Last week The Telegraph, The Guardian and The Evening Standard trotted out a Reader’s Digest survey of 1516 people, proclaiming in turn that “Bocconcini cheese balls” were mistaken for classical music, that Britons are therefore “clueless about classical music”, and – here I’m really puzzled – that “Britons pick cheese balls as top composer”.
Why let the truth get in the way of a good headline? (And what more would I expect from a publication that makes a plural of rubato? But I digress.)
Apparently 4% (that’s 60.64 people) identified Bocconcini as a composer.
But what exactly does that establish?
96% recognised that bocconcini is a cheese. (Not a cheese ball, incidentally.) This has to be a good thing, for the state of a nation’s cuisine if nothing else.
And 4% quite possibly confused the cheese with the composer Giovanni Battista Bononcini, “perhaps one of the most underrated composers of the early-mid 18th century”. Which suggests that at some point they’ve actually heard of the composer. Given his astonishing obscurity, that’s no mean feat.