Late on Friday my editor at the Observer called and asked me to dash off a few words on what was wrong with the Mail and some Conservative MPs demanding that the BBC ban ‘Ding, dong the witch is dead’, a Munchkin chorus, from The Wizard of Oz. I was stuck on a train to Glasgow, but how could I resist?
The partially successful attempt to stop the BBC playing a clip from a 1939 children’s film is one of the most surreal cases of censorship I have seen. Right wingers were not demanding that the BBC blacklist the song because it was pornographic or libellous. The lyrics the merry Munchkins chirruped were irrelevant to them. They were censoring because they disapproved of the motives of the people who had bought the song, not because of the content of the song itself. That the BBC went along for the most part with them showed how quickly its new director-general would fold under political pressure.
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