Franco Building with Jonathan Meades

Opinionated, erudite, brutal, with a sharp turn of phrase and a peculiar eye: Jonathan Meades is a cultural critic like few others, a proof that, in the age of the lowbrow, the highbrow can still deliver something entertaining and unique. Meades in unashamedly snobbish, but his snobbery is often directed upwards not downwards; what he likes is unpredictable, even as he is (perhaps less surprsingly) giving most of the architectural (and wider cultural) legacy of Francisco Franco a merciless and well-deserved kicking. What you don't get is the usual wisdom; the result is enlightening, even if you might not agree on every point. Voices likes Meades's are not often granted this sort of platform; when you get the chance to listen, take it.

Meades has a certain style but his content isn't necessarily factual. He claims that thousands of Republican prisoners were worked to death at Valle de los Caídos. In fact, according to anti- Franco historian Paul Preston, the real figure of fatalities from building work there was 14. Meades seems to have the anti-Franco obsession common among British leftists (or pseudo-leftists) of a certain age.

The crimes of Franco regime are undeniable, but the presenter cynicism (or better said nihilism), and anti-theistic and anti-nationalist bias is caricatural, almost to the level of old communist propaganda, and to exaggerate even more he completly ignores communism from the historical context.