Which Now Unbearable TV Show Has Been Ruined for Ever by Political Correctness?

Plus: the joy of Only Connect lies in its absolute integrity and why Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? is better off with Jeremy Clarkson.

Twenty years after it first appeared, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? is back for a brief, week-long anniversary run on ITV —with only a few small amendments to the near-perfect original formula. Along with 50/50, Ask the Audience and Phone a Friend, you also get the option to Ask the Host. Given that the presenter is now Jeremy Clarkson (replacing Chris Tarrant) this is an option as risky as it is amusing.

As Clarkson cheerfully explained in the first show: ‘If it’s 1970s prog rock I’ll probably know the answer. If it’s anything other than that I probably won’t.’

Read the rest in the Spectator.

Jeremy Clarkson Chops off His Own Balls

Jeremy Clarkson has just lopped off his privates in public.

It wasn’t an edifying sight.

I’m trying to think of an analogy that captures the enormity of what Clarkson has just done. In terms of sheer cringeworthiness, I suppose it would be that sick but oddly compelling documentary I saw the other night called Dan’s 80lb Testicle, about a man with an unfeasibly large growth on his undercarriage which he had to lumber round the streets of LA using an upside down hoodie.

In terms of pusillanimity, it would be something along the lines of Sir Francis Drake on the bowling green at Plymouth looking down at the Spanish Armada and saying: “You know what, me hearties? Let’s get in our ships, sharpish, and sail off somewhere nice and safe, like the other side of the world. It’s plain as a pikestaff that England is lost.”

In terms of nauseating, oleaginous, social climbing disgustingness it’s like Uriah Heep on his knees ever so ‘umbly presenting a BBC tribute to the late Princess of Wales, filmed at Althorp with hour long interviews with Earl Spencer and Tony Blair with songs by Sir Elton John performed by the children of Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital, entitled “Still Queen of All our Hearts.” On Brown Nose Day.

Really, though, there is no metaphor or image or simile on earth quite dramatic enough to capture the shaming spinelessness, the platitudinous vapidity, the intellectual feebleness, the surrender-the-pass cowardliness of the piece Clarkson wrote yesterday in the Sunday Times “explaining” why, all things considered, he thinks it’s a good idea for Britain to remain in the European Union.

Here is an extract to give you a taste.

Whether I’m sitting in a railway concourse in Brussels or pottering down the canals of southwestern France or hurtling along a motorway in Croatia, I feel way more at home than I do when I’m trying to get something to eat in Dallas or Sacramento. I love Europe, and to me that’s important.

I’m the first to acknowledge that so far the EU hasn’t really worked. We still don’t have standardised electrical sockets, and every member state is still out for itself, not the common good. This is the sort of thing that causes many people to think, “Well, let’s just leave and look after ourselves in future.”

I get that. I really do. And after I’d watched Hannan’s speech, that’s briefly how I felt too. But, actually, isn’t it better to stay in and try to make the damn thing work properly? To create a United States of Europe that functions as well as the United States of America? With one army and one currency and one unifying set of values?

So Jeremy Clarkson’s arguments for Britain remaining in the European Union boil down to two things.

Read the rest at Breitbart.

How Nigel Farage Outfoxed the Breast Nazis

Claridge’s is one of London’s finest five-star hotels, popular with royals and aristocrats, film stars and rock stars. But if you’d tried taking afternoon tea there over the weekend, you would have had to run the gauntlet of a rather less glamorous crowd: a bunch of around twenty-five not especially yummy-looking Mummies, making a political point with their lactating dugs and their freezing babies, in affirmation of their apparently unalienable right publicly to breast-feed their babies where and when they will.

The protest was sparked by an incident last week involving a woman called Louise Burns. In the course of taking afternoon tea at Claridges, Ms Burns had started breast-feeding her baby at the table. A waiter, solicitous of the other diners in the room, had brought her large napkin in order to cover her modesty. This Ms Burns found so upsetting and offensive that she decided to tweet before and after photographs showing her apparent humiliation.

Then the Offence Mob got on board. And then UKIP’s leader Nigel Farage got roped into the argument with comments which were represented by his numerous media critics as yet further evidence of his Blimpish sexism, misogyny and remoteness from the modern world.

As the smoke begins to clear, though, I suspect that yet again it’s going to be Farage who comes out of this story with his credibility enhanced while it will be his enemies who emerge looking petty, vindictive and out-of-touch.

