Rod on Jo

Jo Brand, not being carted off to prison

Rod Liddle is, as so often, on form today in The Sunday Times. He takes the line that the BBC shouldn't have sacked Jo Brand, "the Clare Balding of comedy", because "we all knew Brand was making a joke" and because "the suggestion that people might douse Farage in battery acid is an absurdity". He believes that "viciousness is a crucial element of comedy" and that if you "start punishing comedians for viciousness...you’ll have much, much better comedians, such as Stewart Lee, in the dock."

We have to get ourselves away from this hyper-liberal sensitivity, this insistence that words by themselves should be samizdat. We have to value context and nuance. That the police are now involved [or were] is another absurdity. What Brand said was a joke, and intended as such, and she should not be sacked.

But...he also takes the line that the BBC should have sacked Jo Brand:

But still, the BBC should sack her. By its own lights. Because it does not agree with any of the stuff I’ve written above. It signs up to the whole panoply of liberal idiocy, the whole rank, totalitarian caboodle. Had Brand made that joke about Syrian refugees or Anna Soubry, she’d be gone by now.  

Yet because it was about Farage — who has suffered myriad violent assaults — BBC bosses take a more lenient view. Like Brand herself, and the odious Frankie Boyle, they are hypocrites. Sack Jeremy Clarkson, Danny Baker, Carol Thatcher — but not Brand. Liberal double standards — a joke funnier than anything she’s come up with in 30 years.