Sugar and Spice

Frankie McCamley failing to get to Lord Sugar's doorstep

Have you ever been on holiday to a certain resort in Spain and seen those late-night club comedians who tell jokes they assure us we'll never hear on the BBC? These men swear blind that they "haven't got a racist bone in their body" whilst telling jokes that would get any comedian who managed to slip through the net and tell them on, say, The One Show or Question Time instantly hung, drawn and quartered and then tarred-and-feathered and shot. And the audience in Spain, thrilling to the 'taboo' nature of these jokes, then lets rip with their forbidden laughter and applauds enthusiastically before staggering merrily back to their hotels 

I only ask because poor, foolhardy Lord Sugar's recent quip about the Senegal team would probably only get a titter there (being very tame in comparison) but it was still enough to get to cause countless blood vessels to explode with outrage (across Twitter at least) and to get at least one MP to call for the BBC to sack him. The usual forced apology followed. 

Strikingly, for one of their top stars, the story was given extensive coverage by the BBC - of the Jeremy Clarkson kind. It got full-length reports on all of the main BBC One news bulletins. And the BBC's coverage audibly and visibly dripped with disapproval. And they even sent a reporter (Frankie McCamley) to his Lordship's house to try and doorstep him. (Unfortunately for Frankie, there was some distance between the bell as his gate and the doorstep and he wasn't going to oblige her by traipsing the distance between the two.)

And it's not over yet. The Sunday Mirror reports that the BBC is (sending him to be re-educated by the Red Guards) sending him to attend an "unconscious bias" course, and that his BBC career is still not assured. 

Rod Liddle, in The Sunday Times, is typically caustic - and doubtless correct - about the "endlessly self-flagellating" BBC and what will happen next here: 

Back to Sugar and the BBC. He will surely not last there much longer; my suspicion is that the dwarfs of death who run the place ache to get rid of him, much as they relievedly got rid of Jeremy Clarkson. The vast audiences these two middle-aged white men command are the result of a recidivist humour that does not commend itself to the flaccid PC bores who run the place, even if it is enjoyed by a huge proportion of the British people — that is, the licence-fee payers....

....including those who holiday in Spain.