Mr John's speech was partly based on his Daily Mail blog written last December. Here's the argument:

"Hamlet doesn’t need a hip-hop sound track for young people to enjoy or understand it. It’s been doing just fine for the past 400 years. It is both patronising, and frankly racist, to think that black and brown kids in the inner cities will only ‘get’ Shakespeare if it’s set to a hip-hop beat and presented to them in 3-minute MTV Base-style chunks.

Young people listen to enough hip-hop already. They speak in dumbed down, risible street language. Why then would anyone in their right mind swap the mellifluous cadences of Shakespeare’s verse for the ugly patois of the streets?

One unlocks the joys of the English language; the other leads directly to disenfranchisement and the dole queue.

It is positively evil to deny those kids access to the manifold joys of hearing their national poet’s true voice, simply because of a culture of low expectations. What is worse is that this culture has been propagated by ardent metropolitan liberals who more often than not have themselves enjoyed all the benefits of a Rolls-Royce, Oxbridge education, with, I’d wager, absolutely no hip-hop whatsoever."