Sitting on Offence
Those bereft of a vested interest would probably agree war is a pretty offensive thing. Edwin Starr certainly did. We’ve been bombarded with the centenary of the First World War’s outbreak this year and the general tone of events marking the occasion has not been celebratory, but mournful over the seemingly needless slaughter. Yet, whilst we’ve been looking over our shoulders at 1914, seemingly needless slaughter has continued to be played out in Syria, Iraq, Ukraine and Gaza. And that’s also pretty offensive.
In fact, there are few things more offensive than war – an omnipotent source of offence, one might say, as it never really takes a day-off. However, detached from the battlefield, there are other examples of man’s inhumanity to man that have also always been with us and seem unlikely to ever go away as long as we avoid the fate of the dinosaurs. Civilian murder, molestation, rape, torture and physical violence are all as irredeemably offensive as war and have never gone out of fashion. We attempt to curb them, we devise punishments for them, we try to educate against them and we engage in relentless pre-emptive prevention before they surface in the next generation; but they carry on regardless.
Beneath these universal sources of what could be termed ‘common sense offence’ are labyrinthine layers of individual, personal offence, each of which offer different viewpoints to the respective beholders, the old ‘one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter’ argument. And this is where offence becomes less a shared response to something indisputably horrible and more a gauntlet thrown down by one set of beliefs to the feet of another. It’s also where the whole business starts to get mired in the murky waters of prejudice and petty grievances.
I’m not a particular fan of Jeremy Clarkson. Personally, I think he’s a bit of a prat. Whenever he opens his mouth, he says something ill-informed and stupid. I don’t like ‘Top Gear’ so I don’t watch it. But millions of people do and enjoy it. Millions of people also read his newspaper columns and enjoy them. I’m not a particular fan of Coldplay; in actual fact, I want to throw my radio out of the window whenever I hear Chris Martin’s voice and want to throw my TV set out of the window every time his face appears on-screen. But millions of people have bought Coldplay albums and have queued up in the rain to see the band in concert. Am I in the right or are they? I don’t find ‘Mrs Brown’s Boys’ funny, so I don’t watch it; millions of viewers would vehemently disagree with me. I’m not remotely interested in the ‘Bake-Off/Apprentice/X-Factor/Strictly Come Dancing/I’m A Nonentity Get Me out of Here’ strain of populist light-entertainment television; but millions are. What am I to do?
Well, one thing I wouldn’t do is attempt to ban them. I wouldn’t start a petition to remove things from radio or television because I personally cannot abide them. Who I am to dictate? What right have I to demand the employment of censorship? I can say they suck, such is my right; but that’s not a statement I expect to carry any weight beyond my own four walls or my own circle of friends. These sentiments might find empathy with other commentators on here, but I’m sure some would argue that they don’t mind or even quite like some of the things I’ve listed as my personal dislikes; and I’m equally sure dozens of others could be put forward in true ‘Grumpy Old Men’ style. But what good would that really do? After all, isn’t that what Twitter is for, the digital inheritor of a stiff letter to the Times?
Which brings us around to Dapper Laughs. I had never even heard of Dapper Laughs until a couple of days ago, probably because I’m not on Twitter and I have little interest in the here-today/gone-tomorrow fads that preoccupy ‘The Kids’. I saw a clip of this chap on TV the other night and I didn’t find him very funny, which is surely a failing where a comedian is concerned. He seemed to me like a cross between a real-life Nathan Barley and a Cockernee version of the 80s American comic, Andrew ‘Diceman’ Clay, someone else who didn’t make me laugh. As his actual name is Daniel O’Reilly, I wondered if this character was a clever parody of a particular breed of bloke, in the same way that Ali G, Alf Garnett, Alan Partridge and Al Murray’s Pub Landlord are. His humour was a tedious brand of frat-boy grossness that appeals to few over the age of 25, a juvenile strand of comedy not a million miles from something like ‘The Inbetweeners’, if lacking the deftly observed writing of that series and its painfully accurate portrayal of adolescent inadequacy. In other words, he’s not especially important and was probably destined to be an irrelevance within a year or two as his audience moved on and grew up.
The strange thing is that Dapper Laughs has suddenly become the most notorious comedian in the country overnight – a Bernard Manning or Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown for the 2010s. Why? Well, an online campaign to have him taken off our TV screens and censored indefinitely has pushed this obscure and unfunny funny-man onto the front pages of everyone’s lives, at least those lives governed by the frenetic pass-the-moral-parcel panic of social networking. At one time, it only ever seemed to be the purveyors of challenging, artistic merit that were targeted by campaigns, whether the television plays of Dennis Potter, movies such as ‘A Clockwork Orange’ or bands such as The Sex Pistols – and opposition to them was largely restricted to the parents of the generation they were aimed at or to those of an immovable religious bent, adrift in the beguiling Sodom of the Permissive Society. Not so now. Not only is it difficult to discern any challenging artistic merit in Dapper Laughs, but had those who have inadvertently turned the star of a minor cult on ITV2 into a household name been the age they are now in 1971, they would have been protesting against censorship outside the Old Bailey when the editors of ‘Oz’ magazine were tried in the greatest generational conflict of the era.
Accused of objectifying women, belittling the horrors of rape and pandering to the worst elements of Lad culture, Dapper Laughs is as much an idiotic product of his age as those who seek to censor him, a graduate of social networking sites rather than the stand-up circuit. His charmless lingo is no different from the lyrical content of numerous male and female R&B acts that are sold to an audience far younger than that which watches late-night ITV2. His act is also representative of the shows that regularly clog-up the schedules of minority channels targeting a teenage audience, usually centred in Ibiza or Magaluf or a Northern English city, ones in which girls ‘gagging for it’ are hardly shrinking violets when it comes to sex; has anyone ever campaigned for an unedifying exhibition of crass vulgarity such as ‘Geordie Shore’ to be banned? Or is it perfectly acceptable if it is young women self-objectifying? Hysterical overreactions to anything designed to cause offence are commonplace in cyberspace; ‘Off with his (or her) head’ is now the kneejerk response to anyone who says or does anything perceived as offensive, as though being on Twitter is today’s equivalent of being the Chairman of the IBA and everyone has the authority to ban something they don’t like. But is Dapper Laughs really Peter Sutcliffe clad in Max Miller’s jacket?
The trouble with Twitter is that the opinions we all express when confronted by the sight of someone who gets our backs up on TV, ones that usually go no further than our living rooms, can now be shared amongst a community that thrives on brewing up storms in their online teacups, convinced what they have to say carries weight. Rather scarily, it would appear they’re right, if the reaction to Dapper Laughs is anything to go by. Perhaps I should acquire a Twitter account and then I can finally do something about Jeremy Clarkson. And Coldplay. And ‘Mrs Brown’s Boys’. And…
Petunia Winegum
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November 12, 2014 at 10:50 am -
I keep reading people online harping on about this Dapper Laughs buffoon “damaging society” and suchlike – yet, having witnessed his pathetic “interview” on Newsnight I get the impression he is just another cog in the wheel of idiocy, another dopey twenty-something dragged up in the age of “enlightenment” who can’t tell the difference between right & wrong due to being raised with a culture of overwhelming hypocrisy. In fact I’ll go as far as to say this witless Nathan Barley was set-up by a couple of sniggering Jonatton_Yeah’s at ITV for the express intention of causing outrage, making “news” and furthering the cause – the cause of dictating the belief that boys & men are all beastly rapists-in-waiting and the only way of redemption is to denounce the penis, pee sitting down & recant lefty feminist propaganda.
Meanwhile, the BBC refuse to screen the intelligent pop music of 30/40 years without censor and most young women (as well as “men”) appear to be cretins with no self-esteem? Why is this when everyone is so enlightened and educated?-
November 12, 2014 at 3:07 pm -
Jonatton Yeah? – you missed the question mark he had added by deed poll.
