Recap

As I was saying in my previous post, we all make use of cherry-picked examples when it suits us. Sometimes it’s genuinely necessary to cherry-pick for quick and easy, soundbite-style emphasis, but there’s a fine line between wilful bias by omission and diluting one’s argument with too much background information. Taking things out of context on purpose is nasty, but people who do it habitually dent their own credibility, which ultimately has to be counter-productive. 

Back to finding oneself politically homeless, which is how Melanie Phillips seems to feel. I mean, the way politics is constructed automatically involves a whole bunch of compromises and caveats. It’s a Party Line thing. We toe it for the sake of political unity and efficacy. Finding flaws and faults in your political or ideological compatriots is par for the course.

Who could support Trump unconditionally?  With unconditional love? No-one! He’s decidedly repulsive, inarticulate, almost infantile and seemingly totally un-self-aware. But somehow, his fundamental political instinct seems - if not ‘simply the best’- at least “better than all the rest.”

Another of my bête noire obsessions is the Sarah Champion contradiction. She’s cast as the epitome of unjust political ill-treatment and victimhood - sacrificed at the altar of Corbynism. But she’s no saint, and painting her as one is lazy and misleading. She’s a 'Philo-Islamic' antisemite who kowtowed to the Rotherham Muslim community throughout a vitriolic anti-Israel campaign in 2014, and who sat through Rotherham’s grooming gang activities for a good long while before ‘bravely’ speaking out. So, no, she’s not quite the innocent victim she’s made out to be. 

(I've posted this video about four times now - it's when the camera pans out to reveal 'the room' that I find fascinating)

On the opposite side of the coin, there’s the curate’s egg of Miriam Margolyes. She’s totally and utterly wrong, ignorant and gratuitously vociferous about Israel. Nevertheless, a certain charm still seeps through the narcissism, crudeness and ungainliness. If you see what I mean.

In a similar vein, there’s Jo Brand. Everyone loves to hate her, and even more so following her battery acid quip. Not funny Jo. However, she has a certain wit and I liked her ‘Getting On’ sitcom. It was quality TV.

See? I even like the Guardian. Only for its TV reviews and recaps, mind. At the time when most TV dramas are more or less incomprehensible, the Guardian is invaluable for  ‘explaining’ what passes for ‘the plot’.

I was wrong about David Goodhart. I felt insulted by his definition of ‘Leavers’ as ‘somewheres’, which I interpreted as a euphemistic term for parochial, narrow-minded and insular. Turns out not to be exactly the case. 

I’m ambivalent about nearly everything -  the thing that goes “I used to be indecisive but now I’m not so sure’ that's me, that is. 

Although I am pretty decisive about the (admittedly few) things I do know about. As Douglas Murray said - when you read nonsense about something of which you have first-hand knowledge, it dents the credibility of everything else that emanates from the same source. 

Sunday Morning Reading V: A BBC ECU ruling on Jo Brand

Here's something you might also have missed. The BBC's Executive Complaints Unit has finally ruled on Jo Brand's battery acid 'joke'. 

It's taken five months!

I can only imagine the hurdles the complainants had to leap over to get this far. Back and forth, then back and forth. 

Anyhow, the ECU has had its say. Finally.

Heresy, Radio 4, 11 June 2019

28 November 2019

Complaint

Reflecting on recent incidents involving the throwing of milkshakes as a form of political protest, Jo Brand said “I’m kind of thinking why bother with a milkshake when you could get some battery acid...that’s just me. I’m not going to do it, it’s purely a fantasy but I think milkshakes are pathetic. I honestly do – sorry”.  20 listeners complained that the joke was offensive and/or likely to incite violence.

---

Outcome

In view of Ms Brand’s immediate disavowal and the context of the programme’s wider message in favour of more civility in political discourse, the ECU did not consider the joke likely to incite violence, but accepted that, against the background of a significant problem with acid attacks, it was capable of causing offence beyond what was editorially justified, and should have been edited out before transmission.
Partly upheld

---

Further action

The adjudication has been discussed by Radio 4’s commissioning team and with the programme’s producers.

