Beeb butchers Baker

"WE ARE the BBC, after all." The dawning of this realisation among the Radio 5 Live top brass last Wednesday might be regarded as a welcome and overdue development except that it was being used a rationale for axing an enjoyable programme, the Baker Line (BBC Radio 5 Live Wednesday, RIP).

Danny Baker's after match football phone in show was hugely popular with callers, who got to say their piece about the teams they love to the point of hatred. But Millwall supporter Baker was the star, a particularly rude, frank and obnoxious one of us, a fella who said on the radio the things we say back to the telly - or in the pub when we're in particularly loud humour.

Surely this was acceptable for an hour a week? After all, the more slyly offensive, overpraised Alan Green seems to be on every day and night.

To make matters worse, Baker decided, in response to the fate of The Baker Line, to withdraw from the Saturday lunchtime programme he did with Danny Kelly. Radio 5 Live then put the boot in and replaced them with the objectionable Richard Littlejoh Will woes never cease?

The replacement for last Wednesday's Baker Line was a nameless phone in fronted by Scotsman Dominik Diamond, who is - on the one hand - a Celtic supporter but - on the other hand - a harmless, dull host. What's more, the calls seemed to have been screened to exclude any discussion of Baker's fate, another triumph for free speech, BBC style.

The excuse for sacking Baker was nasty stuff he said about referees. Yes, he could be crude, but his cred (a crucial quantity) would have been nil had he not said what fans everywhere were thinking. In the same week, Tory MP David Evans, who made more offensive remarks to a group of school kids, had no trouble keeping his place in the party.

The reality is that Baker was too much like real people - "a bit like a fanzine on air", Radio 5 Live's controller complained. Fanzines are notorious for uncensored attacks on officials, club managements and the powers that be in football - as well as undying devotion to their clubs, to honest players and to the beautiful game.

Couldn't have that, could we?

BAKER, as far as I know, never labelled 40 per cent of his callers "social misfits". "Orla Bourke's recent documentary on people who repeatedly phone radio programmes left the matter open to debate.)

The Irish Small And Medium Enterprises' use of the phrase in last week's report to describe tens of thousands of unemployed people showed, among other things, the organisation's miserable, narrow minded view of what constitutes society: the "social misfits" who can't or won't take the rotten, low paid jobs many ISME members offer may fit in very well, thank you, with their families, neighbourhoods, community groups, etc.

It was bad enough when the ISME spokesman avoided discussion of this grossly ignorant label, on Tuesday's News at One (RTE Radio 1) Maria Hegarty of the Irish National Organisation of the Unemployed wasn't having it, and quite rightly and articulately tore into the ISME report.

But the insult turned into injury - to the English language, that is - when Peter Faulkner of ISME turned up on Thursday's airwaves to accuse the INOU of picking out a "technical" term and using it emotively. If "social misfits" is a technical term, then Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable and Montgomery Clift were welders.

The language took another beating on Friday's Liveline (RTE Radio 1), when Marian Finucane - who has been in cracking, aggressive form since re taking the studio from Maire Geoghegan Quinn - allowed a spokeswoman for Guinness Ireland to utter the word "authenticity" in defence of the concept of the Irish theme pub abroad.

Clearly there was a cultural chasm between Marina and Ian, the Englishman from the redoubtable Campaign for Real Ale who was complaining about decent British pubs being ruined by ersatz Irish remodelling, he probably lost her completely when he started talking about cask conditioned beers". Nonetheless, he embodied a notion which Irish people are supposed to hold dear of the public house as something more than an enterprise, to be manipulated and marketed as the entrepreneur sees fit.

More than likely he's romantic, etc. Certainly the idea is problematic: there are, after all, more fake Irish pubs in a few blocks of Temple Bar than in nay city in England. But "authenticity" - if "you don't follow Bono's example and say it with a sneer - surely derives from the specific conditions and history of a particular place? Surely it can't be imported in a crate of bric a brac?

And now Ian can't even ring The Baker Line.