Millennium People by J.G. Ballard

Author:J.G. Ballard
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Science Fiction, Contemporary, Thriller
ISBN: 9780007371907
Publisher: Liveright
Published: 2003-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

19

The Siege of Broadcasting House

UNPREDICTABLE AS EVER, the police had decided not to intervene. I stood in the crowd of demonstrators outside Broadcasting House, waiting in vain for the sirens to sound and the riot vans to swerve into our ranks. But calm reigned, by order of the Police Commissioner. Double-decker buses moved along Langham Place, tourists gazing down at us, keen to observe one of London’s historic rituals, the raising of fists against the establishment.

Across the street two constables patrolled the pavement near the Chinese Embassy. A third guarded the doors of the Langham Hotel, chatting to a limousine driver. None of them took any interest in the hundred or more protesters now blocking the entrance to the BBC’s flagship headquarters. But without the police and a brisk confrontation, we would never rouse ourselves to action. We needed to lose our tempers, push aside the security men and seize the building.

‘They must think we’re fans,’ I muttered to the fifty-year-old woman standing beside me in a sheepskin jacket. A veterinary surgeon and volunteer sexton at the Chelsea Marina chapel, she was a neighbour of the Reverend Dexter. ‘Mrs Templeton – why is it you can never find a policeman when you need one? They must think we’re here for some pop star…’

‘Mr Markham? You’re talking to yourself again…’

Like most of the protesters, Mrs Templeton was listening to her portable radio, tuned to the Radio 4 channel at that moment transmitting a commentary on the demonstration. Microphone at his lips, the reporter stood behind the security guards in the foyer of Broadcasting House, and there were hoots of laughter at some absurd comment about our motives for picketing the BBC.

Looking at the attentive faces around me, ears to their radios, I realized that we were taking our orders from the organization against which we were demonstrating. During the past three days the one o’clock news programme had run an investigation into the unrest at Chelsea Marina, and into similar outbursts of middle-income disquiet in Bristol and Leeds.

As expected, the journalists had missed the point. They blamed the revolt on the deep dissatisfactions of the babyboomer generation, a self-indulgent and over-educated class unable to hold their own against a younger age-group thrusting their way into the professions. Pundits, backbench MPs, even a Home Office junior minister offered similar pearls. Listening to them in Kay’s kitchen as she sliced the salad cucumber, I knew that I would have been just as glib if I had never set foot in Chelsea Marina.

So incensed by the BBC’s patronizing tone that she cut her finger, Kay set about organizing a demo. We would flood Portland Place with protesters, rush the venerable deco building and seize control of the World Today studio, then broadcast a true account of the rebellion gathering pace across the map of middle England.

A large charge of resentment waited to be lit. As Kay explained, using a megaphone to address the crowd outside her house, for more than sixty years the BBC had played a leading role in brainwashing the middle classes.

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