Petridis on Frith

[sawyl]

I was amused to read the following in a comment on the Mercury Prize:

They haven't handed the award to anyone completely preposterous for years, which, given their vintage form in the 1990s - an era when the judges appeared to pick the winner out of a tombola, hence the triumph of M-People's Elegant Slumming and Talvin Singh's OK - counts as a dramatic change in policy.

Somewhere along the line, someone even appears to have had a quiet word with Simon Frith, whose famous Patronising Little Speech was once the ceremony's eagerly anticipated highlight, giving the chairman of judges a golden opportunity to get finalists' names wrong, and make wildly inaccurate claims about the award's cultural importance.

Talk about telling it like it is...