BBC Brand loyalty is truly blind
IWAS in the kitchen last weekend knocking up some smoked salmon and scrambled eggs (we’re trying low carb and yes, it’s every bit as soul-tearingly miserable as I thought it would be) when I heard Radio 4 cross the line.
No, it wasn’t Jo Brand, with her now infamous battery acid remark. It was part of a Today programme spoof on Radio 4’s Dead Ringers.
‘On Monday Donald Trump landed in Britain,’ said the Martha Kearney voice-a-like. ‘President Trump was here to mark the 75th anniversary of the D-Day landings, where allied troops stormed beaches filled with almost as many Nazis as his White House.’
Wait, what? Did the BBC really just compare Trump’s entire White House staff to Nazis? Really? Isn’t that a little, well, over the top?
I turned it off. It’s what I usually do these days when it comes to Radio 4. There was a time when every radio I owned was permanently tuned to it, the soundtrack to my life a gentle roll from the Today programme through Woman’s Hour, the World at One and Gardeners’ Question Time all the way to Sailing By.
Not any more. These days you’d struggle to tune in without finding an agenda being pushed that’s somewhere to the Left of the Morning Star. Gardeners’ Question Time aside, of course.
So I wasn’t surprised the BBC initially let Brand get away with her comment about chucking battery acid over ‘certain unpleasant characters’, seemingly broadcasting it with no qualms. It wasn’t an anomaly. It’s what passes for humour on the Left.
If Brand wants to make such remarks, that’s up to her. We have free speech in this country, thank goodness, and heaven knows, the only person who’s really suffered as a result of her comments is her. But what I do find irksome is the hypocrisy of it. Where’s the balance? Where’s
the counter-joke? Why are there no Right-wing comedians on the BBC? Why does the Left get to claim some sort of moral superiority while using the sort of language that would not be tolerated were it sent the other way?
I’ve never heard a comedian make an off-colour joke about Nicola Sturgeon. Why? Because if the sort of language used about Tory politicians, never mind Trump, was directed towards those on the Left, there would be mass protests.
I’ve been thinking about that Trump ‘joke’ all week. I am no Trump apologist, yet it is an offensive remark, not so much to the US President and his Teflon-coated team but to those brave men who travelled to Normandy last week.
The ones who wept for the friends they saw shot and killed by Nazis – real Nazis, not some ridiculous millennial repurposing of the word to mean ‘anyone I don’t agree with’ – standing at their memorials and saluting them one last time.
Words matter. Differing voices matter too. Jo Brand found that out the hard way this week. I wonder how long it will take the rest of the BBC to work it out.