Why bother ?

I don’t feel that all lefty comedy automatically rules itself out of being properly funny. Well, not always. For example, much as the late Jeremy Hardy was a fanatical advocate of everything I loathe, I could see that had a lively and imaginative wit. Same goes for Frankie Boyle, another creative wordsmith whose politics suck most of the fun out of his comedy act. However, I can still admit that there are some quirky and humorous ideas hiding behind all the heavy-handed left-wing political proselytising. 

The latest Jo Brand debacle is as tiresome as it is typical. The cloth-eared BBC is immune to accusations of its own hypocrisy, but we shouldn’t automatically ‘hate’ Jo Brand and everything she does. 

“I have been watching, or listening to, Jo Brand for almost 30 years now and have yet to be even mildly amused by anything she has ever said. She’s fat, eats a lot and doesn’t like men — yes, I get it. But if only she could say something startling, revelatory or just — you know — funny about those stock subjects of hers, just once, I’d be happy.” 

said Rod Liddle.

Rod Liddle isn’t exactly elfin-like himself. And off-the-cuff humour isn’t his strongest suit. So, arguably, it’s a case of “pot, meet kettle.”  By the way, I don’t like Stewart Lee. Rod Liddle has a habit of inserting something jarring into his otherwise spot-on rhetoric. In written form, obviously.

In fact, Jo Brand has a droll wit about her, and as far as black comedy goes, her sitcom with the excellent Vicky Pepperdine was high-quality television. Personally, I could do without the man-hating stuff, the period porn and self-deprecating jokes about being greedy. If she applied herself to a  more original narrative she’d be rather good. So would Boyle and the oversubscribed cadre of comics whose default, left-wing assumptions and repetitious attacks on the same old targets from Thatcher to Trump and back are so predictable that they’re almost never funny.

I hope these will be my last words on the ‘joke’ made by Jo Brand, which wasn’t one of her best, but at least (in her defence) it was (presumably) off the cuff; she was expressing the default BBC political view (which is that right-wing politics and politicians are evil) but I suppose it’s her right to do so. even if she was doing it on the so-called impartial BBC, because it was in the context of a programme called Heresy. “belief or opinion contrary to orthodox religious (especially Christian) doctrine.” 

In an earlier post, I tried to explain why I thought it was a poor joke. I‘ll try again. The concept was unoriginal and unimaginative because throwing acid isn’t ‘absurdist’. It’s not even far-fetched, for the simple reason that people actually do it.

 I’m going to be annoyingly pedantic and deconstruct the ‘joke’. Here goes:

’Why bother with a milkshake when you could get some battery acid?’ 

said she.

The word ‘bother’, in this instance, is quite funny because, well, how much bother does it take to get hold of a milkshake? Not much I’d say. So it’s the word ‘bother’ that turns the remark into droll and dry humour. More so than if she’d just said: “Don’t use milkshakes”. 

However, things take a turn for the seriously problematic when we get to the punchline:”

 “…….when you could get some battery acid” (boom boom)

What if she’d missed out the word “battery” and merely said:

"Why bother with a milkshake when you could get some acid?"  There. Not so funny now, is it? 

 In other words, why bother with humour when you can easily use straightforward incitement.

 “Get some acid“ looks a little like unadulterated incitement, but she didn’t say that, did she? Carl Benjamin didn’t say he was going to rape Jess Phillips either. Nor did he threaten to rape her, but simply joked that he ‘wouldn’t even’. Not nice, but no-one’s nice these days. 

Did Nigel Farage really have to increase his security arrangements because of that remark? Did the police really interview Jo Brand? The police? Are the police going to monitor Frankie Boyle and co as well? 

Incidentally, anyone curious about the word Samizdat might have come across the thriving website “Samizdata”. A regular contributor to that site, Natalie Solent, used to be a co-proprietor of Biased BBC, and she too addresses the Jo Brand farrago. Farage-go.

