Frank Kogan

One of my caveats would have been to point out that it's fairly ridiculous not to call Beethoven and Carmen (etc.) "popular music."

Think it's been fairly common in the last 100 years to disdain the middle while plumping for low and high.* I'm an heir to that kind of attitude, a lot of the time. The thing is, the high and the low eventually become the middle, thanks to all the popularization and to people like me, and there's a constant never-ending churning. Contradictorily I'm also an heir to middlebrow social-do-gooding folk music and TV shows (The Defenders and The Virginian, when I was 10 years old; don't know if they crossed to Britain). And of course faves of mine like the New York Dolls and fave of lots of people David Bowie were head deep in sentimental save-the-childern do-goodery, and good for them.

The BBC show does play here. May take a while for me to get to it though.

*See Leslie Fiedler's famous defense of comic books, "The Middle Against Both Ends."