Blossomest Blossom

The title is a quote from the now-famous BBC interview of Denis Potter by Melvyn Bragg, in March 1994. I saw it when it was broadcast in April and he died in June. Throughout the interview he was taking sips from a flask of morphene

Potter was an innovative and challenging playwright, who took television very seriously as an artistic medium

The words are from part of the interview where he was trying to express how the imminence of death intensifies and glorifies his experience of the present moment. It's not an uncommon message from those at the end of their life, or who have achieved some sort of transcendence in other ways. A message that most of us repeatedly fail to heed

In an even more famous part of the broadcast, he said, 'one of the favourite fantasy plots of a writer is a character is told "You've got three months to live" and - which is what I was told - and you, who would you kill? (laughs). I call my cancer, the main one, the pancreas one, I call it Rupert, so I can get close to it, because the man Murdoch is the one who, if I had the time - in fact I've got too much writing to do and I haven't got the energy - but I would shoot the bugger if I could. There is no one person more responsible for the pollution of what was already a fairly polluted press, and the pollution of the British press is an important part of the pollution of British political life.'

Twenty-nine years later, in today's paper is an interview with Mehdi Hasan, a British-born Muslim of Indian descent, now an American citizen and working as a left-of-centre news journalist, with his own show on MSNBC. He says,

“I won’t say Fox ‘News’ because why should I play along with this conceit? It is not a news channel. It is a propaganda arm of the Republican party. It is a booster of white supremacy and conspiracy. What it did in the pandemic is unforgivable. I, for one, will never forgive the people who ran Fox through the pandemic. I don’t know how many Fox viewers suffered because they believe the anti-vax ivermectin nonsense that they were fed night after night by primetime hosts. The Murdochs have a lot to answer for when it comes to the degradation of our democracy and our media.”