Here is a reminder of what Farage said, when ambushed by a question about the issue on LBC radio.

“I’m not particularly bothered about it, but I know a lot of people do feel very uncomfortable, and look, this is just a matter of common sense, isn’t it? I think that given that some people feel very embarrassed by it, it isn’t too difficult to breastfeed a baby in a way that’s not openly ostentatious.

“Frankly, that’s up to Claridge’s, and I very much take the view that if you’re running an establishment you should have rules.”

When asked by the presenter whether new mothers should go to the toilets to breastfeed, Farage replied: “Or perhaps sit in the corner, or whatever it might be – that’s up to Claridge’s. It’s not an issue that I get terribly hung up about, but I know particularly people of the older generation feel awkward and embarrassed by it.”

In the heat of the moment, under the pressure of live radio I’d say that that was a pretty reasonable, fair and measured response. But this didn’t stop his critics doing their usual damnedest to smear him.

The Guardian made much of his use of the word “ostentatious.” (Inevitably it prompted an #ostentatiousbreastfeeding Twitter hashtag). While the Prime Minister’s office sought to take advantage of the situation by issuing a priggish statement saying it was “totally unacceptable” to make women feel uncomfortable about public breastfeeding.

But it’s Farage – not the Guardian or David Cameron’s press people – I suspect who is most closely in line with what the majority of British people actually feel on this subject.

For the more squeamish and decorous older generation, it still remains something of a culture shock when a young mum whips out one of her titties in a public place to feed her baby. In the old days this simply wasn’t done. Well, not outside places like Africa.

But even for younger mothers, breastfeeding in public is not so clear-cut an issue as the progressive, professional offence-takers on social media would have us believe. That is because, culturally, we are in a transitional stage. Yes, it’s true that thanks to the propagandising of all those Breast Nazi campaign groups who believe that giving your baby formula milk is tantamount to child abuse, lots of young mothers have persuaded themselves that breast is best.

But at the same time, though they don’t like being confined at home all day, they still don’t feel altogether comfortable about feeding their babies in public places because, being – as women generally are – sensitive, empathetic sorts, they recognise that not everyone out there is on quite on board with this brave new world where apparently the done thing is for lactating mums to whip out their bosoms at will.

Read the rest at Breitbart London

2 thoughts on “How Nigel Farage outfoxed the Breast Nazis”

Carrie says:11th December 2014 at 8:19 amAnd there was I thinking you were a libertarian James! Sadly disappointed that you’ve been sucked in by the PC brigade, if you don’t want to see a baby doing what is not only natural but also vital to its well being, then don’t look. Simples.
1. Karl says:14th December 2014 at 4:54 pmI think you’re missing the point Carrie. If a guy walked topless into Claridge’s on a hot summer’s day then I expect he’d be asked to leave. Personally, I’ve no problem at all with breastfeeding in public but I think it’s about the freedom of an establishment to uphold it’s rules at it sees fit. If people don’t like those rules then they are perfectly at liberty to go elsewhere.

Comments are closed.

Comedian Frankie Boyle Is a Bully and a Politically Correct Coward. Wish I’d Never Stood up for Him

‘Outspoken comic Frankie Boyle has called on the BBC to sack “cultural tumour” Jeremy Clarkson.’

Can anyone tell me what’s wrong with this opening sentence from a recent news report?

Clue: it’s that first word. In order to qualify as ‘outspoken’, surely, you need to be the kind of person who fearlessly, frequently and vociferously sets himself in opposition to the clamour of the times.

Does demanding that a public figure lose his job for some mildly sexist/racist/homophobic/ableist remark fit into that category? Hardly. In the current climate it’s about as heroically contentious as, say, a private school prospectus that promises ‘We believe in educating the whole person’; or a sign at a Co-op declaring its commitment to social justice, diversity and sustainability; or a Conservative Prime Minister declaring that three letters — NHS — are engraved on his heart.

The only mildly interesting aspect of the statement is that Frankie Boyle is not, contrary to all impressions, a junior policy co-ordinator at the Equality and Human Rights Commission, nor the head of diversity at a firm of chartered accountants, nor yet the health inequalities, disability and lesbian affairs officer at Strathclyde council. Amazingly — don’t laugh, because it really ain’t funny — Frankie Boyle is one of Britain’s most successful comedians.

