardens and bedrooms regardless of what they were doing. The panellists wanted to know what he had against the royal family. It was clear this repulsive man has a deep hatred of them though he merely described them as a 'a shower'. He even sneered at the Queen Mother, dragging up her supposedly rough treatment of the Duchess of Windsor. When you think what the Queen Mother went through because of the odious Edward VIII and Mrs Simpson you could forgive her anything in her behaviour towards them.
Anyway, we never learnt why he loathed the royals so much. Was it a left-wing ani- Inns or class envy? After listening to Har- ris, two thoughts formed in my mind. One was that the paparazzi are no better than stalkers in that they induce mental torture in their victims and, second, that my earlier view opposing some kind of privacy law might be wrong. Janet Daley suggested to Harris that his activities increase the likeli- hood of privacy laws and he was not such a cretin to deny it. I would like to have heard a blast of sagacity from Rabbi Hugo Gryn on this issue as I think he might have got it exactly right but his death last week robbed us of his presence on The Moral Maze.
The presenter Michael Buerk keeps order very well, especially when everyone starts speaking at once. He admonishes his panellists with great charm when they go on too long or try to interrupt. He's so in control and relaxed that he even permitted himself a swear word which sounded quite natural in its context, though no doubt the complaints were rolling in. I hope they weren't.
The royals crop up again in this week- end's Agenda on Radio Four (Saturday). One of the great comic figures of the Six- ties and Seventies, the moustachioed Pak- istani revolutionary Tariq Ali, takes us through his views on the trivialisation of the media. It's odd to think back to the days when the media took this student rab- ble-rouser seriously. There were several occasions when the BBC sent me with my tape-recorder to garner the views of Ali at some juvenile demonstration or campus sit- in.
As he intoned solemnly the evils of capi- talism and the Wilson-Heath pogroms against the young, which would be broad- cast on any number of radio and television current affairs programmes, I formed the opinion that he was giving humourlessness a thoroughly bad name, I also wondered why he wasn't stirring it up in Pakistan where there was genuine repression and wickedness and realised of course, as no doubt did Ali, that he might have ended up six-feet under. There was no danger of that at Hyde Park corner.
In Agenda, Ali inveighs against tabloid values infiltrating the serious media, broad- sheet newspapers and the BBC. The poor old Queen Mum gets it again, with Ali moaning that Radio Four had devoted the first part of a radio news bulletin to her hip operation last year. He sees this as a tabloidisation of the BBC. To me, though, his argument is more a trivialisation of Marxism than the media.
When it comes down to it, the media is really feeding a public hunger and fascina- tion for the royal family. Ali, though, thinks editorship is about leadership, not giving people what they want. He seems to grasp but not accept that in an extraordinarily competitive newspaper market no newspa- per can really risk returning to the days of dense text. As Brian MacArthur of the Times pointed out, the Daily Express of the Sixties had as much text on its pages as the Times and Guardian do today. Ali thought this was the result of a lowering of atten- tion span among readers.
I suspect the reason is simpler and less conspiratorial: people don't have as much time to read broadsheets as they're work- ing harder and longer. I agree with Ali, though, on the extent of the trivia through- out the media. I once — and only once — bought a respectable men's magazine called GQ on the strength of an arresting headline on its cover: 'Me and My Pussy' by Kate somebody or other. It was not about her cat. I was certainly titillated by this but was also intrigued to know how such a subject could be written about.
There's far too much of this and it's the result of commercial pressures. Ali, though, reaches the conclusion that, as with Stalin-. 1st Russia where freedom of expression was suppressed, what he calls the market real- ism generated by capitalist culture threat- ens the functioning of our democracy. I suppose he should know as he once threat- ened it himself but the breathtaking idiocy of the comparison reminds us that Ali remains one of the great comic creations of our time.
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