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November 12, 2014 at 12:08 pm -
I don’t do Twitter. It allows mindless persons to sound off anonymously on every slight perceived, parade their prejudices, develope weird conspiracy theories. Spread nasty accusations against long dead well known persons, and stir up racial/sexist/political slanging matches. Modern comedians leave me cold and detached. I cannot laugh at the swearing and sneering that they call current comedy. Mrs Brown had me amused at first, and watching, but the fe**ks and fu**ks got to me in the end and I dip in occasionally and it does make me laugh, and some times even has a moral theme stitched into the show. We watch and enjoy late night shows of TOTP, with Savile carefully expunged. I was reared on my parents records bought in the thirties. Caruso and Sitting on the Fence in the Moonlight. The Teddy Bears Picnic. Played on a posh cabinet wind up gramophone. Also the piano and sheet music, She’ll be coming round the mountains etc. A long pause due to war and austerity, then Rock and Roll, and later the Fab Four songs. Young singers wailing and caterwauling leaves me totally unimpressed. So does the blinkered lack of general knowledge of the younger ones on quiz shows. Questions such as ‘In which English county is…….? Elicit the reply… Scotland. Next they answer a question on an obscure pop group…no problem at all! I don’t expect them to know what I know now, before slates come loose. They should know their own country a bit better….ooooo can’t do Geography. The Popsters rule OK….Hello anyone at home in that young head?
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November 12, 2014 at 12:08 pm -
“Some 60,000 people signed a petition calling on ITV2 to cancel the show, after Dapper Laughs said on stage at the London Scala that a woman in the audience member was “gagging for a rape.””
… is all that needs to be said. The actor behind Dapper Laughs (comedian Daniel O’Reilly)should see that he needs to re-define his character. Sasha Baron Cohen he ain’t.
For once, Twitter serves a useful purpose.
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November 12, 2014 at 5:00 pm -
Rape as a four-letter word.
Many years ago I noticed my own teenagers were joshing one another to “Stop being so gay”. It became apparent to me that the word “gay” had by then achieved a sense of mild perjoration in the modern playground. This fact surfaced in the newspapers some years later (and not so many years ago now) in a minor spat amongst the Mass Media luminati who had finally noticed this morphing too and complained in the likes of the Grauniad that this misuse of language must be stamped out because it was homophobia resurfacing.
I suspect dappy referring to “rape” is a similar infection of inflection. Not so many years ago Ken Clarke was savaged by the luminati for daring to say there “different sorts of rape”. That old dinosaur was struggling with his hoary old notions of rape being where a female was held down and physically force,d with some more modern notions of what constitutes rape that occasionally surface as contentious. Anyhow, Ken was well and truly put in his place by the screeching of the Banshee; I seem to recall he had to make an abject apology and remove himself from public life. However, if you are a young man of the 21st century you are bound to have knowledge of other males being sent to prison for rape, when you know for sure that no force of any sort was employed. So, the four-letter word no longer has the same meaning for them. Naturally, when those with a vested interest in rape remaining a four-letter word get wind of such subtleties beginning to get an airing on a mainstream channels (however feeble it’s audience), then the Banshee wail is not only a reaction, it is an essential response to maintain survival of their control. The last thing they want is to realise that the youngsters have rumbled the truth. Any old person will know that once you remove the power of a word, then the word no longer has any power.
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November 12, 2014 at 5:05 pm -
Shit…. another four-letter word. That was meant to read:
Any old person will know that once you remove the meaning of a word, then the word no longer has any power.-
November 13, 2014 at 6:54 am -
Fifty years ago I sat across a table from a psychiatrist at the Maudsley. I had a serious phobia (others vomiting). It was restricting my life and I didn’t know what to do about it.
I was so fortunate that my trusted Doctor recognised I was in trouble and knew where to refer me. I was the first patient in the new Phobic Unit.
I’m old Moor.
I’m still uncomfortable when I hear the four letter word “Sick”.
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November 12, 2014 at 5:09 pm -
It is true the context of words does change. I remember seeing an episode of ‘Coronation Street’ from 1975 on a cable channel in the 90s. A female character tries out a new perfume and claims ‘Apparently, it’s supposed to incite rape.’ She leans in the direction of Alf Roberts and asks him if the smell of it could incite rape, to which poor old Alf blushes and mumbles. Nowadays, you could only get away with that line in ‘Buggernation Street’.
