Something New: Roy MacFarlane reads Truth is never too old

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Truth is never too old after Mahmood Hussain Mattan: The epitaph on his gravestone reads “KILLED BY INJUSTICE”. 1922 and the BBC is born. A broadcast of a thousand tongued voices. A song on film, echoing across air waves into homes and in a home somewhere in British Somaliland the voice of Mahmood is heard for the first time and a village sings for joy. Years later the coronation of King George VI is captured on a half Greek, half Latin box of wonder holding a Nipkow disk, making light of moving images into electronic impulses. Thirty years old and news of a death of a King and then of a young princess descending from a tree in Africa as a Queen of an Empire. You’re the same age as the BBC, Mahmood, accused of the murder of a shop keeper. All I got to say. I’m not guilty should be enough to bring you down from a hangman’s noose around a tree in Cardiff but justice is a loose thing in Empire and everybody’s buying a TV for the Queen’s Coronation. It’s the making of the BBC I’d like to imagine the spirit of you, restless aged forty-one, when I came into this world on the back of the pips of the BBC, engaging with Dr Who travelling through time and space with Martin Luther King Jr’s I have a dream speech to make justice a reality for all of God’s children; being serenaded on shipping forecasts, sounding like fairytales and tales of forbode, warning of gales in Viking, Dogger, Fisher. Would Mahmood the seaman smile to hear the chants of Humber Thames and Finisterre? They say we must move with the times, the BBC moves online at the end of the century and after years of Mahmood’s wife and children and grandchildren pursuing the truth you’re posthumously acquitted, your remains removed from prison and you’re buried in a cemetery. The BBC is a hundred years old, the same as you, Mahmood, and truth has found its way home, an apology from the police and a podcast for you; this is not a Jesus Christ story, you won’t rise from the dead but there’ll be a gospel of innocence and injustice in the year of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee.