Phony War: Last Night Of The Proms Is A Culture Vacuum
Let's face it: much of our collective culture doesn't bang...
Tradition is a largely misleading word. Just look at the UK: much of what we term ‘tradition’ is entirely invented, a curated selection of disjointed cultural myopia that trims any notion of Britishness down to little more than a stiff upper lip and one of those Keep Calm And Drink Gin dish towels.
In this sense, there’s little more traditional than the *Last Night Of The Proms*, a kind of bizarre, anachronistic knees up for the Middle Classes in which lashings of prosecco are poured all over the aisles of the Royal Albert Hall, Union Flags are waved, and songs – what glorious songs! - are sung.
Except perhaps not this year. Over the weekend the latest culture war non-war was unleashed, with the Sunday Times reporting that 2020 could see the event’s climactic finale thoroughly castrated.
Land Of Hope And Glory was to be torn down, if the report was to be believed, while Rule, Britannia! was to be thoroughly sunk to the bottom of the ocean. Neither song was fit for purpose, the broadsheet raged, in the translucent, heritage-free, culture-vacuum being created by (gasp!) the BBC.
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As ever in the era of perma-outrage, the row quickly escalated. Piers Morgan leaped in for a two-footed tackle on the BBC, labelling the decision “absolutely pathetic”. Anti-woke meme machine Laurence Fox was even asked for his opinion, stating that “the lunatics are in charge of the asylum” before charging: “Defund this shameful, Britain-hating organisation and start again...”
Ouch.
Leaving aside the sheer deluded hilarity of the BBC being branded a Left wing citadel, this is little more than a tiresome, boring row, a proxy for the left-right culture war engineered by The Sunday Times, a creaking UK establishment broadsheet owned by Rupert Murdoch.
Indeed, the BBC swiftly moved to dismiss the reports, perhaps sensing that the sound of sizzling gammon was in danger of drowning out the Last Night Of The Proms.
In a statement, the Beeb said: “With much reduced musical forces and no live audience, the Proms will curate a concert that includes familiar, patriotic elements such as Jerusalem and the National Anthem, and bring in new moments capturing the mood of this unique time, including ‘You'll Never Walk Alone’, presenting a poignant and inclusive event for 2020.”
What the statement neatly avoids pointing out, though, is that much of our shared cultural heritage simply doesn’t bang. Written decades, sometimes centuries before Empire Windrush docked to alter British life forever, it’s a catalogue of listless, boring, soul-crushing songs designed to prop up an Imperial dream that harmed lives on every single continent.
‘Land Of Hope And Glory’ is a hopeless, lumbering neo-epic, a song that seems to slow down with each passing bar before finally descending into a sludge of fake patriotic goo. ‘Rule, Britannia!’ is a bizarre naval fantasy that needs to be placed in dry dock almost immediately, a song so perverse in its tempo that few can accurately replicate the words.
Even the vanilla dirge ‘God Save The Queen’ has its detractors, with its sluggish pace, and eye-droopingly mundane melody masking a loathsome lyric concerning “rebellious Scots to crush”.
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In short: the British songbook is lacking spice and a definite bounce to its step. So where can we go from here? ‘Land Of Hope And Glory’ is so loathed by the sports world that England fans actually voted to discontinue it as a Commonwealth anthem, replacing it with a variation on ‘Jerusalem’ - complete with words crafted by the original Loony Leftie himself, *William Blake*.
But perhaps that doesn’t go far enough. Stormzy’s ‘Vossi Bop’ has become a modern anthem with young people across the UK with its rallying cry of “fuck the government and fuck Boris”, but it’s doubtful if the Proms audience would grapple with its syntax.
Lewis Capaldi walked out onstage at TRNSMT Festival to the sounds of Glasgow rave anthem ‘Bits And Pieces’, an unofficial Scottish national anthem of sorts, but the chewbacca-mask clad songwriter is still some way from the point in his career where he decides the Proms are the place to be. Equally, Scotland might be independent sooner than a lot of Proms-watchers think.
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In the end, maybe those dish towels have a point. Maybe we all really do need to Keep Calm And Carry On. The bizarre, anachronistic events of the Last Night Of The Proms can continue, becoming ever-more detached from the country as it truly exists, lashing out whenever its irrelevancy is pointed out.
And culture can then belong to the rest of us, the sort of people who wouldn’t be seen dead at the Royal Albert Hall *unless Kano was playing*.
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