I have heard it said that Stephen Fry is what stupid people think a clever person should be like. This sounds pretty unfair to me. However, Jonathan Meades is by far my favorite writer on culture, architecture and food. He has also long been my favorite broadcaster and television documentary maker.
I was therefore intrigued to stumble across him listed on Wikipedia as a being a libertarian. I have no idea if this is true or a position to which he ascribes formally. What I do know is that his outlook and perspective on the world often strikes me as chiming very deeply with my own. As a debunker of all sorts of methodological collectivism and nonsense he is a masterful essayist and communicator.
If you are not familiar with his work, let me point you in the right direction. Start with Jerry Building here and then go on to watch Joe Building here. Thankfully, in the age of the Internet so much of this great man’s broadcasting is now available online.
While Stephen Fry is no doubt a very clever, great and lovely man, if I had to choose, Jonathan Meades would be my preferred national treasure.
Tim,
I recommend you skip to 29’32” http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b019m5yy/Jonathan_Meades_on_France_Fragments_of_an_Arbitrary_Encyclopaedia/ where he is amusingly blunt about European court of ‘special pleading’ – ‘We are showered at birth with the promise of potential entitlements and should those entitlements not be fulfilled, we can come here and complain and so line the pockets of the shysters of the human rights industry’
I’ve been watching Konathan Meades programmes for a long time and always enjoy them. I think he coined the phrase “heavy entertainment” that describes his programmes very well. I am an aspiring electronic music composer and try to apply this approach to what I do. :)