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NewsOpinionColumnistsIts going to be a quiet bank holiday. No pop festivals, no parties in the park, no music at Harewood. And no massed chorus at the Proms, though that last one has more to do with containing our guilt than our germs.

Sunday, 30th August 2020, 6:00 am

It is the fourth holiday weekend since quarantine began, and though we have more freedom of movement than we did at Easter, its hardly a normal end to the summer. At least there will be no repeat of an August past when I drove a carful of teenagers to the Leeds Festival and then forgot which field Id parked in.

Its not just a youth phenomenon, this industry in outdoor entertainment. Todays sixty-somethings belong to the generation that invented festivals in the 1960s and some of us are no less keen now to let down whats left of our hair than we were then. The success of events at Castle Howard and Temple Newsam bears witness to that.

But in a year in which even a childs birthday party in a suburban semi is likely to have the Flying Squad breaking the door down, a rave-up in the country is obviously out of the question.

So its all the more disheartening that the one major event that is still going ahead has been disembowelled by political correctness at the BBC.

Self-recrimination and wetness was the Prime Ministers take on the Corporations decision to go with an orchestral version of Land of Hope and Glory, rather than inflict the lyrics on anyone of a sensitive disposition. But without the words, it reverts to being the Trio from Pomp and Circumstance. Its like putting on Pygmalion and pretending its still My Fair Lady.

It was Edward VII who apparently told Edward Elgar that his march would make a good song, and the poet and academic AC Benson added the lyrics in time for his coronation. By freedom gained / By truth maintained, he wrote. What a heretic.

It is the line in the chorus, Wider still and wider shall thy bounds be set, which seems to be the bone of contention today. Written as it was at the time the mining magnate Cecil Rhodes was bequeathing his vast fortune to his ideal of extending British rule throughout the world, it is clearly not a sentiment of national contrition.

But does that mean it should be expunged from the creative landscape? The thousands of music lovers who sent a recording of it by Dame Vera Lynn to the top of the pop charts this week would appear to think not.

They were responding to an appeal by the actor Laurence Fox whose uncle Edward memorably played King Edwards errant grandson on TV, incidentally. Would the BBC now have to play it, Fox wondered aloud.

In fact, the Beeb has quite arbitrarily banned songs for far less. In 1956 they pulled the plug on Shirley Basseys debut single because it contained references to sex and sin. We can tolerate sex now; just not our past.

The argument over the appropriateness of lyrics from a previous era is actually as old as the hills. As far back as 1957, the American satirist Stan Freberg released a version of Hammerstein and Kerns Ol Man River with the lyrics deliberately bowdlerised to avoid offence. Elderly Man River, he called it.

And strangely enough, thats exactly what is being proposed now. Andrew Lloyd Webber is among those to have suggested that the lyrics to Land of Hope and Glory, Rule, Britannia! and other causes of offence to the easily offended could be tweaked in a way that made them somehow only modestly patriotic.

Thats a slippery slope, though. In a few years time, someone will demand a further rewrite and then another, and a generation from now well be made to just hum it, or whistle it like Roger Whittaker.

The admission by the director-general, Lord Tony Hall, that the BBC had indeed considered dropping songs linked to Britains imperial past, places it in the uncomfortable position of censoring national events, rather than just televising them. Lord Hall is off next month to run the National Gallery no elitism there, then but this is an issue that will come back to bite the Corporation.

Its time we stopped our cringing embarrassment about our history, said the PM this week. And in the absence of much music to drown him out this weekend, his words will reverberate around Broadcasting House when the discussions on renewing the licence fee are resumed.

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Land of Hope and Glory row sees BBC censoring national events David Behrens - Yorkshire Post