Of Poet Laureates, UK Broadcasters and the BBC's Will Gompertz

Look! It's Will Gompertz! And he's asking an important question, slowly, like an intellectual! Look! Look!

Simon Armitage - a working-class Yorkshireman made-good - is our new Poet Laureate. 

I'm not very familiar with his poetry (though I've liked some of what I've heard) but his books about walking across England and exploring his home patch on the wrong side of the Pennines are beautifully-written and often very funny, and I'm a fan of his on the strength of them.

News of his appointment broke during last night's main 10 o'clock news bulletins, and I caught the BBC one, which struck me as being particularly 'BBC' in its slant:

In the last half hour, it's been announced that Simon Armitage will be the new Poet Laureate. He says he wants to use the role to ensure poetry embraces major global issues, including climate change.

The following report by the BBC's arts editor, the shy-and-retiring Will Gompertz, began with the end of a poem about climate change:

I'd wanted to offer my daughter

a taste of the glacier, a sense of the world

being pinned in place by a diamond-like cold

at each pole. But opening up my hand

there's nothing to pass on, nothing to hold.

(That's the least impressive bit of that poem. I particularly enjoyed:
"Rotten and rusted, a five-bar gate/

lies felled in the mud, letting the fields escape.")

"Like a rock-star", "taking poetry to the people", etc, were some of Will's words. (Very 'Will'!)

And then came the questions...

As so often with the BBC, viewers were being whacked over the head with a wet halibut of an agenda here - or a very heavy bronze cast of a wet halibut of an agenda. 

More about Will later.

Stay with us...

With ITV's News at Ten, the usual 'viewer-friendly' conversational style resulted in this meandering description of the 'breaking news':

Poetry has been part of Britain's national fabric for centuries, and the names of some of our most famous poets still resonate. Think Wordsworth, Tennyson and Betjeman, amongst many others. They were all, as it happens, Poet Laureates, there's a good pub quiz question, and the new incumbent of this prestigious post was announced just a few minutes ago. He is Simon Armitage, West Yorkshire poet, professor and playwright. Although the role may no longer have the influence on British culture it once did, he says there's still a need to capture moments in words that stretch the imagination. 

And we got an equally non-political poem to illustrate SA's art from ITV:

As he steps out at the traffic lights,

Think what he’ll look like in thirty years’ time –

The deflated face and shrunken scalp

Still daubed with the sad tattoos of high punk.

ITV then went on to focus on the relevance of the role of poet laureate, without any of the BBC's politics and focus on climate change activism.

And Sky News broke it like this:

His appointment was approved by the Queen, and for ten years he'll be seen promoting poetry, because Simon Armitage is the new Poet Laureate. He says he wants to harness the tools of the multi-media age. And if the rising popularity of poetry among millennials is anything to go by, he'll have a willing audience. 

And Sky then focused on the resurgence in the popularity of poetry and featured a clip of SA reading from 'Kid' and, again, included none of the BBC's politicking or any of their stuff about climate change.

*******

Now, if you think that proves something about the BBC, well try this...

Going back to the BBC, I've held back so far in mentioning what came next. Will Gompertz went on - after all the climate change stuff - to raise another issue not raised by either ITV or Sky:

Yes, the BBC's identity politics obsession reared its ugly head again with ghastly inevitability.

And here it is. Here's Will's 'hideously white' question to working-class Yorkshire poet Simon Armitage:

Did it cross your mind, even for a moment, when you were offered the post to say, 'you know, actually, I don't think this is right at this stage for a white male. Maybe someone from a different point of view, a different background, would be better for this role at this moment? 

As I said, very 'BBC'.

Yes, I know ITV and Sky can be as bad on some things, but - in so many respects - the BBC is well and truly unique, don't you think?