What I would have said on Sky News

I was invited to appear this morning on Sky News to discuss Janet Smith's report on Jimmy Savile at the BBC. But the press conference launching the report went on for an hour or so longer than anticipated, and I never got an air.

You never know with these things where the conversation is going to go, but I'm not sure I would have had very much new to say in any event. I've written about Savile on a previous blog, as well as in a review of Dan Davis's biography. However, what I was planning on saying was this:

The stories about Savile were all over the music industry by the mid-1970s. Not the allegations that he was raping 10-year-olds, but the fact that he had a penchant for teenage girls and didn't bother much with the age of consent.

This was not unusual in the pop world. Anyone who knows anything about the history of rock 'n' roll should be able to come up with a couple of dozen names of those said to have similar taste. Admittedly, there was a difference between beautiful young rock stars and a seedy man in his fifties, but it's not one that is now - or was then - recognised in law.

Rumours aren't evidence, said Smith at the press conference this morning, and as a former judge, she would require evidence. But no one suggests action should be taken against Savile on the grounds of the rumours; merely that if they heard those rumours, then senior figures at the BBC should have made enquiries. At which stage, evidence might well have emerged.

It is possible, of course, that the BBC hierarchy never heard those rumours. And that may also be true of senior figures in the police force, the political world, the NHS, the charities, the local businesses, the prison service. Maybe none of them heard a whisper against him, and that's why they continued to work with him and to court his attention. But it seems a little unlikely.

Even more unlikely is that the newspapers didn't hear the rumours. Where were the investigative journalists? Where were the tabloids? Why did not one of them break ranks and pursue the story of Savile's abuse? If the allegation now being made against the BBC is that it turned a blind eye, then the same is surely true of Fleet Street.

Armistice Day

I spent yesterday evening at the Royal Military School of Music, Kneller Hall, giving a talk on the Last Post as part of the Richmond Literary Festival. And very enjoyable it was too.

For those who missed my Radio 4 programme on the same subject, it is now available on iPlayer. And there's also an article I wrote for the BBC website to accompany the show.

And finally, on the occasion of Armistice Day, a further plug for my piece about the National Union of Ex-Servicemen, the most radical of the campaigning groups in the aftermath of the First World War. This was the organisation that effectively made Douglas Haig found the British Legion, so worried was he by their revolutionary potential.

The Last Post previewed

Some further advance publicity for my Radio 4 show on Wednesday morning. Paul Donovan in the Sunday Times:

Other Armistice Day offerings include Alwyn Turner's melancholic history of The Last Post (R4 FM, 11am), just after the two-minute silence

The wonderful Gillian Reynolds in the Daily Telegraph:

Alwyn Turner tells the story of one of the world's most familiar tunes. Once it was just one of a dozen bugle calls played every day in British Army barracks. In the 1850s it became something played at soldiers' funerals. In the First World War, it gained its greatest resonance. Now it is played internationally to mark the passing of an era or to keep alive the memory of conflicts past and present. It has become the music of loss, an almost sacred anthem in an increasingly secular society.

and again in the Sunday Telegraph:

The Last Post began as a bugle call in British barracks, played to show all was secured at the close of day but, from the 19th century on, has become one of the world's most familiar tunes, played at funerals and state occasions. Alwyn Turner tells its story with the help of men who've played it. Its very simplicity makes it hard to play perfectly but, as we hear, there's something about it that uniquely signals sadness, solemnity, respect.

And finally Liam Williams in the Independent:

It started as just one of a couple of dozen bugle calls played every day in a British Amy barracks - then, in the 1850s, it found a new role, played at soldiers' funerals. Alwyn Turner tells the untold story of The Last Post.

Whoever is responsible at the BBC for promoting programmes is clearly doing a fine job, and I'm very grateful.

The Last Post - another plug

David Hepworth's preview of the week's radio in the Guardian rather wonderfully singles out my programme on the Last Post, which is broadcast next Wednesday:

My thanks to Mr Hepworth. And indeed to Tom Goulding, who I regret I didn't acknowledge when posting his piece from the Radio Times earlier in the week.

PS And here's a piece from the Daily Mail:

Radio Times

A cutting from the new edition of the Radio Times, with a fine pick of programmes for next Wednesday, Armistice Day:

The Last Post on the Home Service

I've been a bit quiet on this blog (and elsewhere) over recent weeks. Mostly this is a result of a lack of time, because in addition to normal stuff, I've been making a Radio 4 documentary about the story of the bugle call the Last Post. Which has been a fascinating but quite time-consuming experience.

It's also been completely new to me and I'm deeply grateful to the producer, the admirable Ben Crighton, who has steered me through the project.

