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By chance, my latest threatening letter from TV Licensing (see many previous Notes) arrived with the same post as a direct mail shot from Sky TV. The TV Licensing letter attacked me for not responding to ‘our recent warning’ that I was soon to receive an ‘enforcement visit’. I may suffer a court appearance and a fine, it went on, and concluded: ‘You must not ignore this letter.’ I shall ignore it, however, since my reason for not buying a television licence is that I do not have a television. The Sky TV letter was much more cheerful: ‘Your flat’s all set up for Sky TV’, it announced on the envelope, and offered me TV, Broadband and Sky Talk landline calls for £16 a month all in. The first sentence of the letter says, ‘We believe that your building has a communal satellite system, which means you could enjoy all Sky has to offer in your flat without having your own minidish.’ The two letters almost perfectly illustrate the difference between a free-market system and a government-ordered one. Both want my money, for comparable services, but the agency of the BBC has to claim it by law and demand it with menaces, whereas the free-market Sky knows that it can only get it by being nice to me and offering me something I might want. I shall not pay money to either, as it happens, but, unusually (see above), I find myself having a warm feeling about Rupert Murdoch.
In fairness to the BBC, however, have you noticed how good Radio 4 has now become? It is starting once again to give meaning to the idea of public service broadcasting. The programmes look behind current trends, asking interesting questions. They tell the listener about other people, other places, other times. Without being obscure, they are intelligent and educated, and assume a desire to learn on the part of the listener. I would specifically praise this change as the work of Mark Damazer, the Controller of Radio 4, if I didn’t think it would damage his career.
Weather forecasters constantly talk about temperatures ‘struggling’, but they are always represented as struggling in only one direction — upwards. This is a version of the ‘pathetic fallacy’ in which human beings attribute their own feelings to forces which cannot feel. As we built a five-foot snowman in the garden on Sunday, I was convinced of the opposite: temperatures are resolutely struggling downwards and, judging by the rest of the week at the time of writing, succeeding.
One of the issues in the Governance of Britain Constitutional Renewal Bill with which we are threatened is the question of war powers. When he became Prime Minister, Gordon Brown gave the impression that the ‘royal prerogative’ should be removed: Parliament, not the executive, should have the sole power to decide whether the nation goes to war. Last month, Jack Straw, the Lord Chancellor and Justice Secretary, published the White Paper. Mr Straw is really the last cunning old fox in government. While deferring to the idea of parliamentary supremacy, his recommendation ‘does not see a requirement’ for most of the things which the reformers would like, and opts, instead of legislation, for something called ‘a detailed resolution’ which would set out the processes which Parliament would follow if war loomed. Mr Straw’s trickery is completely justified. It is ridiculous that the nation should have to wait for parliamentary approval before taking any military action, because timetables of war do not work like that. It is also democratically unnecessary, because no government can prosecute a war for any length of time without parliamentary approval. As Enoch Powell pointed out in the middle of the Falklands war, the royal prerogative is a huge power, but it is of no avail without ‘retaining the subsequent and continuing confidence of the House’. The demand for a change in all of this results from guilty feeling about the Iraq war. But the funny thing is that this, unusually, was a war that the Commons did clearly debate before it began, and clearly voted for.
Halliwell’s Film Companion lists every feature film ever released. The films beginning with the word ‘I’ give an insight into the human ego. Here are just the titles where the ‘I’ is followed by the letter a or the letter b: I Accuse, I Aim at the Stars, I Am a Camera, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, I Am Curious — Yellow, I Am Not Afraid, I Am Sam, I Am Sexy, I Am the Cheese, I Am the Law, I Became a Criminal, I Believe in You, I Bought a Vampire Motorcycle, I Bury the Living.
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