You get the impression that captains of industry love nothing more than listening
Posted in General on 02. Aug, 2010
You get the impression that captains of industry love nothing more than listening to Classic FM in traffic jams (apart, of course, from sacking people for the sake of their dividends). I am also told that if you prefer Radio 3 to Classic FM then you are a snob.Well, I listened to Classic FM again and lawks, imagine my surprise when my snobometer went into the red Again. What was interesting this time was that I heard both R3 and CFM playing the same piece within minutes of each other – in this case, Stravinsky’s “The Firebird”. When it ended on R3, the announcer told an amusing story about how Debussy reacted to it: “Everyone’s got to start somewhere,” was what he apparently said, and he had a point.
And what did the presenter on Classic FM say afterwards? He said, “The FIREbird!”, in a tone of screamingly insincere enthusiasm, the way you say “spinach!” when handing a child, who is not at all sure he likes spinach, a plate of spinach.What is it with people? Why do they prefer to have their intelligence insulted by the moronic cosiness of Classic FM? Why do they like to have ad breaks which are longer than the snatches of music played between them? Do they really like to hear radio adverts for PEPs, mobile phones, and (most desperately of all) radio adverts? I have a horrible feeling they do, especially the ads for PEPs. All this says to me is that if Classic FM is really the preferred listening of our captains of industry, then this country is never going to hover very far above the pan.Meanwhile, in Borsetshire, the black-hearted, twisted scriptwriters continue their sadistic mission to vex us with annoying characters. Last week George Barford, Yorkshireman, ex- copper, gamekeeper, and general pain in the neck, was trying to get poor William Grundy to stay on at school. Grundy, who has not yet discovered drugs but is getting by on surliness, made the mistake of referring to an unspecified “she”.
Which meant that George got to use one of those lines which have done more than Elvis to drive a wedge between young and old in the West: “Who’s she? The cat’s mother?”You would have thought George had more sense than to say something like that. The last time he gave a young person a lecture – Clive Horrobin, as I recall, the subject being the difference between mine and thine – he was thrashed to within an inch of his life. As this really is the only language he understands you would have thought the lesson had sunk in But no.. Good-looking club-going homosexualist hedonists are all the rage in media land, and admen want in.
Lynx and Impulse have had a fair few between them, and now, amazingly, it has spread to the beerage. Not your British bulldog beerage, I grant you, but the upscale Frog brand Kronenbourg 1664; the one which used to be promoted with elliptical serial mystery stories about missing persons
So we get a French clubland scene. Can you imagine, les yes-yes de 1999 squidging around to scratchy squeaks? Rap en Francais, too, using brand names like Nina Ricci. I know they say the Euro music generation has come of age, and that Paris DJs can outrun London and so the Eurovision jokes are over for good, but this actually looks like 1988, not 1999.
A classy young Thierry type enters the dive. He is suited, open-neck- shirted, unshaven, rich and lucky and – by the rules of temporal compression that are unique to television commercials – immediately starts chatting up a girl who’s dancing on her own.She’s handsome, too; she could be his sister, but there are some points of interest: she looks hard, she is very lipsticked and she is wearing violet eyeshadow.