Amongst other interviews, we spoke with Peter Wilson and Basil King, who sounded respectively the Last Post and Reveille at the 1965 funeral of Winston Churchill. We also interviewed Paul Field, who played the Last Post at the 1981 funeral of the IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands - I'm interested in the way that a British Army bugle call was played on both sides in the civil war in Northern Ireland, and this was a rare chance to ask one of those involved about his perception of the call.

Anyway, I'm listening to a recording of the show now, and it's sounding very fine to my ears. Do have a listen: we're on air two weeks today, at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month.

Theatricals - David Bowie

David Bowie's appearance in the title role of Bertolt Brecht's play Baal, broadcast on BBC television in 1982, wasn't one of his greatest acing performances. It's not much of a play either, to be honest, but then it was Brecht's first and he was only twenty when he wrote it. Quite why the BBC thought it was a good idea to revive such a minor piece remains a mystery, though you can see why they cast Bowie.

To accompany the production, Bowie recorded a five-track EP of songs from the show, his final release for RCA Records and Cassettes. And last up in the running order was this very short but very good track, 'The Dirty Song'.

Little Goody Two-Shoes: a portrait of Ben Bradshaw

Denis Healey once said of David Owen: 'The good fairies gave the young doctor almost everything: thick dark locks, matinee idol features, a lightning intelligence. Unfortunately the bad fairy also made him a shit.' Much the same could be said of Ben Bradshaw, except for the doctor bit. And, of course, the bit about him being a shit.

Bradshaw was born in London in 1960 and studied German at Sussex University. Following a brief time in print media, he moved into radio broadcasting, where he became the BBC correspondent in Berlin at the end of the 1980s, just as the Wall came tumbling down. He was very good and he was clearly seen as a rising star of Radio 4; by the mid-1990s he had started to get slots as the stand-in presenter on shows like PM and Weekend World.

Seeking a constituency for the forthcoming election, he was adopted by the Exeter Labour Party, despite telling the selection committee that he was gay. This was at a time when attitudes were noticeably changing, but culturally there was still a long way to go before homosexuality was widely accepted. Legally, the situation was worse: civil partnerships, let alone same-sex marriages, were a pipe-dream, and the age of consent for male homosexuals was eighteen.

And politically it was all very risky - both for Bradshaw to tell the local party and for them to choose him anyway. No candidate who had previously declared their homosexuality had ever been elected to Parliament. 'It is not something I am going to make an issue of,' Bradshaw told the press, 'but I am not so naive that I do not think others may do so.'

He was right. The local Conservative Party chairman greeted his selection with a sorrowful shake of the head: 'It would be a sad day for Exeter if it ever elected an active homosexual as its MP.' The Tory candidate, Dr Adrian Rogers, was a Christian GP who had already made his position clear, denouncing homosexuality as 'a sterile, disease-ridden and God-forsaken occupation'.

Bradshaw's sexuality was therefore a big local issue as the election approached. So too was the fact that the BBC gave him five months paid leave from his job on The World at One to campaign, though the criticism this attracted was somewhat derailed by Rogers's comments on the corporation: 'there are far too many homosexuals in the BBC'.

The slightly unpleasant tenor of the campaign meant there was considerable rejoicing when, in the great Labour victory of 1997, Bradshaw recorded a 12.5 per cent swing to take Exeter from the Tories with a substantial 11,000 majority. That margin has since fallen a little, but the city remains a safe Labour seat in a part of the country where the party is not naturally strong.

Bradshaw demonstrated a commitment to gay rights that ran ahead of the party leadership, so that in 2000 - when it seemed as though the government was backing out of its commitment to repeal Section 28 - he spoke out, saying 'that he had never seen so much anger in the Parliamentary Labour Party'. He might even have been ahead of the curve in other areas as well: 'Cyclists have a right to be pious,' he declared, somewhat piously. 'They cut congestion, cut pollution and cut costs to the NHS by staying fit.'

There were also less obvious positions, such as the issue of repatriation of art treasures. When Labour MP Bernie Grant asked Exeter's museum to return objects that came originally from the African kingdom of Benin (now in Nigeria), Bradshaw was forthright in his response: 'We are not going to send these treasures back - particularly not to a country governed by such an odious dictatorship as Nigeria. Their human rights record is appalling.'

Mostly, though, he became known in Parliament for not rocking the boat. He was allegedly referred to by Alastair Campbell as 'Little Goody Two-Shoes', while the Guardian called him a 'Hugh Grant lookalike turned ultra-loyal Blairite'. He had, wrote Edward Pearce in the Express, 'the distinct look of a teenage seraph on the make'.

