Vol. 11 No. 14 · 27 July 1989
page 21 | 2276 words
Diary
Richard Wollheim
In the late afternoon of Wednesday, 28 June, a television channel rang me. Would I say a few words on their news programme about Freddie Ayer? It was the first I heard of his death. Then the Independent, for which I had written an obituary a year before, asked me if I would write 600 words for their front page. Then another television channel rang. Freddie’s death was about to become, I could see, a media event.
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Letters
Vol. 11 No. 17 · 14 September 1989
From Anne Summers
I was interested to read, in your issue of 27 July, Richard Wollheim’s account of ‘popular philosophy’ in Britain during the Fifties. Does he recall, or has he blotted from his memory of broadcast philosophy in this period, the episode of Hancock’s Half Hour in which the hero consoled himself on a solitary Saturday night with Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy? It ended in tears; he did not get beyond page ten. Should we understand this episode as reflecting the normality of staying in on a Saturday night to read philosophy, or, on the contrary, as signalling an increasing tendency to identify this practice with social failure? Should we, indeed, go further, and see this broadcast as precipitating the decline of popular philosophy, inasmuch as it constituted it within a narrative of not-being-a-beautiful-person? These are not entirely silly-season questions. In his review of Bryan Appleyard’s Pleasures of Peace (LRB, 27 July) Frank Kermode suggests that Appleyard ‘might have thought it proper to glance … at the Beatles or the Rolling Stones or Bob Dylan’: perhaps it is time someone put in a word for post-war broadcast comedy as a worthy subject of British cultural history.
Anne Summers
Curator, Department of Manuscripts,
From J.R. Fredericks
Richard Wollheim writes: ‘For a minister it is second nature to think that argument is good in so far as it is directed at the other side. Intellectuals cannot think like this, for they have to recognise that crucial to holding a belief is seeing how it stands up to arguments pitted against it.’ Would that it were so. How does he reconcile his assertion with the barracking by Oxford undergraduates of speakers whose opinions they dislike, or with the actions of the Oxford authorities in so far condoning their behaviour as not to send the offenders down, or suspend them, for clearly being incapable of profiting from any meaningful university life?
J.R. Fredericks
Charlbury, Oxfordshire
