Once, BBC television had echoed BBC radio in being a haven for standard English pronunciation. Then regional accents came in: a democratic plus. Then slipshod usage came in: an egalitarian minus. By now slovenly grammar is even more rife on the BBC channels than on ITV. In this regard a decline can be clearly charted... If the BBC, once the guardian of the English language, has now become its most implacable enemy, let us at least be grateful when the massacre is carried out with style.
Clive JamesTelevision is simultaneously blamed, often by the same people, for worsening the world and for being powerless to change it.
Clive JamesOne way or another, all the poets of the thirties and forties reacted to Auden, either by rejecting him or trying to absorb him.
Clive James