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The announcement was followed by a statement from the
corporation.
"The BBC finds this campaign distasteful but does
not believe the record should be banned," it read. "On Sunday, the Radio 1 Chart Show will contain a news item
explaining why the song is in the charts during which a short
clip will be played as it has been in some of our news
programmes."
I wonder how many people, and who++, have
spent how long to arrive at this solution which involves
someone telling us via apparently all BBC news outlets which feature it as their lead item this afternoon that rather than
playing the whole 51 second song during a chart run down programme on Sunday
instead listeners would hear someone explaining that there would
only be a short extract from the 51 second song after the
explanation they were listening to explaining why the whole 51 second song wasn't
being played but an extract from it was ...
Speaking to Radio 1 Newsbeat, Mr Cooper said: "The decision I
have made is I am not going to play it in full but that I will
play a clip of it in a news environment.
"When I say a news environment, that is a newsreader telling
you about the fact that this record has reached a certain
place in the chart and here is a clip of that track.
"It is a compromise and it is a difficult compromise to come
to. You have very difficult and emotional arguments on both
sides of the fence.
"Let's not forget you also have a family that is grieving for
a loved one who is yet to be buried."
The Wizard of Oz song at the centre of an anti-Margaret Thatcher
campaign will not be played in full on the Official Chart Show,
Radio 1 controller Ben Cooper confirms.
++ Update - according to the G
The BBC will not play Ding Dong the Witch is Dead, the song being pushed
up the charts by anti-Thatcher protesters, in full in Sunday's Radio 1
chart show following the intervention of new director general Tony Hall
.... The decision comes after Hall, who only started as director
general last Tuesday, got involved in the escalating row on Friday,
holding urgent
talks with Cooper and Graham Ellis, the acting head of BBC radio.
12 comments:
This is why the licenece fee is unjustifiable in a free society. The fact that it is a tax collected by coercion means that pro-Thatcher viewers and listeners can't simply take their custom elsewhere.
Lola, you can, and I did years ago. Just don't have a TV. Who needs one anyway, with iPlayer, 4OD, ITVplayer etc? With a computer you have the added bonus of not having to watch the ads, if you have the right software (although a spokesman from Time Warner said that doing this is theft).
I agree, it would be tasteless to play it in full. More appropriate to just play the first 51 seconds or so.
They haven't a clue, have they? If they think this song is tasteless, why make such a song and dance about it? Why not follow Maggie and deny it the "oxygen of publicity"? All this means is that far more people are now going to listen to it than if they'd kept quiet. The copyright holders will be laughing all the way to the bank.
L re Bayard's advice - if you take it, you might find that it takes several goes to convince the licensing authorities that (a) you no longer have a TV or (b) if you do decide not to throw out the TV because it is useful for watching DVD's via the player linked to it, it isn't connected to an aerial and freeview or freesat box/internal decoder used for watching "on air" transmissions emanating rom UK TV providers.
On (a) I think it took me the best part of 2 years and shall we say several letters and 'phone calls to convince them, following my decision to "live without one" and on (b) a colleague took a similar amount of time and letters etc. to convince them that whilst he had a TV and it was connected to a satellite decoder he and his family - comprising himself, his German wife and their dual language offspring only used it for watching "foreign stuff" - mostly that in German beamed over by satellite from foreign TV stations etc.
Bob, they used to send me threatening letters, which I ignored, hoping that I'd get a visit and be able to waste some official time, but it's obviously too much like hard work to chase up people who like me live in the sticks, so I caved in and wrote back to them, explaining I didn't have a TV and that was that.
Bayard - ditto, including letters saying "we will send our clever people round to carry out an inspection, without warning" to which I replied "Fair enough, but bear in mind I might not be in, so if you would rather not waste your clever people's time, give me advance warning and I'll ensure I am in, and not watching the TV I don't have; or arrange with a trusted neighbour, to give them access and watch them whilst they look for the TV that isn't there." After several rounds of that, in print and on the 'phone I eventually got a "personal letter" - as in from a named person and signed and everything, which basically said "Ok we believe you, we won't bother you any more ..."
Play it. It's what Thatcher would have wanted:-
I always cheer up immensely if an attack is particularly wounding because I think, well, if they attack one personally, it means they have not a single political argument left.
That's not to say that Thatcher didn't deserve some criticism for her policies, but most of the haters criticise her for all the things that she got about right (Falklands, closing pits, crushing union power) rather than selling the council houses off cheap, not building enough houses and centralising government too much.
this is very odd.
A bunch of anti-Thatcherites chanting about a "witch" being dead. did they not attend compulsory classes on gender-neutrality and religious-neutrality? I could read this as a bunch of people celebrating Thatcher's achievements positively. Surely no PC person would condemn a witch!
Bayard: agreed, "they" haven't got a clue - but "they" in this context isn't the BBC, it's the gibbering Daily Mail-ite mob who kicked up the fuss in the first place.
(unless you assume they don't give a fuck about the record but made up the fuss as an excuse to bash the BBC no matter what it ultimately did, which is almost certainly true)
A friend of mine had a licence inspector come round to ask why he didn't have one. He said he didn't have a tv. The inspector pointed to the aerial on his roof but he rebutted him by saying 'Just because there's milk in the fridge it doesn't mean there's a cow in the garden'. Not sure if it worked though...
TS - exactly
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