The weirdest thing of the lot is the media bonanza it has engendered. Including this post.  

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.

Straight faces and unfunny jokes

I think they invented the face veil to protect the world from gurning women. 

Yasmin Alibhai Brown says she doesn’t support the face-veil, perhaps because it would inhibit her most effective means of self-expression, which is gurning.

I saw her on Sky this morning performing facial and full-body histrionics at the possibility of Boris becoming PM. “He’s a cad,”  she said “and a liar” but she adamantly denied ever having promised to leave the country if Boris got to be PM. When it was pointed out that she had indeed made such a promise she airily brushed off her own little lie, saying “Well, I’m not!“ [leaving]  

YAB not leaving the country after all? Phew!! sighs of relief all round.

Watching Faiza Shaheen gurning her way through Politics Live and Ash Sarkar making faces and waving her hideous talons around on consecutive episodes of that programme, one might wonder why so many men of that particular faith suffer from verbal incontinence and women from involuntary facial gymnastics.

A video of the Danish version of Geert Wilders - (Rasmus Paludan) being interrogated by a young elfin-like BBC reporter who says her country of origin is Iran, demonstrates the personification of ‘bias by gurning’. (H/T Biased-BBC) 

She started reasonably well, but dissolved into a display of petulant facial antics, including feigned amusement and an exaggerated “I’m listening to a moron” face, which ultimately came across as feigned bravado in the face of humiliation. When excessive gurning comes back to bite you on the bum.

Mr Paludan’s repertoire includes provocatively burning a copy of the Koran in a “Muslim area” to illustrate his right to freedom of speech and to challenge the basic concept of ‘Muslim areas’ within western democratic countries like Denmark and Britain; areas in which freedom of speech is tacitly curtailed through a collective, ultra-politically correct respect for all things Islamic, such as manifestations of Muslimness. I understand Paludan sometimes adds insult to injury by wrapping the Koran in bacon, (which, as you know, is carcinogenic) before setting fire to it. 

I hadn’t heard of Mr Paludan before I saw that video, but I now know that he happens to be a lawyer and (in this video at least) he makes a serious point, which is that the Muslims have managed to create a new norm, predicated on the premise that the sensitivities and taboos of Islam must be respected by everybody, no matter who they are or where they happen to be. I assume it’s because of these views that Mr Paludan has been pronounced “far right’ and no better than Hitler. 

Some say he’s an actual Nazi and a Jew hater, but that might just be wishful thinking on the part of his critics.

He says ”The BBC is renowned throughout the world as being a complete shit-hole media”

I’m keeping a straight face about this.

********

I saw our old friend David Vance coming head-to-head with the comedian whose alias is ‘Jonathan Pie’ on Sky just now. The issue under discussion was Jo Brand’s tasteless battery acid quip.

Vancey was keen to point out the hypocrisy of the BBC. He brought up the incident of Carol Thatcher and the golliwog and compared the intolerance heaped upon Carl Benjamin by people who couldn’t get their heads round the difference between the ‘joke’ in a historic threat (not) to rape an MP  and a ‘joke’ to throw battery acid over Nigel Farage. Double standards.

‘Jonathan Pie’ used the ‘context is all’ argument; he’s smart enough, but I think he was on shaky ground. In the end, they didn’t fundamentally disagree about ‘when is a joke not a joke’. The Sky anchor was obviously on the other guy’s side, but David Vance is no doubt used to being in a minority, and he copes with it well.

Of course there is a kind of a joke in Jo Brand’s quip, but unfortunately, it’s based on a misreading of the entire business of milkshake throwing. It’s a very poor joke because it’s so banal and unoriginal.

This is my take on it. Milkshakes are not an accidental choice of weapon. The substance itself is comparatively harmless, (apart from the cost of the dry-cleaning) it makes the victim look foolish, and it’s a kind of visual play on pouring liquid over someone’s head - usually pints of beer - which of course alcohol-free Muslims aren’t predisposed to do. It expresses disgust in the most visual and slapstick way and saves the perpetrator the trouble of trying to articulate their grievances verbally, which they’re very likely incapable of doing nearly as effectively as covering their opponent with goo.

