How Hard Can It Be_ - Jeremy Clarkson [54]
The situation has become worse in the wake of Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand’s telephone call to Andrew Sachs’s answering machine. Everyone is after petrol and kindling to keep that fire going until Ross returns to the airwaves in January. That’s why poor old Chris Moyles was splashed across the papers recently for talking about prostitution and then talking about Poles. ‘Aha,’ said someone in a loft. ‘You see. You see! The BBC is out of control. They are employing a man who thinks all Polish people are hookers.’ And it’s why I had to get legal on various newspapers that were trying to suggest I’d given the finger to an American policeman in a recent edition of Top Gear. I hadn’t, but it looked that way, and that’s a big enough stick for those who are professionally angry.
It’s now reached the point where the BBC has drawn up a new procedure to make sure no one in its employ ever says anything that could possibly offend anyone. This is an enormous undertaking. With four television channels broadcasting twenty-four hours a day, along with five national radio stations, and forty local stations in England alone, it amounts to 8,232 hours of broadcasting a week. That means 89m words every seven days, not one of which can offend anyone.
Impossible? Well it’s not like they’re not trying. News reports featuring mildly grisly scenes have to come with health warnings. And I have to tell two people what I’m planning on saying. If I don’t, I am summarily dismissed. And if either thinks there’s someone out there with a website and an acronym who might find the remark offensive, it has to go. The procedure, scarily, is called ‘compliance’. Sounds like something a Dalek might say to some captives: ‘Comply. Comply.’ It has to stop. Because what the BBC is doing is pandering to the wishes of extremists. I mean it. There is no difference in my book between the spokesman for Viva! and suicide bombers who fly planes into tall buildings. Both believe they are right and, crucially, neither wants the other point of view to be heard.
It is their right to eat weeds rather than food. I support them in that. I wish them well and I would gladly give them a platform on TV to express their views, no matter how pallid and drawn their badly malnourished faces may be. So how can they possibly object to someone saying: ‘I like a chop’? And how can we have reached a point where we castigate Harry and Paul for their extremely funny sketch? I even saw some hopeless MP on TV saying we should go back to the days of proper comedy like Fawlty Towers … in which I seem to recall Basil pretended to be Hitler and made some Germans cry. I promise you this: that scene today would not be broadcast because out there somewhere is a Kraut in an attic with a bad temper and a big mouth.
To sum up, then. We all know you can’t use the f-word before nine, the n-word unless you’re Quentin Tarantino and the c-word ever. We sort of know what’s funny and what’s sick. We know something is offensive only if offence is meant. We know the rules and we really cannot have them redrawn by the English Collective of Prostitutes, the government of the Philippines, the Daily Mail and a bunch of people who don’t reckon it might be fun, just occasionally, to go out at night in a pair of mink knickers.
Sunday 14 December 2008
Ambulance, quick – some idiot’s had a brainwave
You must have noticed the change. You used to be able to get a good night’s sleep in a British city centre, but these days you are woken from your dreams every five minutes by the siren of a passing ambulance. And figures out last week show this is no illusion. In London, the number of calls received by the ambulance service has rocketed from 3,000 to 4,000 a day. And in the West Midlands it’s a similar picture, with 8,000 calls being received last weekend – a 30 per cent increase on the same weekend last year. So what’s going on? Obviously some people need an ambulance in these troubled times because they’ve been stabbed or shot or they’ve ingested a bit too much ketamine and are walking