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Radio 1 right not to play Ding! Dong! The Witch Is Dead, says BBC Trust
By Andy Malt | Published on Wednesday 4 December 2013
The BBC Trust has rejected a complaint over Radio 1’s decision not to play ‘Ding! Dong! The Witch Is Dead’ on the ‘Official Chart Show’ earlier this year.
As previously reported, the song from 1939 film ‘The Wizard Of Oz’ reached number two in the singles chart in April, as people brought it in ‘celebration’ of the death of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The Facebook-led campaign to push the song up the charts caused outrage in the political community and the right-wing press.
As it became clear that the song would hit a high position in the chart that Sunday, Radio 1 decided that it would not air the 51 second track, but would instead cut to a Newsbeat report on why the track was in the charts at all when its chart position was revealed.
The Trust rejected a complaint that this decision had been “a breach of the requirement for impartiality”, ruling that the “song had become linked with a campaign in the wake of Lady Thatcher’s death to display opposition to her premiership and did have the capacity to cause offence because it had been widely publicised as being a way of giving voice to anti-Thatcher feelings”.
The Beeb’s Editorial Standards Committee added: “Aside from whether or not people had bought the song in order to express anti-Thatcher political sentiments, which listeners may or may not agree with, the song in question was clearly a celebration of a death”.