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November 12, 2014 at 5:19 pm -
It’s all surreal and very very unhealthy – the best thing a parent of boys could do now is raise the lads to view females as toxic, and to stay away.
The ‘cake-and-eat-it’ brigade have each other, their sex toys and when they want themselves a lickle baby they can order one from a test-tube. No need for men to subjugate the tender little petals any of the beastly old ‘in-out’, and why should they when it means being wide open to a prison sentence? -
November 12, 2014 at 5:20 pm -
There’s a movie that now seems from another Universe, never mind a foreign country. It’s called Sanctuary, stars the very reputable New England liberal Lee Remick and a well-respected French actor. The central plot is that Remick’s sexuality is awakened by being raped and I mean rape as a four-letter word. It’s 1961. Other elements of the plot are even moor mind-boggling.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMnzFM_Sq8s-
November 13, 2014 at 1:55 pm -
There’s an episode of Out of the Unknown (due out on DVD next month!) something along those lines….
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November 13, 2014 at 1:53 pm -
There was an edition of That’s Life in which one of the male presenters was discussing the relative merits of a painting. If it wasn’t Poussin’s The Rape of the Sabine Women, it was a similar theme and title. The painter, he assured the audience, “Liked nothing better than a good rape…” resulting in howls of not particularly nervous laughter. I recall seeing this clip being used maybe ten years ago in another programme. I doubt it’d get aired much now.
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November 13, 2014 at 12:31 pm -
“gagging for a shag”, “gagging for ‘it’” “gagging for a fuck”…. also reasonable and easily understood alternatives . He chose to use “rape” instead. Even if the word has not come to include drug and drink connotations and incapacity, what it says is: have sex with that woman against her explicit, stated consenting will when is still in a state to give her explicit stated consent.
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November 13, 2014 at 12:48 pm -
Tell me, what do you think ‘to troll’ means?
To be absolutely clear, that’s not a pop at either you, or your comment, but rather it is a genuine question
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November 13, 2014 at 2:22 pm -
As a verb: In a gay polari, meaning to take a walk to see who’s around.
current context “to make vexatious comments on the internet”
Noun. Fictional character said the live under bridges.
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November 13, 2014 at 3:34 pm -
You missed one, and covered another only in part.
Missed: Verb: To fish by trailing a line, as from a moving boat.
Deriving from which, in part:
(Immediate Past) context, (last 20 years or so): to make a playful, or even mischievous, outrageous or provocative comment in a web forum, a chatroom, a blog or media comment section, in the hope of elucidating entertaining responses from the duly outraged and provoked, normally individuals whose undue seriousness makes them incapable of seeing that they are having the proverbial wrung from them in torrents, having again been caught hook line and sinker to the merriment of most watching. Now, very recently and unfortunately, bastardised by the mass media, in the last two years or so, to the unmitigated rage of the originating artiste groups – look at the tech web sites and forums – into your current context where trolling is seen as vexatious but also, with the connotation that you passed over, malicious
Now let’s look at your definition of rape
what it says is: have sex with that woman against her explicit, stated consenting will when is still in a state to give her explicit stated consent
Is that fixed, for all time? You need to look at Urban Dictionary definitions and contextual uses. Those are changing as the word’s use is being applied in other places and for different purposes.
Not saying that you are wrong to query what the intent here is, or admonish users for their potential lack of understanding, something with which I might well agree. But the reactionary knee jerking tendency that we can see in this, and similar, cases, whereby the mass mob potentially condemn others of some form of societal sin, or almost even criminality, by assuming that ‘my’ meaning and use of any word is absolute, and hence other’s use is beyond merely being ‘edgy’, making them into some sort of intrinsically evil entity, perverted, to be outcast from the rest of the human race, is beyond me.
I live in a glass house, so I tend to try not to throw stones
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November 13, 2014 at 5:24 pm -
Sorry Mr Ho Hum,
He wasn’t being “edgy”, he wasn’t being “provocative”, he had picked up on a load of internet “memes” (which I shall loosely group together as “feminism.) He then thought it ok to have a go at one woman, in public, with a word that any woman would find repulsive. Was she a target of his? Who knows?Is there are way to make rape funny? All the jokes of Sikipedia have convinced me: NO.
Though maybe it would be interesting to see someone try man-on -man rape “jokes” to see how that goes. This guy was called out for being an untalented pig. Pity that more aren’t.
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November 13, 2014 at 5:46 pm -
Maybe he can blame it on his intern
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/tomchiversscience/100132832/tom-watson-mp-an-intern-and-a-twitter-rape-joke/-
November 13, 2014 at 6:18 pm -
No matter how much we might protest, hate it, or consider that the world is going to the dogs
Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don’t criticize
What you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is
Rapidly agin’.
Please get out of the new one
If you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’.Or, as the ‘Teacher’ wrote, succinctly
What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.
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November 13, 2014 at 6:10 pm -
While I trust you understand my own hesitation to condemn, I have no problem with people acting on what they see as consistent principle
So, given that we live in a country which espouses a system of judicial trial, conviction and punishment for criminal offence, and which sees the subsequent Rehabilitation of Offenders as something to be sought after, can I take it that you would be equally happy for those now crying for the everlasting earthly extra judicial punishment, over and above time duly served, of that Sheffield footballer bloke, to be, as you put it, called out as an unprincipled, baying mob, one which might be more representative of the inhabitants of Suffolk and Essex in the Middle Ages?
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November 14, 2014 at 9:28 am -
Yes. Another scumball for his actions, but as you say, punishment served. Time to get on with the rest of his life, in which he will hopefully have learned to treat women better.
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November 13, 2014 at 2:05 pm -
“Some 60,000 people signed a petition calling on ITV2 to cancel the show, after Dapper Laughs said on stage at the London Scala that a woman in the audience member was “gagging for a rape.” ”
60,000 is, of course, more than 50 times the capacity of the Scala, which makes it clear just how much outrage-by-proxy is being played out in this matter.
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November 13, 2014 at 3:48 pm -
His TV show was getting 120,000 audiences (I have read). So at the very least, it’s not democratic either.
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November 14, 2014 at 2:56 pm -
Vile though the character’s outpourings are, there’s more than a whiff of “disposable culture” to this, in that those calling for its end will almost exclusively have never been part of the intended and even accidental audience for it. “I would never watch this, and we don’t think you should, either.”
What would Voltaire say?
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November 14, 2014 at 4:58 pm -
Precisely – look at the relatively small number of initial complaints (seven, I believe) about the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it background appearance of a certain deceased DJ on TOTP2 some weeks ago. It seems to have been largely the fanning of the flames by our old friends the tabloids which made it such a big deal that that rare archive clip will never be seen again – unless of course the negative reaction of such a tiny proportion of a programme’s actual audience really is all that is needed to get material banished to the vaults forever these days. And fear of such reactions leads to things like still photos of said DJ being chopped out of TV repeats, and even the name of that Australian fellow being removed from captions on repeated music programmes, lest heaven and earth themselves should be rent asunder, etc etc.
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November 12, 2014 at 12:30 pm -
“I want to throw my radio out of the window whenever I hear Chris Martin’s voice…”
I feel your pain for I share it. It’s one reason I don’t have a plugged in/batteried radio in the house. It saves me calling a glazier on a regular basis. Never heard of this unfunny comedian (one of many) probably because I don’t ‘do’ television either other than my DVDs of Bogart, Cary Grant, etc., having cancelled my TV licence almost ten years ago due to finally having had enough of financing the BBC.
I must really be missing out on modern ‘culture’.
