Now, BBC Radio 4 has joined this metropolitan love-fest with their London Season. Don't they realize most people in Britain DON'T live in London, and that the huddled masses outside the M25 couldn't care less about the city?
I wonder why they have embarked upon this season, featuring a debate entitled 'The Greatest City on Earth' and programmes about the history of London, and how it got to be so.. um.. great. YAWN. I would rather a series about Birmingham, Fife or Swansea. Hell, even Gloucester. There are so many rich seams to mine with the stories of Britain's other great conurbations ... whose legends might not be as stitched into the fabric of our national curriculum as London's.
Most irritating of all is a programme, not yet broadcast, called There's More to Life than London, in which apparently "Stuart Cosgrove explains why not everyone wants to live inside the M25". What? really? so the 50 million people who don't live in London have the same reasons for not doing so do they? Blimey, they must be a crazy lot. Perhaps they like the countryside, want a safer environment to bring up their children, don't want to basically burn 20 quid every time they step out of the house, want that house to cost less than two hundred grand, want to buy a pint for less than a fiver, want to know their neighbours and be smiled at in shops. That kind of thing. Yes, there's museums and restaurants and all the smug glee of knowing you're in London, but we know all about that stuff Radio 4 - how about telling us something we don't?
The most appalling part of this programme is the blurb on the website which accompanies it.
"this will be a timely look at how and why, despite political and institutional devolution, we still allow London to dominate British life, and what price we pay for the largely unexamined assumption that everything happens in London".
No BBC, we don't assume that everything happens in London, only those that live there do, and that's the problem!
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