Tell these social media sociopaths to get stuffed

A DOUBLE dose of Mind How You Go this week. In Skegness, police charged a mobility scooter user with drunk-driving when he staged a protest at a drive-in McDonald’s. Officers were called after staff at the burger restaurant said they wouldn’t serve 62-year-old Michael Green because he wasn’t driving a car. He wouldn’t budge until they gave him a quarter-pounder with cheese. Mr Green refused a breathalyser and was arrested for being drunk in charge of a carriage under the 1872 Licensing Act — which was intended to apply to anyone riding a bike, a horse or a cart pulled by a cow. After realising that mobility scooters didn’t exist in 1872, Crown prosecutors wisely decided the case was not in the public interest. All of this could have been avoided, of course, if Maccy D’s had simply sold him a hamburger. Elsewhere, in Market Bosworth, Leicestershire, thieves targeted a police Land Rover Defender designed to tackle rural crime. It was parked outside the nick at the time. They stole the four side doors, rear doors and the bonnet. One theory is that Land Rover parts have become valuable on the black market since the Defender was discontinued earlier this year. The other theory is that they’d been inspired by watching The Italian Job, but were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off.

EVA PRICE, a character in coronation Street, studies her hair in a mirror and remarks: ‘i’ve got more roots than Kunta Kinte. No idea who that is, by the way, just something my mum used to say.’ cue deranged outbreak of faux outrage, a grovelling apology from corrie’s producers and a potential ‘ racism’ investigation by the broadcast watchdog Ofcom.

If you ever doubted that the world has gone rip-roaring bonkers, here is more conclusive evidence.

Kunta Kinte was a fictitious character in a 1976 novel by the black american author alex Haley, which was turned into a Tv series the following year. He was an 18thcentury african slave said to be based on one of Haley’s ancestors in the Gambia. The name of the Tv series was roots. Geddit? ‘More roots than Kunta Kinte’ is exactly the kind of remark a fiftysomething mother in a Northern soap opera would make — along with ‘camp as a row of tents’, and ‘More front than Blackpool’.

Then there’s the cockney saying ‘ More rabbit than Sainsbury’s’, immortalised by chas and Dave. That comes from the original 19th- century east end rhyming slang ‘rabbit and pork’ for ‘talk’. But how many young kids today complaining about some garrulous individual with too much ‘bunny’ has the faintest idea where the phrase comes from?

By the same token, coronation Street’s eva Price, played by 32-year- old actress catherine Tyldesley, is unlikely ever to have heard of Kunta Kinte or roots. She’s just parroting something her mum said when she was growing up.

‘More roots than Kunta Kinte’ isn’t the world’s greatest gag, but it’s perfect in the context of corrie, reflecting the way in which curious expressions are passed down through the generations and repeated, without further explanation.

But after the phrase was broadcast on Monday night, all hell let loose. Well, i say ‘all hell’. What i actually mean is that a few social cripples, sexual inadequates and show- offs went on the internet howling ‘ RAY-CIST’ and demanding retribution.

We’re told that ‘ hundreds’ of viewers complained. The truth is more likely that one foaming madwoman went berserk on her iPhone and a handful of other losers with nothing better to do retweeted it. You would have to be in the advanced stages of mental illness to correlate a throwaway line in a popular soap opera with approval of slavery.

Anyway, a recent survey showed that two-thirds of Twitter users in the UK are aged under 34 — so it’s unlikely they would ever have heard of Kunta Kinte, either.

BUT that didn’t stop one dopey bird, whom i can’t be bothered to name, exploding: ‘ 2016 and you wonder why there is a rise in hate crime, racial inequality & xenophobia with @itvcorrie utilising oppression as flippant humor (sic).’

She’d be an obvious contender for this year’s Here We Go Looby Loo awards, except the judges don’t accept entries from the wilder reaches of cyberspace. Most of these self- righteous maniacs hide behind made-up monikers. So why does anyone pay any attention whatsoever to their lunatic ramblings?

My trade isn’t exempt from culpability, i’m ashamed to admit. The heart sinks every time i read an article which begins ‘ Twitter erupted . . .’ or ‘social media went into meltdown . . .’ or tries to justify flamming up a so- called scandal on the grounds that ‘one Twitter-user tweeted . . .’

That’s like basing a news story on what someone said at a bus stop, over a pint or in the coffee queue.

If you turned to your wife, or husband, while watching Tv and happened to remark that, say, you thought the remake of are You Being Served? was sexist, or demonised gays, or didn’t address the burning issue of zero-hours contracts in the retail industry, that would be the end of it. But were you to tap out your comments on a computer or mobile phone and press ‘send’, it would very quickly become a MAJOR, MAJOR story.

According to one red-top tabloid, the confected fury over coronation Street was the most important thing which had happened in the world over the previous 24 hours. ‘CORRIE RACE STORM OVER SLAVE JOKE’ it screamed from its front page. Give me strength. another report quoted ‘aaron Moffat- Jackman, a trainee vicar from Manchester’, who said: ‘What it did was trivialise a horrific, traumatic time for many people, particularly at a time when things are going on in america with many people getting killed by police, by white people. i think it would be very welcome for ITV to apologise.’ Oh, do get a life, padre. Since when did ITV policy start being dictated by trainee vicars from Manchester? Yet after something called the ‘Slavery remembrance’ organisation weighed in with a fashionable # blacklivesmatter hashtag, insanely comparing the episode to making fun of anne Frank’s diaries, corrie’s producers threw up their hands in unconditional surrender.

They should be ashamed of themselves. Despite a fall in viewing figures, coronation Street is still the most popular soap in Britain, with an audience fluctuating between six and seven million, most of them 50-plus.

So why should the producers prostrate themselves before a few twisted juvenile malcontents on the internet — especially when it’s unlikely many of them have actually watched the programme?

OFCOM is now considering opening an official investigation after receiving a grand total of 278 complaints. Why, for heaven’s sake? No one with an IQ greater than a gravy boat full of Bisto could possibly conclude that a harmless expression such as ‘More roots than Kunta Kinte’ was ‘racist’.

Look, i’m conscious that even writing about this nonsense runs the risk of dignifying it. But there’s a serious point here.

We can’t stop social media sociopaths demanding scalps every time they decide to fill their empty lives by taking offence on behalf of others, even when no offence exists or was ever intended.

But what we can do is stop taking them seriously and that means no longer writing bogus ‘ news’ stories about them, constantly apologising to them or setting up official inquiries into their ridiculous complaints.

The way things are going, in the case of coronation Street, it can only be a matter of time before the Old Bill get involved and mount a full-scale armed raid on the rovers return, dragging off poor eva Price on suspicion of committing a ‘hate crime’. Nothing would surprise me any more.

After all, there’s nowt so queer as folk, as eva’s mum used to say on corrie . . .