[peel] Re: Home Truths Massacre

[MARK LUETCHFORD]

I liked the show but then I was already a R4 listener and was never a Blairite and hated everything he stood for -he destroyed the only mass political force that represented (however imperfectly) the majority and tried (however ineffectually) to rule in the interests of the majority.  Cameron only half pretends he isn't operating in the interests of the ruling class. Not certain either reflect anything apart from an ability to manipulate the media and the public to persuade them that they offer anything but the continuation of a political system that rules in the interest of the elite, an economic system that exacerbates inequality and a social system that stunts human potential rather than releases it. Would hate to think they reflect any sort of zeitgeist. Don't know where that puts me in your analysis!

However Home Truths kicked against this and you could always rely on Peel to find the connection and the "human" side to the story - particularly liked the way he got people to tell stories through contacting the show in an engaging stylee. The sightings of His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie - Ras Ta Fari -  in Godalming a particular favourite and how that reflected a period in history. It also often revealed Home Truths to make the R4 listener uncomfortable when it addressed some of the less pleasant side of human nature.

Much better than the inanity of constant requests for texting/facebooking/tweeting - almost pleading by DJs for people to connect with them that currently pervades the airwave - presumably at the behest of their bosses who judge them on how many tweets, hits,likes they generate!  6 is getting more and more guilty of this and sometimes I just switch it off - I listen for the music selection of the DJ and details plus amusing anecdotes (if lucky) about said music that help me understand it and connect with it - rather than the constant craving for instant meaningless connection which does nothing but alienate me from the production. It makes me hunger for the letters,postcards, telexes, faxes and emails of yesteryear  I do not want to know that Mark in Lydd on Sea is "liking" the music - I already know that!

As you can tell I am turning into the curmudgeon that I always was wary of!

From: februarycallendar <februarycallendar@...>
To: peel@yahoogroups.com 
Sent: Friday, 19 July 2013, 22:52
Subject: [peel] Re: Home Truths Massacre
 


  
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