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A Big Myth-take

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The nativity story is evidently a myth. The evidence?

The virgin conception and birth (similar to other myths);

Angels everywhere;

Warnings in dreams;

The wand’rin’ star;

Events created from out-of-context scraps of Jewish scripture (the virgin birth again; the shoe-horning of Bethlehem; Herod’s massacre; the flight and return from Egypt);

The heavy-handed symbolism (shepherds and their gifts; the magi and theirs);

Historically inaccurate details (disparate dates, the Roman census, Herod’s massacre);

Discrepancies between the two accounts;

The absence of the nativity and its events in the other two canonical gospels,

Disparity with later events in the gospels (Mary treasures the nativity events in Luke 2:19 only to seemingly having no knowledge of them later (Mark 3:12); John and Jesus are second cousins… or not).

And on and on.

Yet the story is analysed endlessly – two thousand years (almost) and counting – as is all that follows in the gospels. There’s a whole lot of jargon to intellectualise this , of what is, in the end, just myth: exegesis, hermeneutics, soteriology, apologia, discourse analysis, close reading. All exist to expose the truth embedded in the text and to defend it. Even those who acknowledge that the nativity story is myth (quite an attractive, cosy myth admittedly) want to confine this admission to the nativity alone. The rest – the symbolic miracles, unfulfilled prophecies, literary sermons, the metaphorical pericopes (more jargon!), the trial, crucifixion and resurrection – they want honoured as historical, factual and mystically embodying Truth. Unfortunately, all of these stories bear the same hallmarks of myth as the nativity tales. Why should these other stories be regarded as anything different?

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Christmas is upon us. I’m happy to call it Christmas; the name has a long pedigree and ‘Holidays’ has, in any case, its own religious connotations. Dennis and I will be spending it with my daughter and her family. I hope you too are able to enjoy it in whichever way suits you best.

A happy Christmas to you, both my readers.

A Special Christmas Bible Study

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An angel of the Lord appeared to (the shepherds), and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified.

But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people. Today in the town of David a Saviour has been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.”

Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying, “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace to those on whom his favour rests.” (Luke 2:9-16)

Another chunk of scripture that will be proclaimed from pulpits and in nativity plays again this year. Let’s take a closer look at the scenario Luke creates. Does it bear any relation to something that might occur in reality?

First, an angel. Doesn’t this tell us from the outset that we’re in the realms of fantasy fiction? You can’t fault Luke for trying though, he does his best to impress by adding a whole host of them. You can hear him thinking that ‘a great company of angels’ should convince all but the most hardened of hearts. He’s inventing freely, throwing in the tropes of the genre with abandon. Doesn’t he know angels are fierce, two-faced, six-winged creatures (Ezekiel 14:18; Isaiah 6), not handsome youths in glowing white robes? There’s a reason they prefaced their every appearance, including this one, with ‘Do not be afraid’.

Good news that will cause great joy for all the people: All? Even as Luke wrote this paean to wishful thinking he knew that the Jesus myth had not brought joy to ‘all people’. Most had rejected the claims of the new cult and joy was hardly the prevalent emotion in some of the churches Paul wrote to.

This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger. A baby wrapped in cloths, as was the custom, and lying in an animal feeding trough is a ‘sign’? A sign that the Messiah had arrived? Really? Granted a manger is not a conventional place for a new-born but it’s hardly miraculous. And what if by the time the shepherds had abandoned their flocks to the night and its marauding wolves, Mary had, say, picked up the child or found a better place for it? Imagine the confusion! Sorry, Luke but this is a very poorly constructed story. You just didn’t think it through.

As for the angels’ last proclamation, what does it really mean?

Glory to God: this of course is fawning to a God whose ego is more inflated and fragile than Donald Trump’s. He demands continual praise not only from his heavenly messengers but from those here below, or else he’ll go off on one. You really want to spend eternity with such a tyrant, Christians?

…in the highest heavens: a reference to the fact that early Christians believed in different layers of heaven; Paul writes about them too. God resides, as acknowledged here, in the highest, the top floor executive suite. No-one ever gets to go up there. Emails are sent down from on high.

