Murdoch changes everything

Oof. You may, however, be surprised that Lord Webber didn’t actually say that. I did a quick bit of research when I saw this posted on Facebook, cos I wanted some actual context… and the actual context was a minor part of a discussion near the end of a podcast called I Never Thought It Would Happen, fronted by Chris Difford from the band Squeeze and produced by a charity called Help Musicians (have a look at the list of guests so far) devoted to helping professional musicians. We’ll overlook the fact that ALW hardly needs any such help, he’s actually not a bad interviewee here.

But the bit about him struggling to write another musical was just a small part of the conversation near the end of a 40-odd minute chat, and it also wasn’t really related to “political correctness”, indeed I don’t think I even heard him use those words. He did piss and moan a bit about people telling him he couldn’t write certain things any more like Evita cos him and Tim Rice aren’t Argentinian, which… you know, conservative lord with a life peerage, what else would they say, but no, that’s still not really ALW’s problem… which is just that there’s a bit of a creative blockage and he hasn’t been able to find a story he wants to make a musical from. Said he could write any amount of music but doesn’t know what to write about.

This is somewhat different from “wah, PC is killing my career” and I can’t imagine why TalkTV would be spinning the conversation this way. *does quick check* Oh, that’s why. They’re Rupert Murdoch’s “news” TV station in the UK after he had to sell Sky. Looking at the list of talent I see Jeremy Kyle, Piers Morgan, a former political editor at The Scum and at least four right-wing politicians, two of them being the current leader and deputy leader of Reform UK, which was the party Nigel Farage founded after UKIP outlived its usefulness for him. Yeah, I really can’t imagine why such an evident shower of cunts might want to blow ALW’s actual words quite so far out of proportion into yet another culture war talking point…