Stay calm – rewriting The Pogues’ Fairytale of New York is not woke political correctness gone mad

That’s it, the army of the politically correct has finally won. The woke tide has swept over the United Kingdom and brought down one of our sacred institutions. This is the year when they finally cancelled the word “faggot” in the classic Christmas hit, the Fairytale of New York. Will our Christmas culture truly ever be the same again?

I have a feeling it will continue to be much as it was before. If this is what is keeping cultural conservatives up at night then boy do I have a story or two from 1917 to tell them. And if this be the harbinger of a coming cultural revolution, then it doesn’t bode well for the revolutionaries. In truth, this row is just another non-story rather than any grand conspiracy from the commissars of the BBC.

Let’s take a look at the details – BBC Radio 1, after a long debate extending back into the noughties, has decided to play an alternative version of the Fairytale of New York first sung by Kirsty MacColl and The Pogues in 1987. Where the original famously features an almighty row between an alcoholic and a heroin addict, complete with the insult “you cheap lousy faggot”, Radio 1 will now play a politer version, which replaces the word “faggot” with “blagger”.

Meanwhile, the original version will still be played on BBC Radio 2. Now that’s what I call peaceful co-existence. Each to their own, Cuius regio, eius religio. Sheltered snowflakes will be able to safely tune into Radio 1, but if you’re craving the raw, sweary power of the original, then you can fill your blokey boots on another wavelength. Isn’t being able to choose a positive thing?

This hasn’t stopped some excited pundits from leaping with clockwork consistency to criticise the latest perceived assault by the politically correct on our public sphere. The ever-provocative Brendan O’Neill  has penned a despairing piece criticising the “pathetic censorship” of “clipboard-wielders at the BBC” for butchering the “poetry” of the original Fairytale.

https://twitter.com/LozzaFox/status/1329390155229224960

Yet there is also an artistic virtue in re-writing – not only in songs, but also in poems, novels, and essays. It isn’t new. The process of re-working a text or a performance is a testament to a thoughtful writer, an active artist and an evolving audience. Oral cultures – whether in ancient Persia or the modern Maghreb – frequently change and adapt alternative versions of epic stories and accounts. In such traditions, people feel free to alter, to embellish, and to re-weave old words and characters anew.

Take the Iliad, the foundational item in the canon of Western literature, along with the Odyssey. It is an epic poem that extends into many pages, yet the version we read today, bequeathed to us from antiquity and which is purportedly by a poet called Homer, was probably just one of many different, orally-transmitted versions that once existed before the story was finally committed to writing.

The version of the Fairytale of New York being used by Radio 1 is entirely in-keeping with such healthy poetic habits, drawing as it does on an alternative line sung by Kirsty MacColl herself on Top of the Pops in 1992.

Often, when something is canonised, it is a sign that it is no longer living.  A culture that is entirely static is generally one that is dead – or at least in its death throes. And, after all, is not conservatism, as envisaged by the Whig Edmund Burke, grounded in organic change, rather than an obsession with conserving every last facet of society as if it were a part of some fragile collection in an antiquarian cabinet?

There is a more serious political point to be made here about what Britain’s rather confected “culture war” has done to how we interpret events. It makes people defensive. It encourages them to read a significance into fairly inane occurrences and see the hand of malign forces where no such forces exist. To get hung up on this non-event and present it as a censorious, politically-correct assault on expression is a waste of time, energy, and effort that could be better spent concentrating on genuine threats to free speech and open public debate.

There are serious problems with political correctness, but this ain’t one of them. A re-written Fairytale of New York is no woke dystopia.