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November 12, 2014 at 12:33 pm -
As a child and student in the Beatle-infested 1960s and 70s I well remember the raised tempers at home whenever Alf Garnett appeared on TV. A parental click of the off switch was the usual punishment meted out to those who dared to find him (in reality, only slightly) funny, and woe betide anyone who dared to try to switch the TV back on until it was “safe” to do so. What “Till Death” set out to do was to rub the older generation’s faces in their own prejudices, particularly those concerning sex or race – and they didn’t like it. They saw it as an attack on their very system of beliefs. I suppose that counts as having “challenging artistic merit”.
Today’s youth, having been brought up in culturally anaesthetised environment of PC schools, PC TV and not quite-yet-PC internet, have no mechanism for dealing with boundary-pushing entertainment such as, I must assume, Dapper Laughs. Anything that doesn’t tick the boxes is immediately verboten, something to be banned for fear of the sky falling. Censorship by another name, and carried out by the young as well as the old. Thought crimes must surely be on the horizon: we already have hate crimes.
PS: At a slight tangent, one of the sharpest observations I remember about the changing mores of the 1960s, as lasciviously sensationalised by the taboids of the day, was the comment: “The biggest problem with the Permissive Society is actually finding it.”
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November 13, 2014 at 6:38 am -
“Till Death Us Do Part” contains some of the funniest scripts in comedy history.
The conversation on the NHS in this episode could have been written yesterday!!!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gA0-fnOsZeo&list=UUuDVRlYTT7DCJPGHJDifAwA
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November 17, 2014 at 6:45 pm -
Till Death Us Do Part gave rise to ‘Alf Garnet Syndrome’ where the will of the programme maker to destroy societal norms he didn’t like only to succeed in entrenching them.
AFAIR more people agreed with Alf than opposed him.
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November 12, 2014 at 1:17 pm -
I’d never heard of Dapper Laughs aka Daniel O’Reilly until the other day when someone set him up on “…is a cunt”
Strange how these people suddenly come to one’s attention like buses. You don’t see one for a while and then three turn up together. One wonders how the hell these people ever make a living. It’s a sad reflection on modern society IMHO.
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November 12, 2014 at 1:45 pm -
Life is like a box of Moral Panics. You never know what you’re going to get.
Unfortunately, ‘The Great British FOAD Show’ was one of the first casualties.
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November 12, 2014 at 2:30 pm -
Never mind Dapper Laughs – here’s some real Comedy Gold. On a scale of 1 to 10 of ‘contrived’, this is about 101
http://www.itv.com/thismorning/hot-topics/max-clifford-ex-wife-jo-westwood -
November 12, 2014 at 2:34 pm -
“In fact, there are few things more offensive than war – ….”
Except Twittering.
Compare & contrast:
http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/mar/27/student-jailed-fabrice-muamba-tweets
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/06/18/tony-blair-impeach-iraq-war_n_5506525.html
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November 12, 2014 at 3:15 pm -
Thank you for this post. It’s pleasing to find that one’s own prejudices are shared! The popularity of Dapper Laughs (a new name to me too) and people like that is simply incomprehensible to my generation, brought up entertained by comedians like Max Miller, who was actually witty and never used bad language. “The past is a foreign country”. Too true and we did indeed do things differently there.
I’ve often wondered if the decline in civilised behaviour in this once wonderful country, so noticeable to those who have spent a long time abroad, owes anything to the quality of TV. If it is the case that some young children spend much of their time dumped in front of a TV screen, it’s perhaps inevitable that they will grow up lacking imagination and empathy.
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November 12, 2014 at 4:32 pm -
If we’re blaming TV, we can probably trace the genetic origins of all chavdom to ‘Dallas’. Prior to that, the gritty realism of ‘Coronation Street’ etc. broadly portrayed what was to be expected from regular life but, once that sparkling Texan bling-fest was presented in prime-time into all the hard-of-thinking living-rooms, they figured they should have some of that, so went out to get it. The rest is history and TOWIE.
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November 13, 2014 at 9:49 am -
I have been abroad a long time (40+ years) in a variety of non-Anglo-Saxon environments and am in full agreement with you and others on this thread concerning the PC-ing of British “culture” and indeed, daily life, insofar as I can glean its nefarious effects from the internet. I do not do Twitter and never will. . I have no wish to return and will continue to shake my head over the idiocies exposed by this irreplaceable blog and most articles on Sp!ked..
