Andy Burnham has long been a staunch supporter of Top of the Pops, so when he was asked at a Labour leadership campaign event in Nottingham this week whether he still planned to lobby for the programme to be returned to the BBC, his answer was a foregone conclusion, according to today’s diary in the Independent.
But as well as praising the show, he went on to complain that the BBC was too “London-centric”, perhaps referring to the ongoing controversy over the reluctance of certain BBC bosses to relocate to new premises in Salford. According to Burnham, the Beeb has also lost touch with “ordinary people” — and he went on to rachet up the rhetoric, saying that “they’d never hire someone like John Peel now”.
Unfortunately for Burnham, the BBC hired someone very like John Peel just a few months ago — his son Tom Ravenscroft, in fact. Tom has a weekly show championing new music on the recently resurgent BBC 6 Music.
However, as a colleague of mine here at the NS has just pointed out to me, the son of John Peel isn’t exactly an “ordinary person”, as the Independent seems to imply — in fact, he’s a quasi-celebrity who surely had a rather extraordinary upbringing. But the slip-up is something of a blow to a candidate who has campaigned relentlessly on his “ordinary” credentials, going out of his way to demonstrate the “elitist” qualities of his opponents and seizing every opportunity to present himself as the choice for “ordinary people”.
“Ordinary” or otherwise, looking out of touch on an issue that he’s campaigned on for several years isn’t going to provide the last-minute boost his campaign so sorely needs.
Read the recent NS interview with Andy Burnham here.
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