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Dear MO-listers,
Just listened to Margaretta Jolly's interview on the Today programme and
wanted to congratulate her on fielding that perennial critique of MO
repeated by her fellow interviewee, the Royal Historian, that it's all
older women from the South of England. (Excuse me, but as Royal
historian...... surely her remit is somewhat limited to a similar, even
narrower, demographic?).
And I think her comment about "narcissistic" is unfair at least in relation
to the MO writers because, as Professor James Hinton points out, what we
find among these writers is a sense of 'active citizenship'. So not
narcissism but social and political awareness, commitment to a more
democratic society, interest in history, concern for the future and so on.
Of course there ARE more older people in the MO Project and always have
been. And of course we must experiment with new ways of diversifying the
panel, but I did wonder what our builder from the East End of London thinks
when he hears this dismissal of his value, or our young student writer from
Manchester, or the cleaner from Limavady or Mr R480, the retired HGV lorry
driver who has written since this phase of MO began in 1981? Or for that
matter, all the many older women writers, the Mrs Lasts de nos jours, who
are dedicated and reflective contributors to MO?
Actually of course the profile of the respondents to the 12th May 2010
appeal was interesting because of its relative youth in comparison with the
regular panel.
What is always hard to fit into these 'sound-bite' news programmes (which
anyway are set up to put interviewees in artificial opposition to each
other) is a broader discussion about the nature of written documentary, and
about the other kinds of stories in the MO Archive.
Still, well done Margaretta.... and by the way, the BBC invited us to
include MO extracts when they were creating the Domesday disc in the 1980s
so the MO writers are already on it. Does anyone know if the Domesday disc
is online yet?
Dorothy Sheridan
--On 12 May 2011 15:52 +0000 Jessica Scantlebury
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9483000/9483733.stm
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