Last week, Clare Balding was enshrined by another newspaper as a national treasure – again. (A cursory internet search revealed that she had been so described more than a dozen times in the last few years).
I do wonder whether her ubiquity on television and radio might have had some bearing on this elevation. From an early morning yomping programme on Radio 4 on Saturday (a bit bloody hearty for 6.10), to seemingly every major sporting occasion, not to mention Trooping the Colour and Crufts, she’s more omnipresent even than the oleaginous Gary Lineker.
Surely the BBC must have a “diversity agenda committee” to encourage different faces, different voices. Apparently not. I admit that my list of national treasures stretches to the Ashmolean, Ironbridge, the Victory and Wren’s St Bride’s church off Fleet Street (declaration of interest – I was married there). Ms Balding, fine though she is, is not fit to be bracketed with these gems.
One man who would rightly blench if he were ever described as a national treasure is the incomparable Jonathan Meades, a one-man debunker of pomposity and cant. His BBC4 programme on jargon was gloriously bracing, acerbic, excoriating and coruscating. The advance notice promised lots of sweary action – he didn’t disappoint. Rather, it was full of aperçus - “slang mocks; jargon crawls on its belly”; jargon is for “people who can’t think for themselves, programmed morons, seething bubos”. Politicians have a “contempt for the language of the people they’re supposed to govern”.
The richest parts dealt with the tabloid press, tabloid television and, most joyously, football, especially the effects of one player nutmegging another. I’m only sorry he didn’t address the ludicrous phrase “stonewall penalty”, coined, I’m convinced, by Alan Hansen. He reserved especial and welcome spleen for art curators and installation artists, a scabrous crew in his just estimation. As for his opinion on Nicholas Serota... reports of any recent sightings of the chair of the Arts Council will be welcome after Meades’s broadside. He must have gone into hiding.
• Jonathan Bouquet is an Observer columnist