And on earth peace to those on whom his favour rests: what sort of peace? Certainly not the absence of conflict or war. We’ve now had two more millennia of these, some in the past initiated by Christians themselves. Do people who are at peace with themselves start wars? Peace within then. Do Christians know greater peace than anyone else? Hard to say when it’s not something that can be measured but I’m sure Christians will claim it’s so.

On whom his favour rests: who exactly is this? Who enjoys the favour of a capricious deity? How do they know when he visits all manner of trials and tribulations, testing and tempering on those who count themselves as his. I’m sure the early Christians who helped write the angels’ speech thought it was they who enjoyed the Lord’s favour. Today’s Christians probably think the same. YHWH has always played favourites. Everyone else can go to hell.

So, the heralds of Jesus’ birth didn’t exactly bring good news, did they. Not even in Luke’s imaginary, completely invented, never-happened-in-reality and isn’t-even-a-decent-metaphor scenario.

The End of Days

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A friend of mine was recently given the book The Dragon’s Prophecy: Israel, the Dark Resurrection and the End of Days by Jonathan Cahn. My friend, already concerned about the state of the world, said how much the book had disturbed her. She had become convinced that the time we live in had been predicted in the Bible, in Revelation in particular. ‘It’s all there in the Bible,’ she said to me. ‘It’s all happening just as it says.’

I tried to reassure her that Revelation was written by someone who, 2000 years ago, believed that the situation then couldn’t get any worse, what with the Roman occupation, the destruction of Jerusalem and the persecution of Christians (as the writer saw it.) This, together with his belief that the Lord would soon be coming on the clouds (Revelation 1:7), convinced him he was living in the world’s last days. I told my friend that because of the mess the world is in today (and when is it not a mess?) the book of Revelation resonates with some people; a voice from the past echoing down the ages. In no way, however, was it written about today.

My friend was unconvinced so I took it upon myself to read The Dragon’s Prophecy. Coincidentally, I had just begun to read Bart D. Ehrman’s Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says About the End, dealing with the same concerns. The comparison between the two books couldn’t be more striking.

Ehrman’s is a measured analysis of Revelation and other ‘prophetic’ books of the Bible. He demonstrates from the outset that Revelation was written for believers of the late first/early second century and that its symbolism represents individuals and events of that time. John of Patmos, whoever he may have been (a cult leader, Ehrman suggests) expected, like most early Christians, that the End was going to materialise soon, in the first or early second century, emphatically not in the 21st.

Ehrman warns that ‘professional prophecy writers’ (he doesn’t name Cahn) think ‘the way to use the Bible is to assemble the pieces to reveal the big picture, which until now no one has seen before’ (p17). He’s right. This is precisely what they do. In his book, Cahn promises ‘to put together the pieces of the mystery’ (p11) and claims ‘We (sic) will now begin assembling the pieces of the puzzle’ (p36). He then proceeds to jump around the Bible like a grasshopper on steroids. He’s one of the ‘prophets’ who, as Ehrman puts it, sees the Bible as ‘a great jigsaw puzzle with one piece hidden in this place, one in another and yet a third somewhere else’ (p17).

Cahn opens his argument with a series of bald, unsupported assertions: ‘Behind the perceivable realm lies another, beyond our ability to measure or quantify’ and ‘Behind the history of this world lies another, unrecorded, unrecited (sic), unknown,’ his readers evidently not expected to ask how he knows any of this codswallop. He goes from there to build his argument, such as it is, with a bombardment of ridiculous questions and pseudo-profundities:

What is evil? And how did it come into existence? It is both a mystery and a problem. The mystery is the problem (p9).

Then there are the propositional statements of the ‘If… then we’d expect’ variety. There’s rarely any evidence for the ‘if’ and none at all for the proposed expectation. Here’s the two – rhetorical question and propositional statement – rolled into one: ‘If evil is uncreated, how did it come to exist?’ (p32). Naturally, Cahn is going to answer this question and all the others like it, with a series of unfounded assertions, non-sequiturs and a smattering of unrelated Bible verses.

A central premise of The Dragon’s Prophecy, the dragon being that of Revelation 12:9 and therefore the devil, is ‘the dark resurrection’ of its subtitle. This Cahn explains, pretending the idea comes from the Bible when it doesn’t, is the re-emergence of the Israelites’ old, (extinct) enemies, the Philistines. Like the Israeli nation they too have now been resurrected: as the Palestinians. Under the control of the dragon/devil, they re-enacted on October 7th last year one of the many ancient Philistine attacks recorded in the Bible, only this time with ‘guns and explosives’:

On that October morning, the ancient drama replayed. The resurrected Philistines had again invaded the land, and the resurrected Israelites had again gone into hiding, keeping silent and still in fear of their pursuers (pp99-100).

How do we know this is a replay of an ancient invasion? Because some of those under attack on 7th October went into hiding, just as the Israelites did in 1 Samuel 13:6. As if no other group of besieged civilians hasn’t tried to hide at any other point in history. That and the ‘fact’ there were, according to Cahn, exactly 3,000 invaders on each occasion. Yes, the book really is this bad.

And so, Cahn says, the stage is set for the final battle and the return of Christ who will knock a few heads together, torture and slaughter everyone who isn’t a Christian and set up his faithful followers in a new Jerusalem made of gold and fancy stuff. As Ehrman says, this is indeed what Revelation promises – for the world 2,000 years ago. Ehrman argues that the author of this revenge porn, (he doesn’t use the term: that’s my contribution – you’re welcome) creates a Christ so unlike those of the gospels that he can only be a fiction (aren’t they all?)

Revelation barely made it into the canon and we would all be better off if it hadn’t; certainly my friend would be, and as Ehrman shows, human society and the planet in general would be too. He warns us to read what the Bible actually says, instead of, as Cahn does, forcing it to say what we want it to (to sell books). Irritatingly, Ehrman consistently refers to the Christ’s prophesied appearance on the clouds as his ‘Second Coming’ when the Bible never uses the phrase. Read what it says Bart!

I don’t know whether I’ll finish Dragon’s Prophecy. Its cover blurb boasts that Cahn is a New York Times best seller so clearly there’s an audience for such poorly argued, alarmist nonsense – which is itself alarming. While Bart D. Ehrman has also made the NYT list in the past, Cahn easily outsells him. Nevertheless, I’ve bought my friend a copy of his Armageddon in the hopes it might serve as an antidote to the dire The Dragon’s Prophecy.

The Feeding of the 4000

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Mark 8:1-15 has the credibility-defying story of Jesus feeding 4000 people. The story is in fact one of numbers, all of which have symbolic significance. Numbers, bread and fish.

At first reading the account seems to be little more than a retelling of the earlier feeding of the 5000 in Mark 6:30-44. However its numerology is different and Mark has Jesus explicitly compare the two stories in verses 8-21. Both are intentional inclusions in his gospel, not an editorial oversight.

The events almost certainly didn’t happen in reality; significant numbers of people, 5000 and 4000 respectively, following an itinerant preacher around for – magic number alert! – three days would not have escaped the attention of the Romans. Nor would the men (Matthew 13:58 insists 4000 was the number of men) have been able leave their livelihoods for this length of time to follow Jesus around the distant countryside.

Then there’s the repetition of the bread and fish motif. In both stories the entire crowd fails to bring a single thing to eat. On both occasions, the disciples somehow, from nowhere at all, come up with a few loaves and some fish. Symbolic food for symbolic crowds.

Bread, while a staple food of the first century always has spiritual significance in the bible. From manna from heaven in Exodus 16:17 to the Body of Christ in Paul’s teaching. Fish likewise: Mark has it that several of the disciples were fishermen and makes Jesus declare they’re ‘fishers of men’ (Mark 1:17). John will later take bread and fish symbolism to extremes.

The bread in the feeding of 4000 is spiritual manna. Jesus is not feeding a real crowd with real bread. He is ‘feeding’ those who follow him, the early cult, with himself: ‘Jesus took bread… and said this is my body which is for you’ as Paul has him say in 1 Corinthians 11:23-24. So satisfying is this heavenly Bread that there is a great abundance left even after his followers have taken their fill.

There’s more: the numerology signifies that the crowd following Jesus in the story aren’t any old rag tag collection. They are specifically Gentile. Mark alludes to this when he mentions they have come ‘a long distance’ (8:3) and again when he has Jesus explain, in typically obtuse fashion, the meaning of the miracle (8-21):

Jesus asked (the disciples): “Why are you talking about having no bread? Do you still not see or understand? Are your hearts hardened? Do you have eyes but fail to see, and ears but fail to hear? And don’t you remember? When I broke the five loaves for the five thousand, how many basketfuls of pieces did you pick up?”

“Twelve,” they replied.

“And when I broke the seven loaves for the four thousand, how many basketfuls of pieces did you pick up?”

They answered, “Seven.”

He said to them, “Do you still not understand?”

Seven loaves with seven baskets left over, seven being the number of the Gentile nations. In the earlier feeding of the 5000 the twelve leftover baskets represent the twelve tribes of Israel.

And still the dumb old Jewish disciples don’t understand. The story is about how the early Jesus cult was open to anyone, Gentiles as well as Jews, who recognised and accepted Jesus as the Bread of Heaven, the Saviour. As Mark was aware, Paul had already expressed this universality:

…when we break the bread, aren’t we sharing in the body of Christ? And though we are many, we all eat from one loaf of bread, showing that we are one body. (1 Corinthians 10:18).

For his next miracle, the healing of a blind man in Mark 8:22-26, Jesus/the cult/Mark go on to hammer home the point still further.

The Ministry Of Truth

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This post isn’t about the absurdity of religious belief, but an absurdity of a different  sort: the right to privacy versus a government agency’s insistence that others can access your data. 

Imagine, if you will, that you’re on the committee of a small local charity. Imagine too that a local government official makes a false, though serious allegation about your charity in a public meeting. Imagine that the public body in question declines to address your concern. You are left then with no option but to make a complaint about it.

Imagine that in retaliation the official in question makes a data protection request (otherwise known as a SAR: ‘Subject Access Request’) to your charity, demanding that it surrender any personal data it has stored about him. The charity responds, as required by law, that it holds no data about the official.

Imagine that the official is dissatisfied with this honest answer, and reports the charity to a government body known as the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) who, like the anti-free speech body they are, start emailing the charity insisting it hands over any personal data they have about the official.

The charity advises the ICO, as they have already advised the official, that they hold no personal data about him. Now Imagine this is not good enough for the ICO, which redefines personal data as any mention of an individual, however oblique, by which he or she might be merely identified.

They continue to demand that the charity provide material (that it doesn’t have) to the official, whom they take to referring to as its ‘customer’; another redefinition when the official is in no sense a ‘customer’ of the charity’s. The ICO nonetheless insists that it ‘appears’ to the official that he might be mentioned in the charity’s committee minutes. This, they say, constitutes ‘personal data’ according to their extremely broad definition of the term.

In fact, the charity’s minutes do not mention the individual by name at all and do not disclose any personal information about him. The minutes do, however, include confidential material completely unrelated to the official. As a result, the charity declines to release the minutes to either party and advises the ICO that it is overextending its powers in insisting the charity ‘must’ do this.

The charity could of course have made public other information about the official, such as his being sanctioned four times recently for remarks made about his colleagues or his current homophobic and anti-immigrant tweets made under his official title (which I won’t mention here for fear of his being identified). But it doesn’t, because it does not store such information.  It is readily accessible online.

Now that you’ve imagined all that, consider the issue at stake in the scenario. How far are government bodies able to monitor and demand access, either for themselves or third parties, the discussions others might have about matters of legitimate and immediate concern to them. The law suggests not at all. The ICO seems to think differently. The charity is only able to free itself from the ICO’s demands by informing them that, if required to investigate the matter further, it will, as the law allows, make a charge for doing so. The ICO is never heard from again. 

All of which suggests The Ministry of Truth is alive and well in 21st century Britain. It is Nineteen Eighty Four and Big Brother is upon us.

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Update: Now the UK government is demanding WhatsApp remove its end-to-end encryption from personal messages sent on the platform. This means ordinary, law-abiding people will lose their personal security and privacy, all in the name of some nebulous ‘national security’. The government and police will be able, should they feel the need, to access everyone’s messages.

As if terrorists and paedophiles use WhatsApp in the first place. 

Here in Spirit

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Just to let you know I may not be able to comment as much over the next few weeks. I will, however, still be posting regularly as the Spirit leads.

The More Things Change…

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This year it’s Black Lives Matter. Last year it was Extinction Rebellion. Before that #MeToo, GM crops and gun control. Every year it seems there’s a new cause for us to take to the streets, or, if we can’t be bothered doing that, to social media where we can make our feelings known. Of course, the common people – you and I – have a voice. We have greater means of expressing it, more platforms on which to exercise it, than have ever existed before. No-one in history has had the means we have to express our outrage, opinions and grievances.

But so what? Whether we take to the streets, vlog, blog or tweet, the result, it seems to me, is the same: things stay pretty much as they are. Hardly anything changes as the result of our outcry and protest. Maybe a few statues are demolished, a handful of sexual predators jailed, but ultimately there’s no lasting change. Perhaps a tokenistic law is created, maybe the media involve themselves for a short time in the issue of the day, but before very long everything reverts to the way it was: black lives are no more improved, the police go back to their former ways of behaving (once no-one’s looking any more), children continue to be abused, the environment is still in crisis, there’s another mass shooting by an idiot who’s bought a gun too easily and politicians carry on acting as if they’re above the law. There’ll be a new cause to excite ourselves about next summer. And another the year after that. Today’s preoccupation will disappear just as quickly as the latest fashion or pop sensation.

Why is this, and  why are we largely ignored when we take to the streets or campaign on social media about the things that concern us? Why does our voice count for so little? We live in democracies don’t we, here in Europe and in the States; we have a right to be heard, to be listened to and be taken into account – don’t we?

Well, no. We don’t. No-one is obliged to listen to us. They don’t even have to pretend to, unless they’re politicians running for election and then they are only pretending. Even then we don’t really have the choice we think we do; we’re told we can vote for the candidate of our choice, but we can’t; choice is so severely restricted it’s hardly qualifies as a choice at all. We vote for whoever the parties have put up for us to vote for; for a package that dresses either to the left or the right, without nuance or balanced consideration of the issues, and very often with no long term view of what we need to survive and flourish. That’s why so many fail to vote; they know intuitively that the more things change, the more they stay the same – so why bother?

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The rest of us dutifully select from an already selected few: the millionaires, billionaires, career politicians and failed businessmen who claim they have our best interests at heart, who say they can manage us and make our country great again. Once they have power they forget about us – their lives are so far removed from ours that they can’t possibly relate to the way we ordinary people live – and what the most vocal of us say we want. We think we won’t get fooled again, as the Who say in their politically astute song, but of course we will: we are fooled again, and again and again. Every time.

To be continued.

Swing Low

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This is my response to the way some in the UK have jumped on the bandwagon of the Black Lives Matter movement. I appreciate it is different in the USA.

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‘So it’s important we get out on the street and bring down the last vestiges of colonialism.’

‘Right. So how do we do that?’

‘We tear down the effigies of those who made their fortunes on the backs of black people. Colston in Bristol, Nelson’s Column, Earl Grey in Newcastle…’

‘I didn’t know Earl Grey owned slaves.’

‘Well, no, he didn’t. But he did fund a port in London somewhere and that port was used to bring in cotton. And who was forced to grow the cotton? Slaves!’

‘I see. Yet I think you’ll find it was Earl Grey’s government that abolished slavery in the British Empire, back in the 1830s.’

‘Was it? I didn’t know that.’

‘Obviously not. I agree, of course, that we shouldn’t be celebrating anyone who was involved in the slave trade, but how is vandalising statues going to improve the lives of black people today?’

‘It shows that we stand with them. It shows we disinherit our racist past, founded as it was on the exploitation of black people; on slavery.’

‘So you won’t be using sugar any more, or visiting the Tate? You won’t be drinking at a Greene King pub? Or driving your Mercedes and reading your Guardian newspaper?

‘I don’t see what that has to do with anything.’

‘No, you wouldn’t. Don’t you think Black Lives Matter, which, might I remind you, is an American movement, has been hijacked here in the UK by well meaning, largely middle-class white people with little understanding of the past? That smashing statues, boycotting Swing Low, Sweet Chariot – written, incidentally, by one-time negro slave – and anachronistically slotting people of colour into films and TV dramas, is really going to improve the lives of black people in this country today? If you do, you’re seriously deluded. We’re not a salve for your white conscience.’

‘Look, I’m no racist, you know that, but you just don’t have any understanding of what’s at stake here. Thank God there are white people like me to look after your interests. Now are you coming to this protest or what?’

 

Trust the Experts

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Following Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, a meme has surfaced suggesting that ordinary people have taken to rejecting and ignoring experts; that we no longer trust or respect them and have taken decisions, which in the past they would have made for us, into our own hands (with, the implication is, disastrous results).

If only our experts were experts in the field they profess to be experts in. The views and advice we reject are very often not those of the knowledgeable at all, but merely of those who claim to be experts.

In democracies, ministers and government administrators are, to give them the benefit of the doubt, experts in a given area – frequently in UK government in economics and politics itself – but are, on election, often appointed to a position outside this area of expertise. The current Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, for example, has no health related qualifications; his degree is in Philosophy, Politics and Economics. Being generous, we might say that he is an expert in these areas, but, he has no expertise whatsoever in the field of health, healthcare, the management of hospitals nor even the management of people. There are those who rightly point out that in these areas, he really hasn’t much of a clue. Yet, as Secretary of State for Health, he manages the entire NHS in England and Wales. Was there really no-one who could make a better job of it than Mr Hunt – an expert, say? Was Hunt any more of an expert in Culture, the post he held before being shunted into Health by David Cameron (another ‘expert’ – in Media Communications – who had no experience, let alone expertise, of managing the Health service)?

Similarly, Justine Greening, the current Education secretary – who has previously been Economic secretary, Transport secretary and secretary for International Development – is an economist and accountant. She is not an expert in Education, nor was she for all of her previous responsibilities. Then there’s Lynn Truss, Secretary of State for Justice (an economist), Chris Grayling, Secretary of State for Transport (historian), Karen Bradley, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport (degree in maths), Boris Johnson, Foreign Secretary (classics), Andrea Leadsom, Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (political science), Michael Fallon, Secretary of State for Defence (classics & ancient history) and Theresa May (geography).

And it isn’t just in the UK; the appointment of similarly non-expert experts is taking place right now under Donald Trump – himself an expert in what? – in the USA. Granted that in the UK government, there are some ministers whose qualifications bear some resemblance to the posts they hold (Philip Hammond, Sajid David) but why do we, the electorate, tolerate the deplorable mismatch of others? Ministers do, of course, have civil servants to advise them on their roles, but these are unelected, unknown bureaucrats and who is to say whether their expertise lies within the fields on which they’re advising?

It is no wonder the populace seems to have lost faith in experts. It is because too many of them are not. When I’m ill, I call the doctor not an accountant. When I’m concerned about the environment, I listen to a climate change expert not a political scientist. If I’m seeking justice, I appeal to the courts system, not the banking sector. Why don’t government appointments work like this? Why are we managed by people who have no expertise and, in many cases, no experience in the field in which they present themselves as the ultimate expert? And why are we expected to trust them, to follow their advice and believe in their promises and plans? Most of the time they don’t, quite literally, have much idea of what they’re taking about, and when they’ve got themselves and the service they’re supposedly overseeing into a mess, they’re moved on in a cabinet reshuffle, to another post they don’t know very much about.

It’s difficult to see how things could be any different with the system the way it is, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be. If it’s the system that needs to change, then it should. It isn’t too much to ask of those who govern us that they have some expertise in the areas for which they accept responsibility.

And what has this to do with religion, you may ask? Be assured it has. Next time.

A Digression

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TonyBA man who can’t always remember the name of the record he’s just played has been sacked by the BBC for being unable to demonstrate total recall of an event that occurred forty-five years ago. The moral of the Tony Blackburn debacle is not to grow old nor lose your whatsitsname.

As usual, the last to be considered by the BBC is the listener, the licence payer who has enjoyed listening to Mr Blackburn present Pick of the Pops every Saturday for the last five years. That’s 2.1 million of us.

Do we care whether he can remember a meeting almost half a century ago? No, we don’t. Do we want to continue to derive pleasure from hearing him on Radio 2? Yes, we do. BBC director-general Tony Hall’s cavalier attitude, towards listeners as well as Mr Blackburn, now means we can’t.

I’ve signed my last petition and written my last letter in support of the BBC. The Corporation couldn’t care less about me and at least 2,099,999 other listeners. Maybe it is time it was taken down a peg or two.

Listen to the last few Pick of the Pops Tony Blackburn presented, here, while you can.