I've been moaning about the way the BBC is presenting Young Musician of the Year this time. It's being treated as though it were The X Factor or Master Chef.
Give it a couple more years and the contestants will all have stories about their dying granny's wish that they should play the bassoon and cry when they are put through to the next round.
But there's something even more depressing at work this year, as Richard Morrison points out in an article that has somehow escaped The Times's paywall:
None of the six semi-finalists for the UK’s most famous instrumental competition studies at a state school. Two are at private schools, two at the Royal College of Music, and the other two attend specialist music schools.
The last are fee-paying too. And although the government offers bursaries to help exceptionally talented children from less wealthy families to attend them, most parents still need to fork out a hefty sum to send their child to one.
This private-school dominance of the arts and sport is becoming a real problem in Britain. When I was writing about the film Last Resort last month, I said of Paddy Considine:
I used to wonder what it was that was so different about him, but now suspect it’s just that he’s a working-class actor in an industry where that has become a rarity.
And amid the Guardian's celebration of Leonard Rossiter, it's a sobering thought that, obliged to go out to work at 18 after his father's death in wartime bombing, it's unlikely that he would have made it as an actor today.
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