Poll: Should Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead be played in the charts?
Should anti-Thatcher song Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead be played on the BBC in the chart rundown this weekend? Cast your vote in our poll.
Three days before the funeral of Baroness Thatcher, the BBC plans to play the song Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead on national radio.
A campaign by agitators has caused the song from the Wizard Of Oz to rise to number 4 in the midweek pop charts.
As well as rising up the official charts, the track, which costs 79p online, is currently No1 on iTunes. In the past, songs deemed to be too controversial have been banned from the airwaves by the BBC.
But insiders confirmed that, in a decision which will cause widespread outrage, Ding Dong! will feature in Radio 1's Sunday-evening Top 40 countdown.
Before it is played, it is planned to use a reporter from the BBC1 news programme Newsbeat to explain to the station's target audience of young listeners why the song has risen in the charts.
MPs from both Labour and the Conservative party united in saying it would be wrong to give airtime to a song denigrating our greatest peacetime Prime Minister less than a week after her death.
Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead was written for the soundtrack of the 1939 film The Wizard Of Oz and sung by Judy Garland, who played Dorothy, the Munchkins and Glinda the Good Witch, played by Billie Burke.
The song, written by E Y Harburg and composed by Harold Arlen, is sung as they celebrate the death of the Wicked Witch of the East after Dorothy "dropped a house on her". It includes the lyrics: "Wake up, the Wicked Witch is dead/She's gone where the goblins go/Below, below, below."
The song's chart position includes sales of all the versions of the song from the 1939 film recording, while a separate cover version by Ella Fitzgerald from 1961 is currently outside the top 75. The song is also on course to become the shortest top 10 single ever, with the most popular version running to 51 seconds.
In 1977 the BBC refused to play the Sex Pistols' anti-monarchy song God Save the Queen during the Silver Jubilee celebrations. It reached number one in the NME music magazine chart, but only number 2 in the official singles chart.
