OK, so I got the date wrong, already. It's to be in 2015, not 2012, but does it matter?
If you don't know what I'm talking about, read Libby Purves's piece in today's Times about the big radio switch-off.
Libby Purves is, wonderfully, starting to sound like Bernard Levin, that much-loved Mozartian, oenophile and ranter of a bygone age, though so far she hasn't managed to cram 400 pejorative adjectives into a single phrase, nor write a 2,000-word column in a single sentence, like what he did.
But she, like Bernard Levin, wields the English language as though it were an sword, putting down the mighty from their what's-it's, and piling contumely upon those who most richly deserve it.
Libby Purves and Bernard Levin use, or used, the English language like Congreve, Pope, and Shakespeare to belittle the bumptious and prick the balloons of persiflage of the pompous, and we need them , we need them: writers with the genius to use the expressive powers of English to its utmost for the purposes of ridicule; writers whose sense of its rhythms, its assonances, and its poetical possibilities provides them with the wherewithal to take the piss out of prats.
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