The BBC won’t rest until we’re all talking filth
In the superb recent remake of True Grit, I don’t think there was a single four-letter word.
Yet it was a perfectly credible portrayal of the lives of fierce and often violent men in a cruel, half-civilised time.
In fact, half the pleasure of the film was the almost biblical English, spoken naturally by everyone – slower, clearer and a hundred times more powerful than the slurred, jerky newspeak of our day.
But don’t expect the BBC, that propaganda organisation for avant-garde muck, to learn any lessons from that.
Fresh from ruining Winifred Holtby’s thoughtful classic South Riding on TV, the Corporation now plans to insert four-letter words into a dramatisation of Wuthering Heights on Radio 3.
Partly this is attention-seeking, and I know they are hoping for condemnation from people such as me. But that is because they are immoral and cheap.
Many people still loathe swearing and are made unhappy by it. For instance,
a grandparent trying to listen to this classic with a grandchild could not do so without great embarrassment.
The BBC knows this, thanks to the many complaints it gets about on-air swearing. It still does it because it is biased against the older Britain where swearing was done only under strict rules.
Its executives and journalists use four-letter words in front of their own children, and think it fine to use them in front of yours, too. They think you’re backward and repressed for not doing it yourself.
The same impulse lay behind the needless four-letter scene in that overrated film The King’s Speech. Fashionable liberals despise restraint and take special delight in debauching innocent and kindly things.
It is quite important that this dramatisation fails and is seen to fail, and that it receives a large number of complaints when it is aired. If they can get away with Wuthering ****ing Heights, it won’t be long before we have David ****ing Copperfield, Vanity ****ing Fair, Romeo And ****ing Juliet, Paradise ****ing Lost, Gray’s ****ing Elegy written in a ****ing Country Churchyard, Tennyson’s In ****ing Memoriam, Brave New ****ing World and, before you know where you are, Alice In ****ing Wonderland, Lord Of The ****ing Rings and (of course) Harry Potter And The ****ing Goblet Of Fire.
For goodness sake, we already have Martin Amis if you want this sort of stuff.
I am envious of those who can speak slowly (and also authoritatively). Wendell Berry might be an example. He speaks without the appearance of being mentally challenged, though this is what some Uhmericans may assume when they hear his accent and learn of his background. Speaking slowly and deliberately -- this is not an affectation -- it might reflects the fact that the gears in the head are turning. Cantonese speakers are often fast talkers, but the ones I admire in film speak slowly (Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung in In the Mood for Love; actors in TVB dramas tend to speak more slowly than MCs and hosts of variety programs). People may talk fast, but often they have nothing to say. It's just gabbing in the worst sense. (I couldn't think of a better onomatopoeia.) The conversation revolving the most inane of things.
I would like to speak with correct grammar; thinking before one speaks, not just with respect to content but also to rules of grammar might be the stage of a beginner, but I'll admit that my speaking skills aren't that great. Is it another symptom of internet-induced ADD/memory impairment/mental diminishment?
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