There’s a great show on BBC Radio 4 called Any Answers. (You can listen again on that page).
It makes often hilarious or frustrating listening as the Great British Public expose their general ignorance and prejudices, but can also be educational and cathartic in a “glad it’s not just me thinking that” kind of way.
Every now and then, you get what is clearly a wind-up. And so, at first, I thought this next caller was.
On Any Questions the night before, in a special episode from America regarding the Obama inauguration, a questioner asked “What dog do you hope the Obamas have in the Whitehouse?”
It was one of those light-hearted end-of-show questions, to which Christopher Hitchens answered “Irish Setter – stupid, highly strung, but dead loyal”. Here’s a clip of the question:
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And of course, no-one thought about it much more. Until Any Answers. At first, I thought “Rosheen from Islington, London” was a wind-up. She said it was “racist of the BBC to broadcast the word ‘Irish’ in the same sentence as the word ’stupid’” Apparently, she’d phoned up the night before to ask the BBC to edit the comment, and how highly offensive she found it – blah-de-blah, whatever, love. But then, she said it was “re-inforcing the stereotype that Irish people are stupid”. Now THAT is irony! I thought that any minute now, she’ll crack, or laugh and hang up. And slowly, scarily, it dawned – this woman (in her own slightly damaged mind) was genuine! You couldn’t make this stuff up, have a listen:
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Maximum respect to Jonathan Dimbleby, he just managed to keep his cool. Of course, now we’re in the territory where you don’t know whether someone is being serious, winding people up, or just a bit nuts. Check out this BBC Message board if you don’t believe me, for a classic example of hand-wringing twattage from user “nibhrionn”
I listened to both programmes and agree totally with Madeline’s point. Hitchen’s knew that he had said something that was potentially offensive but Dimbleby caused real offense by his rude dismissal of the caller. Casual racism is still endemic in this country as evidenced by the recent revelations about the royal family but I guess objecting to this is “political correctness gone mad” as well.
Update: Looks like I wasn’t the only one to blog about this. Alan Brookland has a bit more of a transcript and some thoughts on this, and there’s chatter about it on the Glasgow West End forum. However, in the kind of comment that makes me dispair for humanity, HitchensWatch has embarrased itself with a post which leaves one feeling that if it’s not a joke, it was written by a humanities graduate with a sense-of-everything failure.
Here’s an extract from HitchensWatch- and remember, we’re talking about a breed of dog here:
He decided instead to tell an Irish joke, and not just any old Irish joke, but the kind that relies for its effect on the listeners’ understanding that the Irish, as a race, are intellectually challenged and over-sensitive.
This incidence of schoolboy racist humor was picked up by Jack Grantham, who put together the YouTube clip above with some very familiar images and brought the offense to our attention. I must say it amazes me that the BBC can allow this sort of thing to pass with giggles of approval and no apologies by anyone involved, while at the same time they can’t even bring themselves to carry an appeal for humanitarian aid for the Palestinian refugees in Gaza. More than this, the entire episode seems to have been scripted rather than spontaneous, as is often the case with radio broadcasts. If this is the case, it means that the scriptwriter, director, presenter, questioner and associated staff, as well as the Drink-Soaked One himself, were all perfectly happy to make a lame racist joke for the express purpose of rounding off a light-hearted radio show. What next for Hitch and the Beeb, one wonders? Jokes about cotton fields? Concentration camps? Dwellers of the jungles or deserts? Aids sufferers? The malnourished and starving? The visually, physically, mentally and chromosomally handicapped? People with slitty eyes? Or are the Irish now to be singled out for special treatment?
Nuts. I have no doubt this moron would confuse race and religion when it comes to Islam, too. And not the only example of political correctness gone mad, recently…
Just to recap:
Irish Setter
Irish Nutter
Update! I don’t believe it – there’s a youtube video now! This is nuts, not least because the maker can’t even spell “racist”!
