I wasn’t particularly impressed with the Spectator cover article on how The Left are ashamed of everything Britain stands for, and that this is destroying British culture.
Third Avenue hits on its most important flaw with surgical precision: its writer doesn’t actually like anything about Britain. He likes things about how Britain was (or ‘is now imagined to have been’) in The Mythical Golden Age.
It’s odd that many of loudest lamenters of British people’s lack of pride in their culture also oppose the things (pop culture leadership, universal irreverence, successful multiculturalism, brutal and usually honest media, knowledge-based economy, for starters) that are actually good about Britain today…
The article is written by Anthony Browne who reguarly spouts Mel P/USS Neverdock-type crap.
Third Avenue: The BBC, we are told, ‘gushes over "the other", but recoils at the merest hint of British culture’. Would this, pray tell, be the same BBC that not so long ago was lauding Winston Churchill as the winner of its search for the greatest ever Briton, the same BBC that will be devoting its prime time Saturday slot on its premier television channel in a few weeks’ time to the last night of the Proms (last time I looked, this was not a Muslim festival in Indonesia) and the same BBC that has recently sent David Dimbleby on a tour of the sceptred isle (itself the title of a Radio 4 series on the history of Britain) to investigate the British landscape and its impact on British painters?
To expand on this, I’ve been spending some of the past fortnight helping the BBC put together a similarly celebratory documentary, due to air next year.
I’m not in the loop as regards the editorial line, so of course it’s entirely possible that the final version will be a relentlessly downbeat orgy of Brit-bashing and self-loathing…
…but I think I’d be a trifle surprised if it was.
(Incidentally, talking about the BBC, haven’t they just comprehensively countered your correspondent Bob’s claim that they wouldn’t ever make a three-part documentary series challenging the claims made in The Power of Nightmares?)