Not for the first time, Danny's got himself sacked from the BBC.
He should have known better and it wasn't big or clever but it shows how the second most dangerous thing in our culture, after all the things they rightly complain about, is the tendency among the politically correct to seek out offence where there is none.
In a generation of entertainers who have substituted swear words, gratuitous sexual references and there's also Framkie Boyle, many of who are not well-placed to pass judgement on Bernard Manning, Jim Davidson or Roy 'Chubby' Brown, for wit, Danny Baker has never needed to fall back on such strategies with 'nothing below the waist' one of his taglines, a fine line in the puncturing of pomposity and a wide range of reference points from when we were younger from the polite generation of Harrry Worth, Deryk Guyler and his sign-off at 11 on a Saturday morning taken from Leonard Sachs.
His chosen Desert Island Disc to save after Bernard Cribbins et al had been washed away was The Next Time by Cliff Richard, which he cited as the last hurrah of an age of innocence. This man is not a threat to our properness.
He has updated the tradition of Reithian values but now the BBC, who have been struggling in recent years, since the Cliff debacle, prefer to stick with the deadbeats they have rather than the greatest radio broadcaster of his generation. Radio 5 will struggle. I'm not doing Saturday mornings for them. I'll be off to Record Review on R3; some will presumably migrate to R4 and expect not much from the dull, slightly gormless Rev. Richard Coles while some poor sod is going to have to soldier on at R5 without the rights to the Sausage Sandwich Game. Five Live is up against it with Phil Williams leaving the late evening slot, the ingratiating Chris Warburton far too keen to impress whenever given the Breakfast slot where Nicky Campbell is at least clever, and now this.
The morning after Liverpool's miraculous result against Barcelona (which was actually news to me), all Five could do was broadcast Liverpool supporters shouting, in their chosen mode of celebration, so I turned over to R4 where they interviewed Roger McGough, who was characteristically fey, notwithstanding Evertonian, but endlessly preferable.
Very sorry to see you go, Dan. Saturday mornings won't be the same any more and I don't know where you will turn up next. At the height of my cycling career, in the mid-90's, I needed to get out on the road to pile up the miles of arduous endeavour of a weekend but my start would be delayed as long as possible to hear as much as I could of Baker and Kelly Upfront.
I'll miss you is too easy to say.
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Meanwhile, back at the ranch, last weekend's crisis of having nothing new to read was first of all filled by Daphne du Maurier, who I need to read more of, but then by Andre Gide's The Counterfeiters, which has waited patiently for donkey's years for my full attention.
I think it was worth waiting. Much longer and more complex than those beguiling essays like The Pastoral Symphony, The Immoralist or Strait is the Gate, I don't think I'm going to quite assimilate the whole diagram of characters available on Wikipedia but, being a novel about a novelist writing the novel that perhaps it turns out to be, one can't accuse it of not being many-layered, and it has memorable passages worthy of noting down,
he said my mistake was to start from an idea, and that I didn't allow myself to be guided sufficiently by the words
Look here, my dear fellow, I don't want to appear cynical but I have a horrror of reach-me-down sentiments
Whoever really loves abandons all sincerity
etcetera, etcetera
It isn't easy but it's worth the effort.
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I hope to finish that before the arrival of This is Shakespeare by Emma Smith, which will mark a return to Shakespeare Studies for me after a hiatus. Prof Emma was on the wireless on Bank Holiday Monday. Luckily I was on R4 as I drifted in and out of consciousness. I heard Chaucer mentioned, some earnest talk about 'the canon' - yes, the bloody 'canon' which one minute is discredited as colonial, right-wing, nasty and insidious and the next is still there after all- and then something about Shakespeare. I thought, hello, this must be Prof Emma promoting her new book. Well, she sold one to me.
We will see what we think when it arrives and gets full attention, because it will because it sounds pretty good. It's going to need to be. She has some ground to retrieve but, unlike the self-proclaimed 'controversialist', Prof Sir Stanley Wells, I'm very open to listening to new ideas whether I like them or not. I don't regard myself as a controversialist.
There again, I don't regard Danny Baker as a controversialist, either. I don't agree with him that Steely Dan were the second best band after The Beatles or that Earth, Wind and Fire were the best Disco act.
I might go with T. Rex being the second best band after The Magnetic Fields and Odyssey being the best Disco act but I'm not going to go on Twitter to shout him down. He is very welcome to his point of view.
