Woke up this afternoon with them old jazz-lover's blues

If jazz worldwide had the sort of money which is spent on just one opera house, we'd be laughing

"AND THE worst is, they're trying to put modern jazz on the juke box in my pub! Modern jazz! What a racket! What a bloody awful racket! Nobody likes it! I mean, even the people that like it don't really like it! They say they like it but they don't! The musicians make it up as they go along, they tell me. Well, where's the bloody skill in that?"

Thus, more or less, Al Murray. Al Murray is a comedian who is touring his one-man show Late Lock-In '99, in which he impersonates a pub landlord who is a sort of nephew of Alf Garnett, but a lot funnier and more inventive. Garnett would never have bothered to attack modern jazz. Pop music, maybe. But Al Murray has a real go at modern jazz, and although I am a jazz devotee I laughed like a drain when I heard him at the Merlin Theatre, Frome, on Wednesday, partly because Al Murray is a very, very funny man and partly because it was actually so nice to hear anyone mention jazz at all.

Pathetic, isn't it? Jazz fans have this perpetual ghetto feeling, a feeling of being misunderstood and ignored and undervalued, which I share along with the rest of them, and when we see huge pop music award ceremonies with gold medals being dished out to humdrum musicians playing and singing very simple, popcorn music, and grown-up men and women pretending to respect it, we sigh and wonder if jazz will ever get that kind of recognition. The answer, by the way, is No.

Generally, if we have any sense, we jazz people keep quiet because otherwise we sound like culture whingers, like all those opera people pleading for another billion pounds - blimey, if jazz worldwide had the sort of money which is spent on just one opera house, we'd be laughing - so we don't whinge, and so nobody pays us any attention, so then we have to whinge about it...

This ghetto-mentality has been around a long time. My memory was jolted the other day by spotting The Sweet Smell of Success in the TV film schedules.

I remember reading the Melody Maker as a kid in the 1950s, back when it had decent jazz coverage, and noticing a lot of fuss being made about a film called The Sweet Smell Of Success. Film fans will know it as a blistering satire on the world of PR, media gossip, etc, with wonderful performances by Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis, but none of that was mentioned by the MM. All they could mention was the participation of the Chico Hamilton Quintet, a chamber jazz group very popular at the time, who, it was rumoured, were being given big roles. So it came as something as a shock when I finally saw the film and found that the Quintet only appeared briefly, as a band with which one of the minor characters was working, and that Chico's part was limited to a line like "Hi, how're you doing?"

But we were grateful. Better one line than being ignored. Better being insulted by Al Murray than being forgotten. Better being interviewed by George Melly than not at all...

Well, I'm not so sure about that. George Melly, you see, has a little ghetto spot on Radio Two where for half an hour he is allowed to talk to unlikely people about their taste in jazz, and get them to play a few chosen jazz records. Kenneth Clarke's been on, and Michael Heath the cartoonist, and Ian Dury. Good people. But the other day he had Polly Toynbee on and it was a disaster. Or maybe it was very funny. I'm not sure.

You see, at the start of the programme she said she had made a very eclectic choice of records, and she was right. It was so eclectic that almost none of the records she chose was anywhere near jazz. The opener was a Glenn Miller recording, which was superior dance music. She went on to the Watersons (folk) and Bobby Short (straight cabaret) and Charles Trenet (pure French chanson) and George Melly (which is a bit nearer to jazz), and George Melly was politely flabbergasted. When he inquired how Trenet, though jolly nice, could possibly be jazz, Polly Toynbee said she saw him as the European equivalent of Cole Porter.

"Would you call Cole Porter jazz?" she asked. Being too gallant to say you couldn't compare an American songwriter who didn't sing to a French chansonnier, George contented himself with saying that it depended entirely on who was singing. "Cole Porter interpreted by Ethel Merman isn't jazz, by Ella Fitzgerald it usually is..."

"Ah. I'm beginning to see what the rules are," said Polly Toynbee. Too late, Toynbee. All of us still listening out in jazz land were wringing our hands and lamenting the waste of another valuable half hour of jazz time. God, what whingers we are. How Al Murray would have laughed.