The BBC’s embarrassing climbdown over the proposed non-singing of ‘Rule Britannia’ will no doubt be greeted with whoops of delight from the 3.5 million people who normally watch The Last Night of the Proms, over two million of whom are aged over 65. Having initially said the song would be played without words, to reduce the risk of spreading COVID-19, the Beeb has chosen some ‘select’ singers, who will be carefully socially distanced.
Ever since I was a young boy, I have made a point of avoiding the Last Night of the Proms on BBC One. I have nothing against the show, apart from the fact it always took place on a Saturday night when I’d be deprived of my weekly fix of Kojak or Midnight Caller. I’d rather watch Mrs Brown’s Boys than the Last Night of the Proms! (Urgent correction: no I wouldn’t, actually.)
I don’t mind ‘Rule Britannia’, either, even though I couldn’t name any of the words, other than ‘Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves! Britons never, never, never shall be slaves.’ The thing is, very few of the blowhards who lost their collective shit last week, attacking the BBC for being – yawn – ‘politically correct’ or, the latest vacuous insult, ‘woke’, know any of the words either. In reality, Britain doesn’t rule the waves anymore because our navy these days consists of a couple of nuclear powered punts and 100,000 well-paid civil servants to procure them.
Anyway, there are far better songs through which we can express our patriotism, if that is what we so desire. I’d always plump for Jerusalem, although I can’t pretend to understand what the words all mean. I just love the music and the line ‘Till we have built Jerusalem, In Englands green & pleasant Land.’ It’s the green and pleasant land line I like because that is precisely how I see England. Fly in an aircraft across the country and you will see what I mean.
In any event, the confected row about the proms was a dead cat story, almost certainly placed in the government-sympathetic Sunday Times to deflect from the mess the government is making of running our country. In Britain these days, it only takes a ‘political correctness gone mad’ story to see us lose our minds.
Under Dominic Cummings and Boris Johnson, Britannia doesn’t so much ‘rule the waves’ but rather it leads the world in incompetence and, and as a result of that incompetence, mortality rates caused by COVID-19.
For the 3.5 million people whose lives appear to revolve around the faux patriotism of the Last Night of the Proms, you’ve got your singers back now. I hope you enjoy the show with a nice cup of cocoa and a biscuit. Along with 64 million other Brits, I’ll be doing something/anything else.
