Piped Music and Showing of Television Programmes Bill [HL]

My Lords, one must admire the tenacity of the noble Lord, Lord Beaumont. He is one of those people who has learned that great lesson about parliamentary procedure; if you want something to be discussed, you must be prepared to come back again and again. But, I am afraid, since we last discussed this matter in, I believe, February, my attitude against his measure is slightly hardening. He mentioned hospitals. My experience of hospitals has been in common with that of sportsmen over many years—those hours of sitting in casualty on a Saturday or a Sunday, with mud drying on you, with sports kit that is becoming clammier and more unpleasant by the minute, waiting to have, say, a couple of stitches inserted into a cut or a test to see if a sprain is actually a small break, and so on. The main problem for people in that position is boredom—hours of boredom. I will not address the Government about response times in hospitals, because I presume that it ain’t that bad. If someone comes in who has been in a car crash, they go in front of you—as they should do. But you will sit there and you will wait. And that is quite eerie, if you are waiting in silence, hearing every groan, bump and crash that rings around that hospital. You start to worry and imagine. I am describing a comparatively healthy person who knows that he needs three or four stitches in a cut on the knee. For someone who is worried, I should imagine that taking their mind off things with a little bit of light music is probably a good idea. Also, having a television screen on which to concentrate is not that bad an idea—it will irritate some but relax others. Thus, there is an element of balance in this. Which of the two is the more objectionable in the long term? I do not know. As a disability spokesman, I think that my connections with people who have hearing problems and other disabilities are pretty good. I have heard nothing from those groups that leads me to think that this is a major problem. So I suggest that the noble Lord is slightly overplaying that card. We can carry on going into this matter but there are other examples of where piped music, or a version of it, has been found to be quite useful. I refer to the Australian version in which Barry Manilow was played in the background and this drove away kids from street corners where they had been worrying everyone. The idea of Mantovani and Barry Manilow driving people with ASBOs from our streets is wonderful: it might be a price worth paying. Indeed, the noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky, provided a wonderful example of another ultimate use of background or broadcast music. Apparently in pro-communist-inspired demonstrations in Hong Kong, dance music was played and the demonstrators started to dance. I have only the noble Lord’s word for it but he is a man whose accuracy I would never doubt. The image of music inspiring mobs to start dancing on the streets is one that makes me feel slightly positive about broadcast music. Effectively, the noble Lord, Lord Beaumont, is talking about a minor irritant. Some people believe that inappropriate noise will drive you round the bend but that is not the case. If you concentrate on something else, it disappears. If you concentrate on a conversation in a restaurant, the background music will not bother you, provided that its level is not too high—but, there again, you can always take your trade away. Provided that the level of music in these situations is correctly set and, where possible, you can move away from it, I do not think that it will do a great deal of damage. Television sets on short-haul trains probably provide a great way of stopping you dozing off and missing your stop, apart from anything else, provided that their noise level does not get in the way of station announcements. Speaking with my disability hat on, I think that I have given the government Front Bench a little trouble at times in ensuring that those announcements meet minimum requirements. So long as no background noise impinges upon them, I cannot see what the noble Lord’s Bill will achieve. I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Beaumont, will carry on with this issue, and I am sure that it is good to draw attention to the fact that it must be sensitively handled. However, I do not think that the Bill is appropriate.