The UK’S woke gatekeepers are losing their grip
With Government action and new media outlets we are seeing how political correctness can be beaten
The cultural elite says our new Culture Secretary is uncultured, yet I’d wager she’s the first bestselling novelist to hold the job, and the only one I know of to have eaten an ostrich anus on TV, which sounds positively French. The appointment of Nadine Dorries – an outspoken former nurse, businesswoman and star of I’m a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here! – is not a two fingers up to the culture industry but the direction of travel. That’s what so terrifies the gatekeepers.
Political correctness is losing its grip. Last week, it was alleged that Kemi Badenoch, the equalities minister, was caught on tape giving what various outlets described as a homophobic “rant”. The quotes Vice News chose to publish, and it was oddly selective, were innocuous.
In times past, this might have been enough to wreck her career because what mattered was the media’s verdict that offence had been taken – yet Badenoch is staying put. Boris has set a new standard. An advantage of having a columnist in No10 is that he’s upset everyone under the sun, but has learnt the best way to handle an angry letter is to put it in the bin. Ignore Twitter and it becomes Angela Rayner in a broom cupboard screaming for people to resign. Vice is left talking to itself.
We all are! Because we now inhabit a fractured cultural landscape. Piers Morgan – another who has survived by not giving in – is joining Rupert Murdoch’s new channel talktv, offering not one but two centre-right broadcasters to switch to, rendering the supposed bias of Sky or the BBC irrelevant because the old monopoly is broken. It is this new reality of choice, the crumbling of orthodoxy, that puts so many knickers in a twist. On Question Time, Andrew Neil explained his decision to quit GB News only to be confronted by a panellist who reminded him that he set up GBN on the express promise that it wouldn’t be “woke”. “You exactly knew the dog you were blowing that whistle at,” he said.
Is the dog racism? Several GBN presenters are black. Sexism? I’d guess half are women. Homophobia? At least two are openly gay. The (again, innocuous) content of GBN – they had Bobby Davro on last week – isn’t its Original Sin but its very existence: the outrageous decision to do news and culture without being woke. The discovery that this is possible is as liberating as the realisation that a Tory minister needn’t resign because they have upset four people on Twitter or that a government can, if it wishes, take action to resist Left-wing bullies.
Steps are being taken to protect free speech in universities and put the brakes on decolonisation, and now the Government wants to require broadcasters to produce distinctly “British” content – another move that is wilfully misunderstood. The goal is not, like Goebbels, to create a nationalist entertainment industry. It is to protect television and film against the tide of global imports via online streaming: Britishness as “added value”. The trick will be to do this without entertainment becoming a ghastly parody of itself – Four Weddings and a King’s Speech – but Ealing and Hammer, and other distinctly British filmmakers, flourished thanks to rules that once favoured the home-grown industry. The Government is trying to help the artistic community here, not hurt it.
Most of Ms Dorries’ time will probably be taken up with the least glamorous side of her job: Digital. The idea of a minister intervening to force the BBC to repeat the Carry On films 24/7 is attractive but a fantasy, and the accusation that the minister is lowbrow, aside from being downright rude, reflects an existential problem that really belongs on the desk of the cultural Left, not her’s – namely the enormous gulf between creatives and their audience. It’s a contrast in values and taste, but also in class. Were I appointed culture secretary tomorrow, my concern wouldn’t just be what is being made but by whom, because the language of equality and diversity, though well-intentioned I’m sure, masks the fact that art has become a depressingly middle-class business.
Last week, we lost Norm Macdonald to cancer, one of those rare comedians who only had to walk in the room to get a laugh. His shtick was telling it as it was, though he’d get to the truth in a curious way (“the more I hear about this Hitler guy, the less I like him”), and half the joke was the length of time he’d take to reach the punchline (for a masterclass in misdirection, google his story about a moth who went to the podiatrist).
Born in poverty in Canada, Norm apparently was an awkward kid until, one day, he was told to help a blind man to the store, and the man asked him to describe the world along the way. A gift was discovered. Much of comedy is about taking a shared thing, something we think we already know, and inviting us to look and laugh at its revealed absurdity.
Norm skewered egos. In the 1990s, he reported on a celebrity separation thus: “Real estate mogul Donald Trump announced that after three and a half years of marriage, he is seeking a divorce from wife, Marla Maples. According to Trump, Maples violated part of their marriage agreement when she decided to turn 30.”