Read the rest at The Spectator

Jeremy Clarkson’s critics should be taken out and shot

Jeremy Clarkson got into tremendous trouble last night . . .

. . . for suggesting on BBC’s The One Show that the public sector “workers” who took part in yesterday’s strike should be shot.

This is silly. It should be patently obvious to anyone who is familiar with his style or has seen one of his programmes – ie: everyone in the world – that Clarkson didn’t mean it. For one thing, being an informed fellow he would be perfectly aware that the government simply hasn’t the money to spend on bullets right now. For another, he must know that it’s perfectly possible that among all the diversity outreach consultants, renewable energy/recycling advisers and union reps who spent their day on the picket lines/early Christmas shopping in Bluewater yesterday at least a handful might actually have jobs which make some tiny contribution to the nation’s well being – so killing at least those ones would be counterproductive.

Oh, plus, he was employing it as a figure of speech. I know this won’t mean much to half the morons who complained to the BBC yesterday, but the English language is an extraordinarily rich and nuanced thing. Sometimes, when the speaker says that someone should be shot, he really does mean it: if, say, it’s an officer giving orders to a firing squad about to shoot a deserter or a looter in 1915. More often, though, he doesn’t. For at least the last fifty years “they should be taken out and shot,” has been a socially acceptable, perfectly unexceptionable way of expressing colourfully and vehemently one’s distaste towards a particular category of unpleasantness, be it striking Unison workers, revolting students, poorly performing members of your football team or the Lib Dem members of Cameron’s cabinet. Context is all.

The BBC I know is particularly squeamish about such matters. I remember once appearing on a BBC arts programme on Radio 4, in which I suggested that Robbie Williams deserved to be killed for making some particularly dismal album. Though I said it in the mildest way and it was quite obvious that my fatwa was really not an incitement for Radio 4’s listeners to rise up, hunt down Williams mercilessly and appear outside Broadcasting House with his head on a spike, the presenter nevertheless blanched and felt compelled to offer an instant on-air apology stressing that I hadn’t meant what I said.

Well, duh.

What the BBC and its brain-dead apparatchiks clearly fail to understand at moments like this is that they are actually endorsing and cultivating our culture of abject stupidity. If Lord Reith were still around, he really would want the entire BBC staff – management especially but also grinning half-wit presenters like The One Show’s Matt Baker and Alex Jones – taken out and shot for what they have done to a once-fine institution.

In a sensible, rational universe, the natural response of those presenters to remarks like Clarkson’s would be a knowing chuckle – as if to say: “Ah there goes old Jezza again. What a card he is. But of course, that’s why we had him on the programme in the first place: to say the kind of things that Jeremy Clarkson would say on television.” Thus, they would be signalling to those viewers idiotic enough to seek to take umbrage at Clarkson’s remarks that there was no point in doing so since the comments were obviously flippant.

Instead by looking shocked, the presenters indicated to viewers that they were perfectly within their rights to take offence at what Clarkson had said. This signal was then amplified by the official apology issued by the BBC immediately afterwards. Thus it is that our state broadcaster, whose propaganda we are forced to finance with a compulsory levy, sends out a signal to the world that the English language is no longer a complex, beautiful, nuanced thing in which meaning depends on tone and context but something we should treat with extreme caution and use in its most literal sense lest someone, somewhere take offence.

The damage the BBC is wreaking on our culture in ways both large and small is all but incalculable. The Clarkson affair is at the smaller end. At the larger end, I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to giving you the gory details of the BBC’s complicity in the Climate Change scam – as revealed both in the Climategate 2.0 emails and in Christopher Booker’s magisterial new report for the Global Warming Policy Foundation. And I’m quite sure Roger Harrabin is too.

