Home Truths Massacre

[februarycallendar]

Thanks for these.

Home Truths was I think an important part of our modern history, in that it simultaneously persuaded one audience to shed its old-school snobbery and another to shed its inverted snobbery.  It convinced a lot of people who'd been there since the Home Service days that someone rooted in pop and rock music at its furthest outside the establishment could have a lot of value to say and to feel, while simultaneously broadening the scope of Radio 4 and pushing a new audience into its traditional strengths - it was as important in remaking and reinvigorating Radio 4 as the recruiting of a number of DJs who'd previously been London-only (Westwood from Capital, pretty much all the others from Kiss) was to Radio 1 in the 90s.

As I said on Facebook a while back, it was a programme where the heart of Blairism - both the old establishment culture and the pop/rock underground compromising and meeting each other in the middle - actually seemed to work and make sense, and in (Cameronite) retrospect it seems a better cultural settlement than it did at the time (though of course I can entirely understand why some people, on both sides, disliked it for those reasons ... what antipathy towards it showed, to me, is how similar tribalism is among tribes who would cross the road to avoid each other).

RPC