Photograph: Graham Turner/Guardian
Ian Jack’s last published work was a column in the Guardian of Saturday 22 October, in which he invoked what the BBC meant to his generation, born as or after the second world war ended. It meant, in his telling, a vast amount, as the corporation’s broadcasts drilled themselves into lives then lived almost entirely outside the all-embracing media domains of today.
Schoolboys, then, were being “almost Freemasonic in their mysteries”, repeating lines such as “He’s fallen in the water” from the Goon Show or “Stone me!” from Hancock’s Half Hour, that only initiates, addicts to 1950s airwaves, could know (a signature trick, to insert a word – here, “Freemasonic” – whose meaning needed thought before it clicked). Ian was of an upper-working-class generation: a boy helping his mother at the hand-turned mangle while Oh What a Beautiful Morning, from Oklahoma!, crackled out from the Light Programme: he imagined the song had been there always – and the “bright, golden haze on the meadow” was there always for him, a spurt of remembered joy.
