There are two sorts of sacred cows, just like there's a Whopper
and a filet mignon. The first sort of cow is one that we know is sacred,
but we're - titter, snigger - covertly encouraged to attack it, both
for pleasure and profit. That would be the Queen and Cliff Richard.
The second would be the Queen Mother and John Peel. Show me a filet
mignon and I become a mad cow. John Peel has become 'our' - and, by
that, I mean people who consider themselves enlightened and unburdened
by tradition - Queen Mother. He needs taking out; if only in a caring
way, for his own good.
He is in danger of reaching hands-off, Help The Aged status: 60 years
old, and he's still got all his own teeth, sorry, all his own Fall
records!
I've always loathed John Peel. It started in
the Sixties when I was a child, still staggering under the first blow of
benediction by black music. All day long on Radio 1 - most of all, on
Tony Blackburn's show - you could hear great creamy earfuls of it:
Motown by the mile, Philly by the furlong. But at night Radio 1 became a
white desert. It became 'intelligent'. That is, it became male, hippy
and smelly - it became John Peel.
I hated him in the Seventies, too, because he liked punk, long after
punk - the whitest, malest, most asexual music ever - should have been
left to die an unnatural death. I'd been a punk, and knew that the whole
thing was, frankly, shit in safety pins. We came to bury the music
industry; we ended up giving it one almighty shot in the arm.
In the Eighties, someone gave me as a kitsch gift a Sixties pop annual.
I'll never forget John Peel in it, talking about his father's absence
during his infancy: "He was off playing soldiers." Reader, this man was
fighting in the second world war.
What did YOU do in the war, Daddy? Well, John Peel caught VD, and banged
on about it. Until recently, Peel banged on a lot about sex. Like many
an ugly Englishman, he went to America, where that nation's young women
found a Limey accent so beguiling that they barely looked at the face it
came out of: "All they wanted me to do was abuse them, sexually, which,
of course, I was only too happy to do,"
Peel told the Guardian in 1975. "Girls," he said to the Sunday
Correspondent in 1989, "used to queue up outside oral sex they were
particularly keen on, I remember one of my regular customers, as it
were, turned out to be 13, though she looked older."
This was the Sixties. Fleeing America after the authorities quite rightly objected to him
having sex with young teenage girls, Peel was joined by his wife, Shirley, a Texan girl, who was 15 when he married her.
Talking to the Correspondent about this young woman, now dead by her own
hand, Peel seems strangely censorious: "She fell in with some extremely
dodgy people she married three more times after me, and I was the only
husband by whom she didn't have a child.
All the children were in care. She did some terrible things, you know.
She didn't deserve to die, though." Somebody give that man a medal!
Scratch a hippie and find a sexist - well into the Seventies, Peel was
drooling on about "schoolgirls", in print and on air, where his
Schoolgirl Of The Year competition was quietly laid to rest during
punk's tenure. I always thought the alleged Sexual Revolution of the
Sixties was not a bid to advance women's rights, but rather to block
them, to turn back the clock and push the brave new young working woman
back to being barefoot and pregnant. Even the appearance approved for
hippie women - long skirts, long hair - spoke
of an earlier era, before girls raised their skirts and bobbed their
hair and went out to earn a living.
Knowing of Peel's rather sticky track record on matters sexual, it seems
both wildly inappropriate and somehow totally fitting that his latest
venture is the radio critic's favourite Radio 4 programme, Saturday
morning's Home Truths, which, as
its name implies, is a deeply reactionary idea
masquerading as a droll, down-to-earth sideswipe.
Home Truths concerns itself with family matters, both bitter and sweet.
These may be as unimportant as the reluctance of teenagers to tidy their
rooms or as serious as the alleged False Memory Syndrome, but they are
linked by one overriding belief: that after all politics, after all
ideas, there is the Family. And that the Family, alone of all
institutions, is as natural as breathing.
This is, of course, untrue; the Family is a construct like any other,
one that has been propped up by a million years of hellfire warnings
("Marry or burn" - so-called "Saint" Paul) and that, the moment the
pulpit-bullying ceased, broke down with amazing swiftness.
Everyone's got a right to get old and fat - hell, it's practically my
raison d'être - but I find it filthily objectionable for someone who
has grown rich and respected for preaching the Sixties mantra, "If it
feels good, do it!", suddenly to come over so cosy and domestic that it
would have Oxo Katie reaching for an icepick.
Peel, being middle
class, managed to survive the Sixties, and then thrive in the decades
that followed. But for the young working class, the road of excess led
to madness, alienation and incarceration; and for the girls who got hip
to the Sixties slogans about sexual generosity, a joyless shag led to
nothing but a council flat and the end of youth before they were
entitled to vote.
I don't blame Peel for changing his mind. But I
do blame him
for rubbing the nation's collective nose in the fact that the
well-connected can walk on the wild side and return to the fold, whereas
the working class need only stray once off the straight and narrow to
be trapped in a cul-de-sac of sorrow.
A public schoolboy who calls his children after footballers, a lover of
World Music who happily took the Order of the British Empire, a
landowner who does commercials for toilet paper and Playstations and yet
calls himself a Bennite, a past 'abuser' of children who preaches
Family Values in excelsis: it is not, as his fans like to say, a wonder
that Radio 1 has not sacked him in 30 years. No, in all his patronising,
phoney, hypocritical glory, he is Radio 1. Lord Reith would be proud.
Via
