BACK in the autumn of 2015, a camera crew visited my home in Worcester to film me playing blues harmonica for a forthcoming television series.
It’s a long story of how this came about. Suffice to say that an extended clip of me talking, and then ‘accompanying’ – yes, in the key of ‘E,’ naturally - the Rolling Stones’ version of the Buddy Holly number Not Fade Away was included in the first episode of a BBC five-parter titled The People’s History of Pop.
The series was subsequently televised in the spring of the following year.
Charting the rise of the pop and rock culture in Britain, starting from the 1950s onwards, The People’s History of Pop proved to be very popular with viewers and was re-broadcast a year or so later.
Each episode was also uploaded to the internet, all of them over time gaining thousands of ‘hits’ with scores of attendant comments by viewers.
And it was one of these that not only caught my eye but also lingered in my consciousness for quite some time afterwards. It simply said: Cultural appropriation.
Just two words… not exactly Shakespearian and posted anonymously, of course. After all, we know full well that most social media commenters crouch low, hiding behind pseudonyms, very few having the courage of their convictions.
Hmmm, pseudonyms. On reflection, that’s probably a rather grand description.
Well, these days many of us are familiar with this absurd, meaningless and mindless slogan that is ‘cultural appropriation’, but back then, this was the first time I had encountered it.
Nowadays, of course, this go-to cliché is just part of a growing and insidious arsenal now being employed in what has become a constant assault on free expression.
For everywhere one now looks, the Arts are under attack. Tighter and tighter become the bonds that are now strangling all creative endeavour, as the new Puritanism, encouraged by an increasingly authoritarian centralised state, consolidates its grip on everything we say, do and - maybe one day, courtesy of Artificial Intelligence (AI) – think, too.
Therefore, it is little wonder that an increasing number of performers in the world of comedy are voicing their concerns about a growing, reactionary society that cannot, and clearly will not, tolerate being offended in any way, shape or form.
For heaven’s sake, what is comedy if it cannot offend? Answer - it is nothing.
John Cleese, Stephen Fry, Rowan Atkinson and Ricky Gervais have all voiced their very real fears for the future of comedy in a world that seems to regard everything being said in a strictly literal sense.
And it has now reached hysterical proportions, a spreading rash of mass autism where irony, satire, sarcasm and biting invective are taken at face value in a world populated by people who demand that they must not be offended.
The latest comedian to join this growing throng of dissent is David Walliams, whose Little Britain series has been the target of a robotic minority that seeks to control the tastes of the majority. A case of ‘I don’t like this - therefore you shouldn’t see or hear it, either.”
All these seasoned performers appear to be united in the view that comedy can only exist if it is not only free from restraints, but should also be able to offend with impunity, the logic being that someone, somewhere will always be the butt of a joke or humorous comment.
That is the very nature of the beast, and why we will laugh like drains at any bon mot that comes our way. Well, at least until now, that is.
Wherever we look, artistic freedoms that were once taken for granted are now being slowly and relentlessly taken away. For example, could you imagine the 1980s puppet show Spitting Image being tolerated these days?
Meanwhile, the stand-up comedy of the present seems to consist of a lot of striding about the stage, shouting and swearing. And very little else, as anyone who tunes into late-night telly will confirm.
The fact is that comedians are now running scared. And they are therefore playing safe, invariably substituting bike shed profanity for witty observation of the human condition.
Whereas once no subjects were off limits, more and more issues are being proscribed. And criticism of religion has become the latest casualty.
The Labour government’s plan to create what is effectively a Star Chamber to monitor - and logically, presumably to prosecute - anyone suspected of blaspheming a certain belief system, sends a clear message to satirists, writers and columnists everywhere. Criticise or make jokes about us at your peril.
Let’s be clear about this. Religions and political parties are merely belief systems. Nothing more, nothing less. They are there for the unconvinced and unconverted to ignore, criticise, laugh at, ridicule and/or question.
But most importantly, belief systems should not receive any special protection in a progressive, humane and open society that is at ease with itself.
Yes, respect one’s fellow human beings. But that doesn’t mean that their beliefs should also be accorded the same degree of reverence or acceptance.
It shouldn’t have to be, but we’re talking about the right to speak freely – within established law - without fear of repercussions and reprisals in what is supposedly a democratic society. It’s called ‘free speech’.
The test of this principle being the acceptance and acknowledgement of an opinion which doesn’t necessarily coincide with that of our own.
There is a difference, and a huge one, between robust criticism and, say, crude racism. They are not the same, yet the two have now become conflated.
The architect of a council to combat ‘Islamophobia’ is deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner. You will no doubt recall that Rayner, seemingly forgetting her own selective righteousness, memorably called adherents to a belief system – Conservatives - ‘scum’.
Despite denials from the usual suspects, what we are seeing here with this looming law is mission creep. For once this ends up on the statute book, who would dare taking even the smallest risk?
Rayner’s hated Conservatism is a belief system, just like any other. Protect that? So, what about Socialism or Christianity… Buddhism, Hinduism. Should they also not be protected? Or is it, as in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, the case that some belief systems are more equal than others?
Further, what is Islamophobia, other than a made-up word? How do you define it? And more to the point, WHO would define it? The police? The Crown Prosecution Service? Clandestine operations within the Government’s Deep State? Angela Rayner?
Elsewhere, freedom of speech is being curtailed on a scale unprecedented since the rise of the Nazis in Germany during the 1930s. Speakers whose views don’t tally with the official thinking of student unions are cancelled, no-platformed and generally vilified, even though British universities have been places of free and fearless debate for hundreds of years.
Tellingly, Labour’s Free Speech Bill – inherited from the loathed Tories - omitted to include student unions, despite the reality that it’s precisely these bodies which, by their repressive actions, are now stifling the free exchange of opinion across Britain’s campuses.
But let us return to ‘cultural appropriation’ and its bravely anonymous commenter’s implied criticism of myself - a presumed, elderly and plainly privileged English white man playing the ‘Mississippi saxophone’ - on the telly.
Had this person done even the smallest amount of research, he or she would have discovered that jazz, blues and rock ‘n’ roll, although initially American imports, eventually took on – through a kind of musical osmosis – a new persona, hence the British rock and blues boom of the 1960s.
The music can now be experienced through every form of media, both ancient and modern. It can be seen and heard in a thousand pubs and concert halls any day of the week.
It is life-enhancing, joyous, and testimony to the human soul that lies within all of us. Rock ‘n’ roll and blues music were glorious, liberating forces for my baby-boomer generation, the first youngsters in the 20th century to be free from the dark shadows of world wars.
For from these small islands, what originally had been conceived in the cotton fields and juke joints of the southern United States, has now spread to all corners of the world, bringing with it the peace and harmony between peoples that only music – and certainly not those grey, ugly politicians – can achieve.
'Cultural appropriation' is good. Oh yes, very good indeed. We need a lot more of it. Lots more, anonymous commenter.
But ominously, everywhere we now look, the liberal arts are under sustained attack. They are under siege from the ‘useful idiots’, those smug, ignorant middle classes now firmly in charge, and directing all human thought… while remaining unburdened by any concerns about to where this new, toxic cultural fascism might lead.
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