In July 2001, following Tony Blair's second victory, Bradshaw was given a ministerial job in the Foreign Office, again raising some eyebrows, since he would be dealing with the Middle East, not a region noted for its enthusiastic embrace of homosexuality. In fact, though, the most contentious issue turned out to be his robust defence in 2002 of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, insisting that conditions there were perfectly humane, and saying of the suspects who were being detained without trial: 'we are talking about some of the most dangerous men in the world'.

He was similarly bullish the following year when he joined the government's assault on his old employers at BBC Radio 4. The station had covered Dr David Kelly's revelations about the abuse of intelligence reports in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, and had brought the wrath of the government down upon its head. Bradshaw was a minor, though notable, player in the campaign to re-position the story, making it about insignificant detail rather than the broad picture.

He went on to become deputy leader of the House of Commons, and then minister for, successively, the environment, the South-West and health, before ending up as secretary of state for culture, media and sport for the final year of Gordon Brown's premiership.

On taking up the latter position, he was asked to list his favourite cultural works. He selected Casablanca (for some reason it's the most cliched film choice for a politician), Bob Marley's Kaya (that's the non-political one), Michelangelo's David and Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbevilles (well, it was the Western Morning News who were asking).

During his time in government, there were some difficult issues to be faced: Britain's involvement in the arms trade, the badger cull, bird flu, the BBC licence fee, the fact that Jeremy Hunt, as the Tory shadow culture spokesperson, got a better press than he did. There were also some odd moments of his own making, such as the time when, during a shortage of NHS dentists, he suggested going to see your GP about your teeth instead.

But none of this seemed to cause him any great harm or even discomfort. Indeed, nothing ever seems to do so.

His public persona is one of apparently relentless good humour and absurd optimism, a determination to accentuate the positive that sometimes veers towards Pollyanna-ism. He even found a silver lining to the credit crunch; he wasn't arguing, he said, 'that a recession is good for people's health, but on issues like mental health, more men go and see their GPs if they are unemployed'.

Similarly, when Labour lost the safe of Norwich North in a 2009 by-election on a 16.5 per cent swing to the Tories, Bradshaw admitted that it was 'disappointing', but also 'said that the result did not appear to be as disastrous as Labour's loss of Crewe & Nantwich to the Tories and Glasgow East to the SNP last year'. (Just for the record: Labour did manage to regain Glasgow East in 2010, but has since lost it again, while the others have remained Tory through two subsequent elections.)

It's hard sometimes to identify quite what it is that Bradshaw stands for or what he has done, and equally hard to see that his career has been better spent in Parliament than it would have been on Radio 4. But he always seems very personable and, in some undefined way, quite important.

In 2000 the Independent on Sunday launched its Pink List, listing alphabetically the fifty most influential gay and lesbian people in Britain, and Bradshaw was included (as was his deputy leadership rival Angela Eagle). In later years, the names were ranked in order of significance, so that we could track his rising significance: in 2005 he stood at #69, moving up every year till he hit the top ten in 2009, the same year he was named Stonewall Politician of the Year. But political fortunes are never secure, and after Labour lost power he found himself plunging down to a lowly #82 in 2011.

Perhaps the highest accolade of his career thus far, however, came earlier this year, when this blog suggested he should go for the leadership of the Labour Party. The reasoning was simple: 'he's by far the best dressed MP of any party.'

This is the fourth of a series of posts in which - unless I fall by the wayside - I shall be looking at each of the candidates in the current Labour Party elections for leader and deputy leader, with portraits drawn entirely from their media coverage. Tomorrow: Stella Creasy.

Books and Bookish

I've been absent from this blog for over a week, largely because I've been busy writing. Which is going very happily, thank you.

In addition, I seem to be getting a bit of book reviewing at present. My review of Charlotte Higgins's rather fine book on the BBC is here.

I also had a trip to Blackpool, as mentioned earlier, which was very enjoyable and introduced me to a musician of whom I had never previously heard. Leo Chadburn soundtracked the movie at the centre of the exhibition in the Grundy Art Gallery, and he closed proceedings with a performance of a piece inspired by the correspondence between Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. It was fabulous, almost touching the genius of Scott Walker at times - and by that, I obviously don't mean the melodic Scott Walker, but the creator of Tilt and The Drift.

Leo Chadburn also performs under the name Simon Bookish and I'm gradually exploring his work. This album, Everything/Everything, in particular, is stunning, like the Decca-era David Bowie covering Slapp Happy's Casablanca Moon, accompanied by the Fires of London. (There's one for the teenagers.)

This is Mr Chadburn/Bookish, wearing a shirt that Robyn Hitchcock would have been proud of in 1985: