As we prepare to enter 2010 here’s a candidate for most absurd sacking of the year. The radio DJ Tom Binns has been dismissed after interrupting the Queen’s Christmas message on air, saying: “Two words: bor-ring.”
The humourless directors of BRMB, a Birmingham radio station, took fright after a handful of listeners complained. That the station had not planned to broadcast any of the speech (it mistakenly picked up a feed) was not, apparently, grounds for leniency.
Binns’s sacking is indicative of the post-Sachsgate climate of fear and of the extraordinary deference the media continue to show to the royal family. We have grown used to the subservience adopted by the BBC when reporting on the monarchy and, depressingly, this attitude now seems to infect the commercial sector, too.
Binns’s swangsong was distinguished by at least one decent gag. As he segued into Wham’s “Last Christmas” he quipped, “From one queen to another . . .”
Had the voice of Elizabeth Windsor invaded my broadcast (in my student days I anchored a show, Clash, Fuse and Amplify, on Radio Warwick), I would have retaliated with something far stronger.
So, as an antidote to the apologists of the airwaves, here are two of the finest republican songs, the Stone Roses’ “Elizabeth My Dear” and the Smiths’ “The Queen Is Dead”. Enjoy.
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