Friday, April 12, 2013

For God's sake just play the bloody thing!

The BBC in an effort to promote their hatred of Thatcher whilst desperately trying to remain 'impartial' ave manage to offend just about everyone, which I suspect is not the impartiality they wanted...
The problem they have is the song ♫ Ding dong the witch is dead ♪ which is not to surprisingly heading for chart success as many of those who are buying it have no idea who or what Thatcher was and have simply bought into the idea that she was the anti-Christ.
BBC.
The BBC has defended its decision not to play in full on Radio 1's Official Chart Show a song at the centre of an anti-Baroness Thatcher campaign.
A five second clip of Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead will be played in a news item on Sunday's show.
BBC Radio 1 controller Ben Cooper said the move over the Wizard of Oz film track had been a difficult compromise.
He said he had to balance respect for someone who had just died with issues around freedom of speech.
Sales of the song, from the 1939 musical starring Judy Garland, have soared since former Prime Minister Lady Thatcher's death on Monday, aged 87.
That's right, they played five seconds of it and upset a lot of people. Yet the daft thing is, had they played it all, it would have been (probably) a five second wonder. As it is, the BBC may just have put themselves in the position of having to play it again next week bringing with it more opprobrium.
When you ban something then it becomes oddly enough something that people feel inclined to try out. people are bloody minded like that so the BBC is in fact fuelling the sales of the song (perhaps it's deliberate) yet is being forced to try and defend its decisions at large putting them in a no win situation.
Now an impartial (as in really impartial) organisation would have simply just played it without comment and got it out of the way and next week it would have moved onto something new.
The BBC are simply incapable of doing such a thing and so managed to upset just about everyone with an interest in the matter from those who wanted their little mass media protest to those who were horrified by it.
Banning simply doesn't work, those calling for it should have simply ignored the BBC not given it air time over a crisis. For those who wanted the song, get over yourselves, you wouldn't like it done to one of your heroes.
Yet it still should have been played.
Not the stupid games over it...

3 annotations:

Anonymous said...

Err can't we find a Wiccan who's offended by the idea of calling someone a witch as an insult offensive?!? ;)

banned said...

I'm with Paul Gambacini(sp?), if it reaches X spot in the chrts then play it without comment as a matter of historical fact.
They tried to ban the Sex Pistols 'God Save The Queen' and look where that got them.

Conversely I had managed to entirely avoid 'Gangam Style' until it appeared out of the blue yesterday on BBC Radio 4 of all places, perhaps as an act of revenge.

Anonymous said...

Stonyground

April 12, 2013 at 7:56 pm


I think that it is now referred to as the Streissand effect after Barbara Streissand drew attention to a picture of her house on the internet by trying to have it removed. Remember the BBC playing Relax by Frankie goes to Hollywood until DJ Mike Reid pointed out that it was a bit rude. Independant radio was only just getting started at the time, so in most areas the only way that you could then get to hear it was by buying the record. How times have changed, nowadays they play it on Radio 2.

Further to the comment by macheath about send off songs, my choices are Life’s a Long Song by Jethro Tull and The Sage by Greg Lake.

Here’s a link to the latter for anyone who cares:

link to youtube.com