The BBC rejected loud calls to ban the song âDing Dong! The Witch Is Deadâ from its airwaves on Friday, after the apparent success of a Facebook campaign to celebrate the death of Margaret Thatcher, the divisive former prime minister, by driving sales of the tune from the âWizard of Ozâ up the British singles chart.
In a statement, the controller of BBC Radio 1, Ben Cooper, said that while he finds âthe campaign to promote the song in response to the death of Baroness Thatcher as distasteful as anyone,â the channelâs weekly review of the most popular singles could not simply âignore a high new entry which clearly reflects the views of a big enough portion of the record buying public to propel it up the charts.â
By way of compromise, Mr. Cooper said he had decided âthat we should treat the rise of the song, based as it is on a political campaign to denigrate Lady Thatcherâs memory, as a news story. So we will play a brief excerpt of it in a short news report during the show which explains to our audience why a 70-year-old song is at the top of the charts.â
While acknowledging that the broadcast could offend Mrs. Thatcherâs family and supporters, Mr. Cooper added, âTo ban the record from our airwaves completely would risk giving the campaign the oxygen of further publicity and might inflame an already delicate situation.â
Mrs. Thatcher herself made famous use of the same metaphor in 1985, shortly after the hijacking of TWA Flight 847 by Islamist militants, when she argued:
We must try to find ways to starve the terrorist and the hijacker of the oxygen of publicity on which they depend. In our societies we do not believe in constraining the media, still less in censorship. But ought we not to ask the media to agree among themselves a voluntary code of conduct, a code under which they would not say or show anything which could assist the terroristsâ morale or their cause while the hijack lasted
In a television interview on Friday, one of the organizers of the Facebook campaign, Mark Biddiss, argued that for many people buying the record was âa very cathartic experience,â even if it would also enrich the corporate owners of the rights to the âWizard of Ozâ soundtrack.
Other supporters of the campaign noted with satisfaction that the lyrics to the âWizard of Ozâ soundtrack were written by E.Y. âYipâ Harburg, an American songwriter best-known for his Depression-era classic âBrother, Can You Spare a Dimeâ Mr. Harburg, who died in 1981, was blacklisted in the 1950s for his left-wing politics.
According to his Songwriters Hall of Fame biography:
Harburg, who had been a member of several radical organizations but never officially joined the Communist Party, was named in âRed Channels.â This pamphlet, distributed to organizations involved in employing people in the entertainment industry, listed 150 people who had been involved in promoting left-wing causes. This, along with his affiliation with the Hollywood Democratic Committee, led to his blacklisting by the film industry as well as the revocation of his passport.
He was not helped by the failure of his next project with composers Sammy Fain and Fred Saidy. âFlahooleyâ opened on Broadway in 1951 to negative reviews. Set in a toy factory, Harburg parodied the rabid anti-communist sentiment and witch hunts that pervaded 1950s America.
While The Yip Harburg Foundation does not own the publishing rights to the âWizard of Ozâ soundtrack, a spokeswoman confirmed on Friday that it will get a small percentage profits from the new sales.
Asked what his father might make of the controversy, the late songwriterâs son, Ernie Harburg, said Friday that his father would have been amused by it. In a statement sent to The Lede, he wrote:
Yip Harburg, lyricist of âThe Wizard of Ozâ film, would have been amused that âDing Dong! The Witch Is Deadâ rose to the top of the charts when Margaret Thatcher died. W.S. Gilbert and George Bernard Shaw taught Yip Harburg, democratic socialist, sworn challenger of all tyranny against the people, that âhumor is an act of courageâ and dissent.
Those who sang the song âDing Dong! The Witch Is Deadâ in the film âThe Wizard of Ozâ celebrated the end of tyranny at the hands of the Wicked Witch of the East. That celebration was not in L. Frank Baumâs book. Yipâs artistic leadership put it into the film. (Yip also brought the rainbow, also not in the book, into the film.)
Yip said âHumor is the antidote to tyrannyâ and âShow me a place without humor and Iâll show you a disaster area.â Yip believed tyranny is caused by the policies of austerity, imperialism, theocracy and class supremacy, which deny most people human rights and economic freedom from poverty and want. A song â" music and lyrics â" allows singers and audiences to âfeel the thoughtâ of the lyric. âDing Dong! The Witch Is Deadâ is a universal cry against the cruelty of tyrants and a protest against the ban on laughter at that cruelty. For the 99 percent, laughing and joy are required at the funeral of a tyrant. According to Yip, humor gives us hope in hard times.
In Britain, where Mrs. Thatcherâs supporters are still fuming at the taboo on speaking ill of the dead being flouted, the BBCâs attempt at compromise predictably inflamed partisans at both ends of the political spectrum. From the right, the editors of The Daily Mail attacked the BBC for caving to a âcampaign by Left-wing agitatorsâ by playing even a few seconds of the tune.
From the left, there were accusations that the BBC had in fact caved in to pressure from outlets like The Mail by refusing to play the whole song.
Still some conservatives, like the former member of Parliament Louise Mensch and the leader of the U.K. Independence Party Nigel Farage, agreed with the argument that banning the record would violate principles of free speech and might just prolong the argument over the song.
Others, like the political blogger who writes as Guido Fawkes, supported a late effort to drive another song, the punk anthem âIâm in Love With Margaret Thatcher,â to the top of the chart.
What makes the viral campaign to associate the real death of Mrs. Thatcher with the fictional liberation of the Munchkins from the tyranny of the Wicked Witch of the East still more complex is that âThe Wizard of Ozâ film was adapted from a childrenâs book that has been read as an allegory of late 19th-century American politics.
As Henry M. Littlefield argued in âThe Wizard of Oz: Parable on Populism,â an essay published in 1964, after the film version had displaced the book in the popular imagination, the original story was written in 1900 by L. Frank Baum, a journalist whose fairy tale might have been inspired by debates over American monetary policy and imperialism at the time.
In the book, Mr. Littlefield observed, âDorothy sets out on the Yellow Brick Road wearing the Witch of the Eastâs magic Silver Shoes,â which he interprets as a parable about the use of gold and silver as money. (In the film version, the shoes were made ruby instead of silver.) The Emerald City,â Mr. Littlefield suggested, ârepresents the national Capitol. The Wizard, a little bumbling old man, hiding behind a facade of paper mache and noise, might be any president from Grant to McKinley.â