On Tuesday Aunty indulged in one of her regular bouts of self-laceration when Chris Ledgard presented The BBC and the Closet (Radio 4), an illuminating examination of the broadcaster’s attitude towards homosexuality before 1967, when being gay stopped being a reason to be sent to prison for 18 months.
It might have been funny were it not so sad. In 1953 D.F. Boyd (Chief Assistant - Talks: the programme was full of that BBC favourite, the convoluted job title) jotted down a few thoughts in a memo in which he categorised homosexuals as “actively predatory, insatiable for their own sex”.
It was in this sort of atmosphere that, ten years later, a producer named Colin Thomas was granted permission to record the experiences of six gay men. The next step was to get his programme broadcast. The Head of Talks and Current Affairs (he was named, but I can’t be bothered to type his name out) was against it: “Although the homosexual proportion varies between 2 and 4 per cent,” he wrote, “there is a substantial number of marginal cases of people who under certain influences could cross the frontier.” How he could have decided that the men’s stories of fear, guilt and self-loathing could tip anyone over the edge into gayness is anyone’s guess.
Now - do you play Truth or Pose? It’s simple: you just listen to Desert Island Discs (Radio 4, Sundays 11.15 am, repeated Fridays 9am) and award yourself points for spotting which of their eight records the desertee really loves, and which they have nominated because it makes them look clever.
It’s also possible to play it with the literature paraded With Great Pleasure (Thursdays, Radio 4, 11.30am). This time the first of the great and good combining honesty with impressing us with their erudition was John Major. Dickens, Wilde, Milne, Trollope ... one tended to believe that all those came from the heart but not, curiously, his choice of a cricket writer. Neville Cardus obviously making up something about Denis Compton? Surely Wisden was the real Major meat - the 1959 edition, say, when cricket was really dull.
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Being Major, though, the grey man with a glint of red in the eye, he hinted at something racier, the “doggerel” he himself had written which it might not be a good idea to read out for fear of the libel laws. Interest was piqued: could some of it begin “There once was a vengeful harpy called Edwina”?
CHRIS CAMPLING