Choosing Rita December 27, 2009 at 7:53 am
There were some treats from the BBC this Christmas: one of my favourites was a delightful production of Willy Russell’s Educating Rita on Radio 4, with Bill Nighy and Laura Dos Santos. Much of the dialogue is great, but one section particularly resonated with me. Rita is talking about her husband:
He thinks we’ve got choice because we can go into a pub that sells eight different kinds of lager. He thinks we’ve got choice already: choice between Everton an’ Liverpool, choosin’ which washin’ powder, choosin’ between one lousy school an’ the next, between lousy jobs or the dole, choosin’ between Stork an’ butter.
In other words, the choice between alternatives selected to suit others’ needs, the needs of choice providers, is often no choice at all. Rita wants one good school, not a choice of bad ones; she wants the opportunity to be some decent fraction of what she can be, rather than a cog in cheap machine.
This dialogue, then, is not only acerbically accurate, it is also prescient. Educating Rita premiered in 1980. As we struggle with the legacies of the bizarre Blairite belief in choice — waste and dysfunction we can ill afford in education, transport, healthcare and the rest — perhaps we can hope that some Russell’s insights might penetrate into public policy, even if it is thirty years too late.
