Evening Standard (London): Percussion roulette

I HEAR on the jungle drums that the tired-and-tested format of themed evenings is returning to DDC1 (Dumbing Down Corporation), so as the channel lowers its aim yet further, how about a Victims' Night?

There could be an entire evening of dyslexic scheduling, with dyslexic theologians debating the existence of Dog, classic dyslexic drama (such as John Osborne's angry tale of theft from Epping public library, Book Lack in Ongar), and music from the Dyslexic Male Voice Choir, performing Old MacDanold Had a Fram, EJEJL.

Sufferers from Mnire's disease could remember the golden days of "yoof" television, when they all had jobs as cameramen, and middleclass people with ME could spend hours telling us how they "could have made it to the top of the careers ladder but ..." and try to explain why their tragic illness never seems to attack, say, subsistence farmers in Africa. And perhaps they could also solve the riddle of how, although exhausted, they always find the energy to send hundreds of angry 10-page letters to me every time I mention the fact. And I intend to do so, again, and again, and again. I collect stamps, you see.

Perhaps DDC1 could also devote an evening to our national disease of arrhythmia, the genetic inability of a large group of English people to clap in time (observable at any public event, from an Elton John concert to The Last Night of the Proms).

Given that severe national handicap, it might seem optimistic in the extreme for Ayodele Scott (a Sierra Leonean) to start offering West African drumming classes in Ashburton Methodist Hall, but he's determined to bring his native style to South Devon, and invited Afrophiles (this week's occupant of the Channel 4 Slot) along to chart their progress.

I was intrigued, too, because I once participated in a weekend course of West African drumming, and can assure you that it's an astonishingly precise and complex business. Let's put it this way. It only takes one weak link on the kidi or the gong-gong to make an entire troupe of earnest and pasty-faced Brits (which we were) sound like a 1960s set of cheap Sonor drums being kicked down a flight of stairs.

"British people can understand African culture if they open their minds to it," Ayodele told us, but he was anxious that they should experience the real thing, not some ersatz westernised version. "African culture being celebrated outside Africa is fine, provided it is being pioneered by indigenous Africans" was his maxim, a philosophy that not only ensured purity of tradition, but also eradicated any possibility of the local percussion teacher attempting to muscle in on his evening-class tuition fees.

The alfresco scene of multicultural drumming and dancing that followed was a welcome sight ( especially when you consider that in nearby Torquay there are still people who chant "there ain't no black in the Union Jack"), but I wasn't so sure about his claim that "music can build bridges".

It's a laudable thought, but I remember those soldiers on the River Kwai whistling that tune about Hitler being testicularly deficient by at least 50 per cent, and that bridge ended up blown to smithereens.

We also heard from Zimbabwean Chartwell Dutiro, who was teaching Shona music and mbira technique to the locals, but it was Ayodele who dominated the show.

"I'm English, I'm African, I bridge the gap," he declared, then told us laughingly that "I'm part of the community now, I speak Devonshire - 'Get off my land! Don't touch my milk!'" and I recalled that the only English phrases that you ever hear uttered by Indians in Bollywood films are similarly officious and aggressive ("get out you idiot", "shut your mouth!" or "you bloody damn fool!").

Well, Sierra Leone was once part of the British Empire, and empires are there to be hated, as America is currently discovering. You'd think Uncle Sam would have learned something from our experience, but as an old African proverb has it: the first kick of a mule is an education, the second is stupidity.

WHILE it's inspiring to see such exotic activities taking place in a quiet Devon town, the subject was simply too vast to be contained in a single short programme, and I came away disappointed. It's high time that an entire series was devoted to the myriad forms of African instrumental music, but given that terrestrial television can seldom find space nowadays even for Western instruments (the responsibility for serious music education having been foisted onto BBC4 and Artsworld, where only the digerati can access it), that's unlikely to happen.

Nor did we hear much of Ayodele or Chartwell's views of the British, which was a pity, because while some African customs may seem odd to us, many of our activities must appear a great deal stranger to them. For example, the Mursi tribe in Africa predicts the future by reading the entrails of a freshly slaughtered goat, but for years we Brits actually had an old goat predicting the future on the National Lottery Draw, name of Meg. What happened to her? I think her agent should tell us whether or not she informed him, in advance, that her contract was about to be cancelled.