As well as the above, another reason for choosing milkshakes as a weapon is as an indirect reminder that  “it could be something more harmful, but this time it isn’t”. If you like, it’s an unspoken threat. We’re all well aware that actual acid-throwing is gruesome and depraved and only too real. 

So Jo Brand’s quip is a statement of the bleeding obvious, which instantaneously sucks the humour out of the whole thing  - the opposite of injecting humour into it.

Kudos to Vancey for being asked to join the fun.

*******

Extensive Boris-bashing continues throughout the day. I have nothing extra to contribute on that topic so please continue to use the open thread to your hearts’ content.  

Why don't you switch off the TV ?

A couple of days ago Craig included the following observation in his smorgasbord post: 

 “In a questionable editorial decision, this morning's Today chose to invite in comedian Jake Yapp to mock ITV for switching off all their channels this morning in a Team GB-related stunt to encourage children to go out and do some exercise... The BBC mocking ITV for doing something noble doesn't strike me as being very...er...noble on the part of the BBC. The one upside is that Jake, as ever, was funny. I like Jake. He does all the voices:”  

Over on the Spectator, ‘Steerpike’ has posted something about Mr. Yapp too, but rather than picking up on the ‘questionable editorial decision’ made by the BBC to mock ITV for switching itself off to encourage couch potatoes to “do something less boring instead” (like sport) -  Steerpike has chosen instead to criticise Jake Yapp for sneering at the working class. 

 I’m with Craig on this one. I thought Yapp’s little sketch was okay. Not hilarious, but …okay. It would be nice if Mr. Yapp did one about the BBC one day (for balance) - but we’ve had “Harry and Paul’s Story of the Twos’ so we should be happy with that.

 

Harry and Paul's Story of the Twos [couchtripper] by couchtripper

All comedians seem to range from left-leaning to hard-line leftie. The more lefty the jokes, the harder it is for non-believers to see the funny side. When a leftie comedian does their thing, even if it’s funny, non-lefties won’t crack. “Not funny” they insist, sucking a lemon.

Much as I loathe Jeremy Hardy’s bizarre anti-Israel / antisemitic politics, I have to admit that when he steers clear of that topic he can be funny. Actually, on second thoughts, that’s pushing it a bit. I used that extreme example to illustrate my point, because his slap-you-in-the-face anti-Israel ‘jokes’ are a real antidote to laughter. 

Another example of the above is Frankie Boyle. I think if he was on my side, I probably would laugh, but as it is, no. His rapier-like wit is more rapier than wit. Well, there is wit, but when the ‘joke’ hinges on a falsehood it ceases to be amusing.

Here’s another example. Many ‘critics of the left’ detest Jo Brand. She used to make one feel uncomfortable rather than amused by shocking the audience with her self-deprecating, rude, too-much-information patter. But Jo Brand’s material has matured; it’s still self-deprecating but no longer obsessively gynaecological. 

Her co-authored sitcom with Joanna Scanlan and Vicki Pepperdine “Getting On” was a mini masterpiece. (though I didn’t think her solo spin-off was up to scratch) 

Now when I see her chairing HIGNFY, I give her the benefit of the doubt. If she amuses me, despite golliwog-gate, I don’t try not to laugh.

Anyway before I go off on a lengthy list of drearily unfunny leftie comedians, which would probably contradict the point I set out to make, let me return to the reason I started to write this. What was it again? Oh yes.

Look at the comments below Steerpike’s article. They’ve veered away from the topic, as usual, and settled upon a generalised outpouring of criticism of the BBC.

It seems that the BBC’s bias is recognised by huge numbers of people. You see it everywhere. On both right and left-wing media. From the OMG Daily Mail to… even the Guardian.

BBC staff will soon be the only ones who are unaware of their elephantine bias. That’s the employed ones. They do have a habit of ‘discovering’ it when they leave.  


Gatecrash (from Craig): I agree with Sue (to paraphrase a famous pair of unfunny comedians). 

Those comments at the Spectator ought to give the BBC pause (but won't). 

More and more people are angry at the BBC - from the Corbynistas and the SNP on one side to all the many-and-various 'people like us' on the other.

The old 'complaints from both sides' no longer washes either. Both sides are firing from different sides at the same place (loathe as they might be to admit it): the place where the BBC sits.

And the BBC doesn't sit where many of us/they sit. It (generally-speaking) sits with people other than us/them, somewhere on the socially-liberal, strongly pro-EU, economically-centrist, politically left-leaning, pro-modern-Establishment spectrum between Ken Clarke and Owen Smith.

Still, here's more Jake Yapp (another one for Mr. Steerpike?)...

Thread about some of my worries etc

Does anyone else worry about the way people like Laura Kuenssberg or Norman Smith are called in on every occasion to interpret all political news? It’s as though they hold themselves superior to the lot of us, (the ignoramuses) speculating on the motives of the likes of Iain Duncan Smith, Boris Johnson or whoever. Do they know what’s inside the head of IDS? Does IDS even know?

As soon as something happens, along comes Laura to tell us what we should think, and it’s getting ridiculous. Analysis is one thing, but imperious interpretation is superfluous to requirements. It's overpowering, really.

*****

I watched Simon Heffer’s speech to a packed Bexit crowd. (H/T comments @ B-BBC) 

Very nice, but what with Iain Duncan Smith, the BBC and arguably George Osborne and David Cameron helping to undermine their own government, if we vote ‘out’ because we want to regain sovereignty and we want to decide our own future, well, the thing that worries me most is - who will the ‘we’ actually be? The Conservative party’s loss might be the Labour party’s gain, and given the current leadership that bothers me greatly.

******

My agenda was that I wanted to like Stewart Lee and dislike Jo Brand. It didn’t work out.

I watched Stewart Lee’s tedious shaggy cat story about Jeremy Corbyn, the cat. 

As soon as he started saying that his diarrhea-afflicted cat was called Jeremy Corbyn, dread descended and hung there like a blanket. A gross ending was imminent. I didn’t even foresee a protracted, interminable raspberry, which the Grimsby Telegraph seemed to find amusing, but the punchline involving the England flag, some shit, the national anthem and someone confusing the cat called Jeremy Corbyn for the ordinary Jeremy Corbyn, couldn’t come soon enough. 

   

How did this script come about? He must have thought: edgy + Jeremy Corbyn + crap -- patriotism--> laborious monologue. He allowed the tail to wag the cat, so to speak; pity you can’t unhear things. 

Was that Chris Morris dishing out advice? He should have advised against. 

On the other hand Jo Brand’s walk thing was alright. I don’t dislike Jo Brand at all. Despite her political views, she can be funny, but that sitcom about the geriatric ward - Getting On, in which she played Nurse Kim Wilde with Vicky Pepperdine as Dr Pippa Moore - was fine. 

Even though he had a small role in Blackadder I could never be persuaded to like Jeremy Harding, if you get my drift, but I think Jo Brand is ok.

*******

Did you read this?    As soon as I saw Rod Liddle’s article on the Spectator I realised I’d already heard this Taiwanese author on Start The Week with Andrew Marr. I thought she sounded odd then, but now I’ve connected her with a video, captured clandestinely on his mobile phone by ‘Tommy Robinson’ I know she’s not only odd, but dim. 

She has written this dire book about what she sees as 'the far right', and what baffles me is that such an ill-conceived project ever got published, let alone plugged (yes it was) on the BBC. 

Just as Hsiao-Hung Pai hasn’t read the Koran, I haven’t read "Angry White People", so at the risk of being berated for my own ignorance, I wonder why anyone would publish such sensationalised drivel in the first place? Judging from the attitude of the author, the answer’s in the question. It’s sensationalist and shallow. Perhaps it ticks the boxes of a publisher that also lists Ilan Pappé and Richard Falk amongst its authors.