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November 12, 2014 at 3:33 pm -
* people like that is simply incomprehensible to my generation, brought up entertained by comedians like Max Miller *
You obviously never noticed his pretty much career-long absence from the BBC. His joke about what would you do if you met an attractive young lady on a bridge would pass muster with any dapper audience of today… Although ’tis said he never told the joke but someone else made it up on his behalf. Bob Monkhouse was widely known to have an absolutely filthy cabaret act but maintained a different persona for the mainstream telly, although my father always loathed him – possibly because he knew the man was hiding in plain sight. Oddly Bob was one of the old Contemptibles who was reinstated by the Nineties Alternatives as top quality class, not long before he gracefully died and left the stage. Death seems to have become as much a lottery as life these days.
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November 12, 2014 at 4:48 pm -
“I’m not a particular fan of Jeremy Clarkson. Personally, I think he’s a bit of a prat.”
To say that Clarkson is “a bit of a prat” is like saying Adolf Hitler was a naughty boy. Clarkson is an immense imbecile.
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November 12, 2014 at 8:25 pm -
“Clarkson is an immense imbecile.”
C’mon. How many others can persuade Auntie to totally fund their driving of exotic cars, in exotic locations, by channeling huge wedges of licence-payers’ cash into a company he owns, so his tax liability is minimised?
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November 13, 2014 at 6:28 pm -
Ok, fair point. But I reckon Adolf conning a whole nation beats dear Jeremy’s conning of the BBC.
Adolf remains somewhat more than a naughty boy, and Clarkson remains an immense imbecile.
What really gets to me about Clarkson is he panders to the moron class in this country – The moron class comes from all classes. What they have in common is their psychopathic love of cars, and mandatory disbelief/hatred for environmental and green issues.
Can you imagine the world if Clarkson was absolute king?
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November 13, 2014 at 6:38 pm -
I believe Top Gear is the biggest money-earner for BBC Worldwide, so I would guess their principal target market has become the American viewer and perhaps the Far Eastern viewer dreaming of what the future holds in promise for them. For any British person, the idea of driving one of these super-cars has all the appeal of piloting the QE2 up the Manchester Ship Canal. The very essence of frustrated potential.
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November 12, 2014 at 8:26 pm -
Never having heard of Dapper Laughs and not being prepared to spend any more time on Wikipedia than I already do, I assume he is the Ben Elton of this generation? I mean the real fist-in-air-plastic-dog shit-on-train-seat Ben Elton when he used to be on the late night TV of my teenage years and not the poor man’s Steven Fry impression he does today.
Back in the 80s I thought Jim Davidson was hilarious in his TV show (‘Up The Elephant & Round The Castle’), having a cleanish ‘2Ronnies for the 80s’ style humour -with added rhyming slang. Then returning to this country years later I caught a tv showing of one of his stage acts. He was obscene, I mean obscene enough to make me turn off the TV -and I class myself as fairly fucking unshockable.
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November 12, 2014 at 10:15 pm -
I hate to resort to clichés but really this is all about choice… and the power to choose what we DON’T watch/listen to is just as important as the power to choose what we do. For my part, the deeply unpleasant spectacles put on show by a certain Mr Kyle, or Very Special Based-On-A-True-Story misery flicks like Murdered By My Boyfriend get me reaching for the remote like nothing else – but because I don’t watch them, they don’t affect me. I have chosen not to let them enter my world.
Which then begs the question – why should the grumbles of people who DON’T exercise their power not to watch certain things cause such an uproar with the Powers That Be, that said choice is then taken away from ALL of us by the banning of the material? “YOU can’t have sweets because I’M on a diet” – that is the impression that comes across from those who cry for the eradication of all that appears offensive from their very own subjective point of view.
Which in turn leads to another question – why are these people (say) watching something that they find objectionable in the first place? OR – are they in fact complaining about something they wouldn’t watch anyway, simply to feel self-important? Either way, why are the Powers That Be these days so desperate to appeal to what must surely be a minority viewpoint?
