Two sides to every story

Maybe the equality inspectors at the corporation didn’t get the chance to vet Richard Littlejohn’s series for Radio 2, The Years that Changed Britain Forever, before it was broadcast on Sunday. Maybe the first programme (produced by Jodie Keane) was an accurate reflection of the year it focused on, 1972. But the most striking thing about it was not so much Littlejohn’s thesis, by which he declared that politically, culturally and musically it was a pivotal year in our national history, determining events that followed much later. No, it was his selection of music to accompany his thoughts about how the miners’ strike of 1972 led to the three day week, which led to the general election that destroyed Edward Heath and brought Arthur Scargill to national prominence. Or that the events of Bloody Sunday, 30 January, in Derry, when British soldiers shot at unarmed demonstrators, killing 14, made it inevitable that the violence in Northern Ireland would go on for another three decades.

All this recollecting and theorising was accompanied by the bad boys of British rock in full swagger — Jagger, Ferry, Clapton, Stewart. Not a woman’s voice to be heard. No Lulu, Dusty or Sandy Denny. Instead, a lot of guitar riffs and male agonising, to which Littlejohn responded, ‘the music was great’. It was like being taken back to that period on air when only the valiant Annie Nightingale was allowed to be heard talking about rock music, and she was only given airtime because her voice, husky and low, could have been taken for a man’s anyway.

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Julie Burchill

Will I ever pee again?

Why, too, begin with 1972? Littlejohn, of course, is a Daily Mail columnist, and 1972 (do we need reminding?) was the year we were eventually accepted for entrance into the Common Market, and when just eight MPs, as Littlejohn insisted, allowed the European Communities Act through parliament, Heath ‘signing away our sovereignty and sacrificing our fishing waters’ along the way.