Will Beeb sack all its top people for being white?
After reading your article last week on the sacking of the excellent Jon Holmes from Radio 4’s The Now Show for being a ‘white man’, I wonder how far the BBC would be prepared to go with this policy. Would they extend it to the BBC Symphony Orchestra, for example? If there were quotas for ethnic and religious groups, chosen above talent, the nation would lose a world-class orchestra, and also its excellent chorus. Jane Mortimore, Malvern, Worcestershire May I commend Jon Holmes for his well-balanced stance in last week’s Mail on Sunday on discrimination, after his sacking from Radio 4’s The Now Show. He is absolutely right that we should all be treated as people, and jobs should be decided purely on individual merit, and not on colour, gender, sexual orientation, disability, nationality or anything else.
He lost his job because of ‘positive discrimination’. But what is ‘positive discrimination’? Discrimination is a word like ‘unique’ – it cannot be qualified. There is no ‘quite unique’ or ‘very unique’ – something is unique or not, and so it is with discrimination.
Jon’s article was a breath of fresh air for sound, traditional common sense, which seems to have been made almost obsolete by such things as political correctness and ‘positive discrimination’. Let’s get back to deciding things in a fair, common-sense way, and nothing else.
Terry Reeve, Bungay, Suffolk Jon who? He’s not the best known of comedians. I think he’s been sacked because he’s not very good and an executive couldn’t bear to tell him that, so hid behind the smokescreen of ‘diversity’. Now her cowardice seems to have backfired.
J. McLean, Manchester I am male and I am also white. So when the new version of The Now Show is broadcast (with its extra diversity and more women), if I find that I am not laughing as much as I did before, will that therefore make me, in the eyes of the BBC, both sexist and racist? Steve Oliver, Heckmondwike, West Yorkshire Doesn’t the BBC realise that radio is not a visual medium? Listeners don’t know what colour somebody on radio is. There are too few genuinely funny people on radio. The BBC should cherish those like Jon Holmes who can make people laugh. That should be the only criteria for a radio comedy series.
Jean Powell, Norwich Since radio is a not a visual medium, who beyond the production team and studio audience would ever know what colour a performer is?
F. Harvey, Hotwells, Bristol