There is someone on youtube.com who has made it his work to transfer some of the jewels of the BBC’s dramatic output of the last thirty years onto that site, and I would like to shake him by the hand and/or buy him a doughnut.
Thus it is that The Theban Plays by Sophocles (with a cast including Juliet Stevenson, Claire Bloom and John Gielgud) and The Trojan Women (starring Genevieve Bujold, Katharine Hepburn and Vanessa Redgrave (as well as, slightly improbably, Brian Blessed…) are up there to view on his site. What have the BBC done with these rare treasures, some of the greatest works of culture, brought to life by some of the greatest actors of the last century? They have deleted them.
No doubt they have hung onto the stuff that really matters: things like “Noel’s House Party”, “Goodnight Sweetheart” and early transmissions of “Pebble Mill”, but, I mean: WHAT? I am not being a high culture snob, but to quote Hanif Kureishi and one of my favourite comments ever (made by him during a Radio 4 debate on “High Culture and Popular Culture, addressed to some Piers Morgan/ Mark Frith type idiot): “I’m sorry, but opera IS better than “Just Seventeen”, it just IS.”
What the hell do the BBC think they’re doing? Rather than deleting this stuff, they should be transferring it to DVD and selling it to raise some money (and anyone who thinks there isn’t a market out there would do well to look at the upsurge in the study of Classics at schools and universities all over the country recently; as well as considering all those people who would simply enjoy this kind of feast on its own dramatic terms). No doubt it contravenes some kind of ludicrous “exclusivity” clause – maybe whichever cretin instituted that would like to consider the best-selling football song of all time: not “Three Lions”, not “World in Motion”, not “On Top of the World”, but “Nessun Dorma”.
