The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
VICTORIA COREN MITCHELL HOW I SEE IT
What connects Paul Hollywood, Jeremy Corbyn, a cloaked 17th-century character and the tango?
Have you ever been to Canada? I’m thinking of moving there. I can’t tell you why until we’re at least three paragraphs in, but if this were an Only Connect question, the clues would be Paul Hollywood, Jeremy Corbyn, Matthew Hopkins and the tango.
It must be the time of year when people daydream about running away; last week saw the start of several new series on that theme. I watched New Lives in the Wild on Channel 5 (in which Ben Fogle met an amazingly intelligent and charismatic Italian runaway called Annalisa Vitale) and Escape to the Chateau: DIY on Channel 4, which revealed that France is positively bristling with Brits digging organic sewage ponds round the back of old castles.
Right, we’re at paragraph three. Are we alone? By now, anybody who’s still reading has either bought the paper or subscribed online. Or at least hacked someone else’s online account. The first two paragraphs are visible to any old internet passer-by and I’m bored of people being cross about things they’ve taken out of context.
A couple of weeks ago I hosted Have I Got News For You and read out a joke that ribbed Jeremy Corbyn over some topical allegations. The internet was soon alive (a-twitter, you might say) with the idea that I had “gone on TV and attacked Jeremy Corbyn”. The context that it was a one-liner on a satirical news programme – and that it sat alongside far more savagery at the expense of Boris Johnson – had fallen away.
Out from the woodwork crawled a host of ghastly characters with the usual gruesome comments. I don’t know if they were Jeremy Corbyn supporters. (They said so, but they were such cartoonish anti-Semites it would be more logical if they’re actually saboteurs determined to make him look like a magnet for bigots. I met him once and he seemed like a perfectly nice man.)
Meanwhile, Paul Hollywood has made a public apology for saying on The Great British Bake Off that a giant cream cake was “diabetes on a plate”. People with (and parents of children with) type 1 diabetes, which is unrelated to diet, were so enraged by the cliché that they said Hollywood was “disgusting”, that they wanted to kick and punch him, and of course that he should be fired.
Ah, I dunno. People used to want to come together and laugh at terrible things – really terrible things, like illness and antiSemitism. That was our way in this country. We were slow to hector and quick to laugh. We lived and let live. We were tolerant and chuckly.
But were we always? Or has it just been a phase? Internet trolls don’t care about context, which reminds me that half the people in the 17th century didn’t believe in witchcraft but wouldn’t let that stand in the way of a good drowning. That’s where Matthew Hopkins, the Witchfinder General, comes in. This bloodthirsty, semi-erotic desire to see fear or shame is an old, old thing. We grew up thinking it had passed into medieval history, but perhaps it was just latent: the internet has woken it up again.
Even the lightest of light entertainment is not immune. Amiable BBC sports presenter
Mike Bushell has received such vicious verbal abuse for a questionable tango on last week’s Strictly Come Dancing that his wife has pleaded for mercy.
To be fair to the trolls, Strictly itself doesn’t help, with its own judges openly sneering as some poor sap does his best to shimmy about in Lycra and look game. I think Craig Revel Horwood in particular might be missing an opportunity to send a salutary message about human relations. A bit more “Well done for trying, nice effort!” and a bit less “You looked like an ugly, clumsy, talentless blob of dog mucus” might help us all. Perhaps the whole recent fad for nasty personal remarks dates back to the early days of The X Factor when it became sport to mock the quirkier auditionees in talent contests?
Anyway, I don’t like the swinging back of the pendulum and I’m thinking of moving to Canada, which everyone says is very civilised. To this end, I insisted my husband join me in watching Escape to the Chateau: DIY. (France is too close and nobody says it’s very civilised, but it’s a start.)
Unfortunately, this didn’t turn out to be the sort of escape fantasy where you see a lot of sundrenched meadows, glistening fruit and jugs of wine. It was all wintry chill, leaky roofs and digging sewage systems.
“It looks like a lot of hassle,” said my husband. “They seem like nice places but you have to plumb in your own f------ central heating system. I don’t want to do DIY. I am not the sort of person who sees the problems inherent in reglazing a skylight and wants to get involved.”
Sadly, there was no better luck
Our desire to see fear or shame is nothing new – but the internet has woken it up again