Sheila Dillon, on today's The Food Programme, noted that the BBC Cook of the Year Award used to be called the Best Dinner Lady or Man Award. "We've got more PC since then", she added. (I'll say!)
What struck me about the BBC Cook of the Year Award (from what I heard on this programme) was that it's not what I imagined it to be. It's a much worthier thing than being merely an award for great cooking. It's about "changing the culture" according to Sheila.
And, thus, this year's finalists work with (1) prison inmates, (2) asylum seekers/refugees and (3) cancer sufferers - and lovely people they sound too.
Had a laugh when absentmindedly tuning into Mariella Frostrup's Radio 4 book prog. There she was going large on "queer this..." and "queer that..." - a word she would have avoided like the plague ten years ago. And then nearly all the questions she asked of the militant lesbian writer were essentially what I call "quota questions"... e.g. "How do you feel about having awards for particular sexual choice categories...?"..."Do you want lesbian writing to be part of the mainstream or distinct...?" etc etc. So BORING!!! And you can hear these quota questions virtually 24/7 on Radio 4, whether it's the news prog, a science prog, history, Woman's Hour (obviously), the arts review progs, the Archers, all comedy progs, drama (of course)...it's all about how many minorities, are minorities part of the mainstream or is the mainstream made up of minorities, is enough being done for minorities...Sometimes this is literally 24/7...if you are lucky you might get a couple of honourable exceptions actually interested in what happened in the past, what's happening in the present and what might happen in the future.
ReplyDeleteIt's totally relentless. It really spells the death of literature, the death of the arts, the death of science, and the death of (freely reported) news.