A thought long fermenting in what I am pleased to call my brain makes an interesting historical link between the curates of the Victorian era and the linen-suited denizens of Broadcasting House's corridors today.
Under the Great White Mother and Kaiser-i-Hind, Oxford and Cambridge produced a surfeit of vaguely posh and vaguely but pointlessly educated young chaps who lacked the drive and physical fitness to go off and join the army or indeed any discernable professional skills, but who nonetheless thought of themselves as part of a God-chosen elite destined to order others about. The only appropriate career thus open to them was the Church, in which they could stand in pulpits and lecture the population at large about the moral, aesthetic and intellectual deficiencies of their hard-labouring, poverty-haunted lives.
Oxford and Cambridge - never institutions to go charging ahead with radical reform - still manage to produce a worrying surfeit of vaguely posh and vaguely but pointlessly educated young chaps and similar young gels who share the desires, ambitions and lack of appropriate talents of their Victorian forebears. But nowadays, alas, the C of E provides very little in the way of full pews to harangue.
And in any case, the church today provides very little for anyone in the way of career benefits besides camping about in fancy tat and drinking free wine, qualities which have led the priesthood to become colonised by inverts to a degree that makes it impossible for the weak-kneed Silurian buffoon occupying the throne of St Augustine to avoid giving them pointy hats and crooks.
Where was I?
Oh yes - the decline of the church has led to ever decreasing cushy job opportunities for vaguely posh and vaguely but pointlessly educated young chaps to lecture the rest of us, which is where the BBC comes in - as an employer of first resort for vaguely posh and vaguely but pointlessly educated young chaps and a bully pulpit for telling everyone else how to live their lives in a patronising but uncomprehending manner. I rest m'case.
