A Dahl Rant to Start the Day

The infantilising of our culture proceeds apace. This morning that august broadcasting institution the Today programme devoted an inordinate length of peak listening time to a free commercial for the latest Roald Dahl adaptation, an animation of Fantastic Mr Fox. Dahl was a nasty overgrown child whose nasty stories have sadly proved enduringly popular with children and, worse, adults alike - many of them no doubt reared in their formative years on Dahl's stories. Happily my own children proved resistant to Dahl's charms, despite attending a primary school where there was almost nothing else on the literary menu - but most succumbed and still succumb all too easily, with heaven knows what effects. It's a hard (not to say impossible) case to stand up, but I do suspect that teachers pushing the works of Dahl might have played some small part in the wave of indiscipline, disrespect and moral nihilism that engulfed the country over the past couple of decades. And now adults and children alike are queuing up for more, as they queued up for Harry Potter and The Hobbit and street-urchin clothing and a thousand other 'childish things' - and the Today programme, it seems, is right behind them.