Letter: Handful of sages monopolise media

Sir: Am I alone among your readers in finding it curious that interviewers in the press, radio and television are only ever able to find a handful of MPs to answer their questions?

Of this select group several would seem to be new knights - Teddy Taylor, Marcus Fox and Rhodes Boyson - while others are new or newish lords.

All have been presumably so rewarded as a result of their heroic accessibility and preparedness to answer questions on anything under the sun, whether or not they know anything about the subject under review.

Various 'personalities', such as Jonathan Miller (though less, recently), Melvyn Bragg and Germaine Greer (rather more, recently), fulfil the same function for the arts. And from time to time past favourites from both fields, whose obituaries we were quite sure we had read, are sounded out about this or that. For the most part, though, we are forced to accept a limited diet of the utterly predictable. It is possible, of course, that all the other several thousand MPs and workers in the arts know nothing about anything, or have speech impediments. Or could it be that those with the job of choosing who should be approached are just incorrigibly lazy?

Yours faithfully,

JOHN EDMONDS

Harpenden, Hertfordshire

2 October