Jeremy Clarke Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 14 March 2019

issue 16 March 2019

Does the BBC suppose that it will convert the public to a belief in equality if it does not, in its heart, believe in it itself? Unlike the genial guidance of wartime propaganda, this current stuff feels like snobbish contempt. Of course no one forces me to watch state television, and apart from snooker, darts, football or horse racing, I don’t. But the other day, I took a tray into the room where my mother sits slumped at an angle and the telly was on, and it was showing the terrier judging at Crufts. Crufts! Terriers! Wondering how this culturally questionable event has escaped the gimlet-eyed ideologues’ red pencil, I settled down in a comfortable chair to watch.

When I was a committee member of the south-west terrier, lurcher and ferret club, I occasionally stewarded the terrier show ring at our summer shows: perhaps half a dozen battered terriers in each class, all probably related; half a dozen weather-beaten owners, all probably related.

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