Ordinary people will always let you down, Jeremy

It is a small sadness in the general scheme of things, but it seems that Bruce and I are about to part company. He has been excellent company down the years, but his latest contribution managed to be both bombastic and self-pitying. More seriously, he has won the admiration of Iain Duncan Smith, who included him among his Desert Island Discs, and Jeremy Vine, who has announced to the world that the first tune he will play on his new Radio Two morning show will be Bruce Springsteen's "Thunder Road".

Can one, with any hope of retaining self-respect, share an enthusiasm with both the Tory leader and a smoothie-chops radio presenter? I fear not. A few poseurs and idiots have spoken up for Bruce in the past, but, on the whole, the people whose opinion one trusts – trusts to be 100 per cent wrong, that is – have disliked or misunderstood him in one way or another. Now, though, he has a highly successful new CD and is fashionable enough to have politicians and celebrities dropping his name whenever possible. He will have to do without my support until he produces something hardcore and uncommercial or, better, makes a public pronouncement that causes umbrage in all the right places.

There is a moral here. Each of these men has attempted in his own way to suck up to the public. Bruce presented himself as an ordinary, good-hearted American by recording a sequence of songs around the theme of the attacks on the World Trade Centre. Duncan Smith has desperately flailed about, saying or doing almost anything to catch public approval. But it is Jeremy Vine who has turned out to be the most eager and ingratiating of all.

Aware that most of the 5.3 million listeners to the great Jimmy Young will be outraged that their hero has been sacked by the BBC for the sin of being old, Vine, who is his successor, has gone on something of a charm offensive.

"It's every 37-year-old man's High Fidelity dream, isn't it?" he confided to one journalist. "To have your own radio show and choose the opening track." Having reminded potential listeners of his age and his impeccably populist reading matter, he went on to reveal how seriously he takes his new job.

He had already received letters from members of the public, apparently. A lady from Sheffield had complained that he spoke too fast and too loudly and had invited him to "keep your trap shut in future". Instead of binning this impertinent letter, Vine actually picked up the phone to ask his listener for more advice. "We had a nice, civilised conversation," he reported. Later, he worked his way through other messages from the public, making a note of their points and objections.

This attitude, assuming that the public has a sort of wisdom denied to performers or politicians, almost always ends in tears. Just as Springsteen has alienated his core fans and Duncan Smith has lost much of the traditional Tory vote, so Vine will discover that the more he sucks up to the lady in Sheffield and tries to broadcast in the way that she finds acceptable, the more contempt she and others will have for him.

It is, perhaps, no surprise that listeners believe that they have a right to advise those in public life as to how to behave – after all, the past decade has been something of a golden age for the fake democracy of the media-manipulated popular vote. Every morning's newspapers will contain the result of at least one opinion poll on asylum-seekers, sexual habits, Tony Blackburn or whatever. Most nights on television there will be at least one show where viewers will be encouraged to vote for or against the pop star or reality-TV patsy of the moment. No news item is complete without broadcasting the views of a few, gormless, bewildered folk accosted while out shopping by a person brandishing a microphone.

No doubt, if war is declared in the next few weeks, the BBC will react as it did at the start of the Gulf War, by putting on special studio discussion, reflecting the opinions of ordinary people whose uninformed opinions are deemed to be as worthy of air-time as those of any political or military analyst. Flattered by the attention and gulled into believing that their points of view can influence matters, people like the lady from Sheffield may chirpily invite broadcasters to keep their traps shut, but it is a serious misjudgement for a professional to take them too seriously. Public opinion changes hour by hour. It is buffeted by what was on TV last night, who said what at which dinner-party or pub.

Of course, a view from the street can be interesting, but, in their different ways, Bruce, Iain and Jeremy might do well to avoid the temptation of sucking up to the public and build their careers on their own judgement rather than that of excitable, volatile and unreliable ordinary people.

terblacker@aol.com