It’s my firm belief that people who go looking for the objectionable amidst the everyday will invariably find it, even if they have to invent it – and will therefore have a constant supply of hay for their high horse, which these days is so overfed that the stench from its rear is unbearable to those of us who want to make our own minds up about things.
A lot of this country’s problems would be alleviated if people stopped inferring offence where none is intended…
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November 13, 2014 at 12:28 am -
Just look at how few people have to complain to OFCOM to get something banned. For contravening ‘the rules’, of course. But how small a number drew up the rules to start with? And what drove their underlying sanctimoniousness in the first place?
The world is full of enlightened liberals, who are convinced that their informed idealism gives them the right to decide what is good for the plebs who make up the great unwashed.
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November 12, 2014 at 11:02 pm -
And it never occurs to the 60,000 in the “Ban him mommy! ban him!” faction that the best way not to be offended is to ignore the would be offender entirely. By running their negative Twatter campaign they have probably earned him 600,000 new fans. Foot, bang, ouch.
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November 13, 2014 at 12:09 pm -
I didn’t find him very funny, which is surely a failing where a comedian is concerned
Perhaps that was the main reason behind the Twitter outrage rather than the subject-matter.
Modern comedians leave me cold and detached. I cannot laugh at the swearing and sneering that they call current comedy.
One casualty of this seems to be Jimmy Carr. I remember seeing him on TV when he started, and his act was free of the usual swearing and obscenity. He seemed quite original and funny. Then he switched to the run-of-the-mill stuff. He apparently lost his Christian faith at some point, so perhaps that had something to do with it. Maybe the old humour took too much thought or didn’t generate enough ticket sales.-
November 13, 2014 at 12:17 pm -
Jimmy came in on the wave on un-PC comedy to my memory, along with Ricky Gervais, who started the notion of taking the mickey out of disabled people (later exploited to the max by “Little Britain). One of Jimmy’s jokes that sticks in my memory was a long description of the poor little girl in Africa and how she had to walk ten miles very day to fetch water, and he laid it on in the full shaggy dog “Do they know it’s Xmas” style. Then he delivers the punchline to the effect of, “why doesn’t she move closer to the water?” It’s the combination of the serious and the absurd that makes it funny, but of course folk who take these things seriously do get their knickers in a knot about this sort of cruelty. Far safer to do jokes about tits and bums and suchlike organic humour.
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November 13, 2014 at 12:42 pm -
‘Modern comedians leave me cold and detached’
I’ve never seen, or heard of, this dippy Dapper bloke until now. From general observation – and no more than that – there does seem to be some age related factor at play in some of the criticism, in that for many people, for some reason that is unclear, at some stage on their timeline, their ‘Golden Age’, of comedy, music, TV, films, etc comes to an end point, and what succeeds that becomes ‘inferior’
Personally, I could watch people like Reeves and Mortimer, Ricky Gervais et al, all evening and struggle to laugh once. But those 20 years younger think they are a hoot. After 20 years or so of Private Eye, Viz left me stone cold, but much of the graffiti to be found on the planes of the 20 year olds in Gulf War 1 was straight out of the latter. Today, my kids can laugh at things that I wouldn’t even spend 5 minutes on.
This current lot of comedians, although ‘dismal’ and incomprehensible to many of us oldies, as surprisingly evidenced, in this normally most liberal of sanctums, by some of the unexpectedly BOF comments above, will probably be someone else’s Golden Age. And so it will go on, as it always has. In fact, they may be part of the salvation of this cadre of younger people, by being those prepared to put their head above the parapet, publicly sowing the seeds of dissent against the older generation’s authoritarian PC traits, just as their predecessors did. And that might not be a bad thing.
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November 14, 2014 at 4:28 am -
November 14, 2014 at 11:07 pm -
Just noticed that at 11,25pm tonight, on itv2, the TV Listing schedule reads: “Dapper Laughs:On the Pull”.
I wonder it it will get pulled. The BBC would.
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