Terrible journey to school today, taking two hours, instead of the usual hour. An hour , in itself, is bad enough, you might think. Two is definitely NOT GOOD.
It certainly gave me time to get really annoyed with Radio One. When we moved back to the UK, the girls thought Capital was the coolest station ever, which rather pleased me as I had listened to it myself as a teenager. I even won a T shirt in a phone-in once upon a time! Sadly, things have moved on, Child One is now into classical music and Child Two would rather die than listen to Capital. She could cope with the growing realisation that it wasn’t the be-all and end-all of cool, if her mother liked it. But when Johnnie Vaughan left the breakfast show, we both lost interest. His replacement is annoying.
So off we went to Radio One. Initially, I felt sorry for Nick Grimshaw, as he was taking over from some uber-blokey guy who’d been doing it forever and was popular with white van drivers. Grimshaw’s mission was to make Radio One the It station for people like my daughter, or even cooler teens (if there could ever be such creatures). He soon lost my sympathies, bigging up his drunken nights out with showbiz pals, talking about himself non-stop and playing horrible songs. Needless to say, Child Two still said she loved it.
So now we have a rota system, where we each choose a station in turn. Today, alas, it was Radio One. As well as the usual drivel, Grimshaw and his coterie started describing the new Miley Cyrus video. Miley, you may recall, has shot to notoriety by ‘twerking’ at some awards ceremony while a nasty man sang a song about rape. Yes, Miley did look pretty stupid (I watched it on You Tube as I’d never heard of twerking and wanted to know if it was something I should be doing. It isn’t. It really isn’t) but the man was singing a song about RAPE. Why is it ok for him to be crooning his distinctly questionable lyrics, but it’s not ok for her to shake her not-very-impressive booty?
Today, Grimshaw and his chums described the Miley video frame by frame, making it clear that she was continuing with her new ‘sexy’ act, including licking a mallet. They had a good laugh about the inappropriateness and ridiculousness of her behaviour. Then Grimshaw played a rap song with extremely explicit lyrics about promiscuous sex. This was at 8am, peak school run time. Did they laugh and jeer at the song? No. It was sung by a man. So a man can sing whatever he likes, and a girl (admittedly, one who is making a fool of herself, but that’s her choice and she’s not advocating violence) gets lambasted for stepping out of line. Pah! What a world to bring girls up in.
