From our Swindon Correspondent:
From The Times
The BBC is discussing whether to drop Rule Britannia and Land of Hope and Glory from the Last Night of the Proms in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement.
This is like watching some porn where the plumber actually fixes the aircon, or the girl pays for her car to be fixed with cash rather than in kind. The whole point of Last Night of the Proms is as a night of patriotism. Land of Hope and Glory, Rule Britannia and Jerusalem.
The traditional anthems are hugely popular with the flag-waving prommers who ordinarily cram into the Royal Albert Hall, but organisers fear a backlash because of their perceived association with colonialism and slavery.
With Land of Hope and Glory? Written by Elgar? Quite some time after the end of slavery.
Dalia Stasevska, 35, from Finland, who is conducting the Last Night, is among those said to be keen to modernise the evening’s repertoire and reduce the patriotic elements.
It’s not about you, though. It’s about us. What do we want. And I’m pretty sure we want this, because otherwise, it’s just another proms concert that almost no-one watches. Last Night of the Proms is a unique event. Why would you ruin that for some vague colonial stuff?
I do see an opportunity for someone here, though. Get a small orchestra together, a reasonable soprano, maybe a cannon if you can get one and do it all on YouTube.
This is all very strange. Because, for years, there has been the most brilliant deal. Sure, the gammons can have their jingoistic crap. But only in the second half. First, they have to sit (or stand!) through a full first half of ultra-modern music before they can salivate along to the nationalist stuff. In addition, in order to even qualify for promming tickets to the last night, one must first attend a number of other concerts in the Proms series. Thus guaranteeing that one must make a fairly sizeable musical investment in order to participate in about half an hour… Read more »
“Why upset this stroke of genius?”
Well, mostly because they can. Or at least, think they can. People are going to hand over their license fee anyway. The clock is rather ticking on that though…
I can understand why “Jerusalem” would be deeply offensive to the wokeist left, particularly those in the Labour Party.
Rewrite it as “Al Quds” and it would probably pass muster.
On the political spectrum of his day, Blake occupied a position similar to Jeremy Corbyn. ‘Jerusalem’ is a call to revolution as much as anything.
Newsflash: people who want to ban stuff fail to understand the stuff they want to ban.
Saw this earlier today, I’m Australian but it still pissed me off. Everyone has their patriotic songs. I wonder how Dalia would react to being told she had to drop Finlandia from the set in Finland.
I notice they’re trying to hide behind we’re not sure if it’s possible with social distancing, size of the orchestra and choir, etc. So run some recordings from previous years then, there are some great ones out there. Do some video conferencing with people waving flags. How hard can it be?
This is the result of a guaranteed income. The subsidised arts do it all the time.
“We’ve got a product that the audience loves. Lets give them something else. If they don’t like it who cares, we get paid anyway.”
That’s why popular operas are only put on occasionally, and new productions keep being staged. The cost of running the company goes up as lots of new productions are having to be prepared. The audience declines as most people prefer the familiar.
By the way how many BLM fans would watch whatever they played? Never mind buy tickets, just watch.
We’ve got a popular product that people like consuming, but we don’t like, it, so we’ll stop producing it. Hey, where have our customers gone? Come back! Eat our stodge and like it, dammit!
I don’t really care, but I note that it shows the left has really given up on those red wall sets they lost at the GE despite all the hand wringing.
@ BiND
No, this is a ploy: the left will blame Boris for dropping all the good songs from the last night.
The BBC has backed down in the face of widespread fury. They could not find a single racial, let alone racist, quote in any of the songs that they wanted to abolish for their patriotism.
The English are a mongrel “race” so our anthems are non-racialist: something that the racialists in the BBC failed to get their heads around.
Oh I dunno. Plenty of opportunity to mishear Cruel Brittania, Land of Grope and Gory with You Rude Len to finish. After all, the woke have poor listening skills…