The latest BBC row. Featuring Carol Thatcher, gollywogs and some staggeringly ignorant commentators.Hands up if you can remember the last time an entire week went by without a BBC-related row, especially one that wouldn't involve the name Jonathan Ross and an £18m figure. The latest is centred around Carol Thatcher, axed from the 'One Show' over the use of the word "golliwog" to describe a black tennis player.
If there's one good thing about Maggie's gobby daughter though, it's that her choice of vocab is shedding some light on the fine mind of some of our commentators.
Look at Charles Moore in the Telegraph: "Carol Thatcher liked the jam and she liked the golliwog. When she said that the mixed-race Jo-Wilfried Tsonga resembled a golly, she was making a friendly joke". And the Daily Mail's Richard Littlejohn: "[the BBC] worship at the altar of 'diversity' and are in a constant state of zealous vigilance for any evidence of 'racism'. The younger members of the tribe simply don't know any different. They have been brainwashed to believe that 'racism' is the most heinous crime on earth".
In the same paper, Linday Johns slams: "How dare BBC liberals patronise us", while Jon Gaunt in the Sun reveals: "I have never found them offensive or racist" even though he concedes that "I am a fat, pasty white bloke and I accept that some black people do find them offensive" (maybe Gaunty too is pandering to political correctness?- ed).Yet the award for most ridiculous point on the matter goes to Lord On-yer-bike Tebbit: “It is probably a bit of a way for the BBC to get back at Carol’s mother”, he said. To which, the best reposte comes from Ava Vidal in the Independent: "Ah yes, the perfect plot: employ someone's daughter for a while, paying her thousands, then just wait for her to make a sackable mistake. Yeah, this one's for the miners, Thach!"
Matthew Norman puts it like no-one else could:
"[Carol Thatcher's] bemused reaction to the ensuing melodramatics confirms that she no more comprehends the distasteful nature of the word than does her media claque. [...] To them, the racist spectrum has the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan at one end and those soundly against lynching at the other, with nothing in between. That vast quagmire of nuance in the middle remains invisible to them, which is why every now and then one of them strolls blithely into the quicksand."
3 comments:
Remember the row over Prince Harry last month? Now, imagine if the apologists and the cheerleaders of the "it-was-only-a-joke" and "Political Correctness gone mad" had it their own way.
I suspect, their own ideal world then would turn into a 'paki' and a 'nigger', a 'golliwog' and a 'queer', a "love thy neighbour" and a 'chalky' after the other. Because, after all, "it is only a joke, isn't it" and "don't be OTT" and "stop this loony leftist political correctness".
Yet, give me PC gone mad any time over the days -for those old enough to remember- when England would beat Brasil 2-0, John Barnes would score a goal and the fans would come home saying the final score was 1-0.
What this is revealing about the unconscious racism of the Establishment and "opinion formers" is far more interesting than what one thick daughter of privilege blurts out in the Green Room — in vino veritas, btw.
Well done Jo Brand and the others who challenged her. She was given a chance to retract and apologise, which was pretty generous, but her arrogance did for her, not some "PC" crowd.
Is the web address a Suede reference?
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