When Covent Garden was good for sex
NewsBBC2 last night broadcast a 90-minute disquisition on the Covent Garden area, at first an enclave for the obility and then a hub for brothels and restaurants. Some premises served both purposes simultaneously.
If your soup was delayed, you did not need to amuse yourself crumbling bread rolls.
The language of the programme was relentlessly woke. A historian, Montaz Marché, told us about the brothel keeper Jane Douglas. Her father Jon ‘was a black man, by complexion’. Her unmarried parents ‘encouraged her to, kind of, indulge in sex work because her father owned a public house.’
In plain English: her parents forced her into prostitution.
Not in the approved English of 2022, apparently.
On other matters, no space was found for discussing the crucial role of Covent Garden in the post-1945 revival of British arts.
The BBC no longer sees things in the round.
This is sad and entirely unsurprising. I discovered classical music via the BBC and also Channel 4 growing up in the 1980s. Nobody is likely to be able to discover it in that way now.
The BBC’s offerings seem to be an odd mix of cheap and trashy mass-market offerings, mostly long past their best, and anti-White and anti-Western wokery. The sooner it’s abolished, the better.
Did you actually WATCH this excellent programme?…..
It was a social history about the area, and not about The Royal Opera House. Dare I suggest that the goings on inside that fabulous building – and I write as someone who, half a century ago, enjoyed the likes of Klemperer conducting Fidelio, Davis conducting the first complete staging of Les Troyens and Boult conducting VW’s Job – are, for most people, only a small part of the long history of that space.
There was nothing about this programme that deserved your ‘cheap and trashy’ comment. And the ‘anti-White and anti-Western wokery’ jibe, typical of so many respondents on this site, is just so tired, and tells us all we need to know about your jaundiced world view.
Well done NL for provoking this dismal response from ‘Triboniam’. I despair…..
This programme was specifically about the Covent Garden Piazza, although it did extend its remit to include Nell Gwyn at the nearby Theatre Royal Drury Lane. No mention of Hitchcock’s Frenzy!
“The BBC no longer sees things in the round.”
Or in the square, or in any shape.
“The language of the programme was relentlessly woke.”
Woke? Really, NL?
It sounds as if you are a supporter of Ron DeSantis.
The boxes of Italian opera houses are great for a “quickie”…..Think of all the fun one could have during the first act of “Die Goetterdaemmerung?”. Just wear earplugs so that one does not hear the screaming and shouting that passes for Wagner singing nowadays….