It was of its time – and its time is long past.

It is hard to recall the song having been played on the radio since it was in the charts. I remember hearing it on “Top of the Pops” on a Thursday night. It was always the busiest evening of the week in the television room. A small black and white set sat on a wall shelf in the corner of the room. The boys who had come to watch perched on stools or on a bench-shelf that was fixed to two sides of the room.

Undoubtedly, had we been challenged, we would have found no fault with the lyrics of the song. We were growing up in a misogynistic culture where treating women as objects for comment was an acceptable norm.

Recoiling at the idea of someone being objectified is not about being feminist, nor is it about being politically correct, nor is it about being over-sensitive – it is about a fundamental belief in human dignity. As the 75th anniversaries of the liberation of the concentration camps in Europe approach, there are vivid reminders of what happens when the treatment of people as objects is carried to its logical extreme. People treated as objects are denied their dignity as humans.

So, “Fox on the Run” by Sweet, played this evening on Radio Six, may be an inoffensive pop song, but in treating a woman as a physical object it is failing to recognise fundamental human dignity. It is part of a culture that is no longer acceptable.

I don’t wanna know your name
’cause you don’t look the same
The way you did before
Okay, you think you got a pretty face
But the rest of you is out of place
You looked alright before

Perhaps the reason that I had not heard it since 1975 is that people no longer find such thoughts to be palatable, more likely it is just that the genre the record represents is not popular. Whatever the reason for it not being on air, another forty-four years without it would be welcome.