13 thoughts on “Jeremy Clarkson’s critics should be taken out and shot”

Paultracey says:2nd December 2011 at 11:48 amA beacon of sanity in a sea of stupidity.
Stuie Scott says:2nd December 2011 at 1:09 pmJust seen your interview on BBC. Well said! Perfectly put. Hit the nail right on the head. Will subsribe now! :o)
Russell says:2nd December 2011 at 2:17 pmThis is brilliant, I’ve been looking for a spoof blog taking the mick out of extreme right-wing nuts for so long, I’ve finally found it. Whoever the actor behind James Delingpole is, hats off to you
Russell says:2nd December 2011 at 2:17 pmThis is brilliant, I’ve been looking for a spoof blog taking the mick out of extreme right-wing nuts for so long, I’ve finally found it. Whoever the actor behind James Delingpole is, hats off to you
JimmyGiro says:2nd December 2011 at 5:50 pmGood post James.
Remeber the days when ‘Telly’ people, all had personalities?
Spanner says:2nd December 2011 at 6:23 pmI’m only sorry that 21000 people have now taken it upon themselves to complain to the BBC about Clarkson’s comments. Excellent articles James, thank you for having the courage to set out the mainstream view – most of us took Clarkson’s comments in the manner intended – humour, with a grain of intent!
Anonymous says:4th December 2011 at 8:38 amEverytime a leftie makes a comment likes this his/her allies hyperventilate about the lack of sense of humour among the critics (and also the right in general). Turn the argument against them.
Seanmcgowan9 says:4th December 2011 at 5:16 pmI am a union rep, and every time we upset the ignorant of society, like you, by taking legal industrial action, it warms my heart.
If you have ever done a day`s work, instead of living off your mother and father, you would understand the depth of feeling towards those that expect the working class to pay for the mistakes of your ilk.
I am also from Doncaster, birthplace of Jeremy, Up His Own Arse, Clarkson. I expect he will not be revisiting Doncaster in a while, nor would he be welcome to.
Comments like his are not said in jest by people like him. There is many a true word spoken under the guise of humour. He meant every word, and he should be sacked and jailed for it.
Far right cretins, like you and your ilk, have no understanding of the real world that the rest of us live in. You are so out of touch with reality that you may as well be living on a different planet.
I would love to meet the likes of you and Clarkson around a quiet, dark corner one time.
You are the scum of society, and deserve to be looked upon as such!
1. Nige Cook says:4th December 2011 at 8:13 pmDid your union stop Gordon Brown creating Britain’s financial debt, deregulating the banks, selling the gold at rock bottom, and everything else?
  The thing about the pension pots is that medicine is making the average age of the population increase, so a small increase in contributions are needed from the public sector, unless you the taxpayer to effectively pay extra the public pensions, which are generous already.
  
  By the way, the threats and intimidation from union stewards is all hot air; the only thing private sector unions do in the long-term is bankrupt your employers by pushing up your own wage packets and making the company fall foul of cheap foreign competition. If you want to stop cheap imports, you need to get behind Delingpoles anti-EUSSR campaign, and vote UKIP, not Labour. All these disasters for everybody are the fault of socialist strike and dissent, the same stuff that caused the USSR to go under.
  
  If you want to meet these people “around a dark corner”, you’re in a pipe dream. Look what happened to Arthur Scargill, who has to be protected by an office like Fort Knox, only accessible by an underground car park with full time security. You end up making the workers unemployed by driving industry to China where wages are lower and unions are prohibited. Also John Prescott, with his working class credentials, two Jags, and a long so-called “eating disorder” consisting of going to top restaurants repeatedly each day to gorge, empty and re-gorge, in the Roman banquet manner.
  
  Yeah, I’ve heard all this hard man union talk all my life, but you guys need to cut down on the beer bellies and try running instead of darts before you’re anything like a challenge to anyone.
  1. Gordonrear says:5th December 2011 at 10:23 amNige, it was that neo-conservative climate denialist Lawson that was instrumental in deregulating the banks. He was also instrumental in deregulating the energy markets that provided us British consumers with above inflation price rises. Thanks Lawson!
2. Anonymous says:5th December 2011 at 2:41 pmUnion members should be free to go on strike, but bosses should be free to fire workers at whim.
  The garbage strike in Southampton is dragging on because the council can’t fire the b*stards, even though hundreds of unemployed people have volunteered to take their place.
  
  And people wonder why Britain is going down the toilet.
3. Paulgabbo says:15th December 2011 at 12:16 pmI am working class and proud of the fact. I also agree with the comments made by Jeremy Clarkson. Its people like you who think the world owes them a living that are the problem. I would love to meet you seanmcgowan9 around a quiet dark corner one time.
4. Richard Churchill says:11th January 2012 at 11:35 pmYou just made it obvious why your kind of nasty out look on life is so dangerous. Having no sense of humour is just plain psciatrically scary. all out brothers !