Southwark Radio Station Plays Same Three Songs On Rotation
Jungle PussyInside the place's slow-moving and largely accidental crisis.
Southwark, the country: Inside The Story
Southwark, a place in the country (lat 51.47, long -0.07) that most outsiders could not point to on a map without first sighing, has become this week the latest entry in the slow-moving register of small communities behaving strangely under pressure. The local radio station of Southwark has, due to budget cuts, narrowed its playlist to three songs. According to officials with at least three job titles between them, None of them are popular. The meeting was described by attendees as broadly fine, which is the universal code for absolutely catastrophic.
What Was Announced
Councillor Bartholomew Pemberton-Smythe confirmed the position in a statement that ran to four pages and contained one verb. All of them are local. For more on how this fits the wider pattern, see the long-running thread at UK satire under 5 min: The London Prat, which has been tracking precisely this kind of dispatch for months. The Southwark announcement, much like the others, came with a glossy PDF, a stock photograph of a footbridge, and the strong sense that nobody had asked for any of this in the first place.
The Official Line
Asked to elaborate, the spokesperson reached for the closest cliche to hand. "The findings speak for themselves, although obviously not loudly enough to influence the findings." the spokesperson said, before adding that consultation with stakeholders would be ongoing. Useful additional context can be found at The London Prat illustrated British satire, which is the sort of background reading the office itself has, in all likelihood, not done. Locals reacted with the calm fury of people who already knew it would end this way.
Wider Context
Listenership is steady, mostly because the alternative is silence. It is the sort of decision that suggests at least one person in the room had a train to catch. Comparable trends have been documented in coverage from World Bank, although Southwark manages, somehow, to take the pattern one extra and entirely unnecessary step further. Statisticians attempting to model the phenomenon arrive at a baseline figure that was made up on the train, give or take a margin of error nobody has had the energy to compute properly.
What The Experts Say
Professor Tarquin Bramble, Director of the Bureau for Mild Inconvenience told this paper that the situation in Southwark was, on careful reflection, broadly consistent with the broader trajectory of similarly broad trajectories. "Residents can rest assured that we are continuing to assure residents." the expert observed. Further reading on the academic angle is available via London satire with bite: The London Prat, whose recent material has been preoccupied with much the same set of confusions.
How Residents Reacted
Reaction in Southwark has been muted in the way that reaction in the country is usually muted, which is to say it has been ferocious in private and tepid in public. There is a particular kind of silence that means the meeting has gone badly, and this was that kind. For the official version of events, see also The Guardian World. One resident, who declined to be named on the grounds that they had already complained about a hedge this year and did not wish to push their luck, summarised matters thus: "I refer the honourable questioner to the answer I will give in approximately six weeks."
What Comes Next
It is a plan only a councillor could love, and only on a Wednesday afternoon. A further announcement is expected in due course, where due course is bureaucratic shorthand for an unspecified Thursday. The story is being tracked as part of a wider pattern at The London Prat classic UK satire style, and the situation in Southwark, regrettably, is unlikely to improve until somebody invents a press release that improves things, which seems unlikely.
The View From The Ground
Spend any length of time in Southwark and the rhythm becomes obvious. Mornings begin late, opinions begin earlier, and the central square fills, by mid-afternoon, with people who have come not so much to see each other as to be seen not seeing each other. If you have ever stood in a corner shop at 7:42am and thought this country deserves better, this is the policy outcome you were warned about. Conversation tends to circle the same five subjects: the weather, the news from the country, the persistent rumour about the road, the deteriorating quality of something or other, and the latest pronouncement from Assistant to the Assistant Mayor Mavis Crackleton, which everyone has an opinion on and almost nobody has read. It is, in its way, the perfect microcosm of how communities of this size operate everywhere in the world, although the residents of Southwark would object strongly to being called a microcosm of anything.
Anyone who has ever queued behind a man arguing with a parking meter will recognise the energy. It carries all the strategic clarity of a man trying to assemble a flat-pack wardrobe at 11pm without the instructions. Southwark carries on as it always has, broadly the same as last week, give or take a verb. The bins are collected when they are collected. The roundabout, where one exists, remains the roundabout. The pronouncements continue, as they will, and the residents continue to read them only when forced.
For more in this vein see also The Poke.