Sherlock and the BBC's war on plot

Since I refuse to fund the media wing of a paedophile ring – ie I don’t pay the BBC Licence fee – I had to wait until today to watch the Sherlock New Year Special. It was good. Better than that, it was great, done in the definitive style of Granada’s The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes starring Jeremy Brett, the definitive Holmes, with a gothic mystery it seemed only Holmes could solve, with witty references to Watson’s publication of Holmes’ adventures in The Strand.

Then suddenly and inexplicably we are in the present day on board a private jet and Holmes is delivering an impassioned defence of recreational use of illegal drugs. How depressingly BBC. The theme of the episode was women’s rights, particularly in the context of the invisibility of women in the late 19th century.

Really? Wasn’t this show broadcast by the same BBC that dropped former Countryfile presenter Miriam O’ Reilly like a hot potato when she started making noises about misogyny and ageism in the Corporation? That has form in hiring pretty young female current affairs presenters and weather-girls then throwing them on the trash heap when they no longer look like Barbie? That forced Martine McCutcheon, while in Eastenders, to do a lingerie photoshoot for lads’ mag FHM without a female chaperone?

Although the programme aired at 9pm on New Years’ Day, right on the watershed, there were several explicit scenes of suicide, which will be watched by teenage fans throughout the iplayer availability slot. Is this really appropriate?

The theme of suicide was part of a postmodern thread going through the program drawing attention to the fiction-within-a-fiction gothic tale within the “real-life” tale. As soon as I worked this out I saw the connection with the theme of Santa Claus recurring throughout the dreams-within-dreams thread of the inspirational Dr Who 2014 Christmas Special Last Christmas – and it turns out both episodes were produced by the same man, Stephen Moffatt. Is there such poverty of talent within the BBC that they have to recycle old plotlines?

Postmodernism, the view that there are no facts except those things we decide (ie the Establishment decides for us) are facts, and there is no right and wrong except those things we decide (is the Establishment decides for us) are right and wrong, but when used to underpin plot so heavily it allows a war against plot that amounts to an excuse for lazy writing and producing.

And in the last analysis, given the problems the world faces at the moment, it’s salutary to remind ourselves that people who believe in facts and that they are on the side of right will always win against people who have surrendered their powers of discernment to hypocritical Establishmentarian bureaucracies like the BBC.

Gerry Dorrian

Resources

Women in News and Public Affairs Broadcasting House of Lords Select Committee, Miriam O' Reilly's evidence begins from p171

Curtain - Poirot's Last Case

One of the best aspects for me of Hercule Poirot’s apparently needing a wheelchair in ITV’s Curtain – Poirot’s Last Case is that although he is invalid, in the language of the time and for decades afterwards, he is in no way in-valid. His is the obstinate anger of the person who knows his worth, and what’s more of the disabled person who refuses to be perpetually grateful evidence of others’ forebearance and charity.

The issue of invalidity is key to this mystery which, Agatha Christie biographer Laura Thompson tells us, was written in 1940 while Christie was working in a central London hospital during the Blitz. It was by no means certain at that point that Great Britain would be on the war’s winning side, and the Nazis’ ideology of Übermensch and Untermensch come through in a dinner conversation about "unfit lives" and euthanasia, just as the national conversation about whether Hitler was a Good Thing or not would make it into Dorothy L Sayers’ work earlier, when British people at all levels of society were split down the middle on the matter.

Unlike other commentators I see no need to cast aspersion on other screen Poirots in order to praise David Suchet’s definitive interpretation. Albert Finney and Peter Ustinov were exquisite Poirots, and Suchet takes the material and elevates it to those heights of high art that excluded the novels on the grounds that they were readable, ie not literary. With Curtain, Christie gives us literary Poirot and Suchet rises to the challenge wonderfully. We’re still reading Christie almost a century since she started writing, and our descendants also still be watching Suchet’s Poirot a century hence, when it will feel as if it was made for them just as it feels Christie wrote for us.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

What made Hercule Poirot perfect - Laura Thompson, The Telegraph, 13 November 2013

Click to read reviews for Agatha Christie: An English Mystery by Laura Thompson

Agatha Christie's Poirot on ITV Player

Read more about David Suchet and Poirot at david-suchet.ru

Citizen Khan series 2

It’s not clear whether Adil Ray, creator of Citizen Khan, intended the multitalented Bhavna Limbachia to be the star of the show in her role as daughter Alia, but that series two kicks off with a story centred on Alia shows he knows it now. The result was a comedic tour de force as Mr Khan leaves aside his naked ambition to become Sparkhill Muslim community’s most renowned leader and finds himself unintentionally integrating to get his supposedly observant daughter into a Catholic school. In a scene that I think will make TV history we see Alia convert a hijab into something not unlike a nun's wimple, perhaps making the point that the first garment is not a million miles away from the second.

Alia is, of course, a modern girl enjoying a modern life while letting her father believe she is a devout Muslim. I would identify the relationship between Alia and her father as the conjunctio oppositorum holding the show’s many hilarious expeditions together as two worlds are only just kept from colliding. In the second episode, however, Ray recontextualises this by having his mother-in-law bond with a British man who turns out to be gay.

Hilarity ensues; but the many popular comedies have an edge to them as well, witness Love Thy Neighbour and Till Death do us Part. Citizen Khan’s edge is the peripheral, mute chorus of neighbours who are unhappy, for example, that Alia comes back at all hours.

Ray airs the fears of Westerners of all backgrounds in comic, therefore safer, form, eg "we Pakistanis don’t have bridesmaids; in our culture, your bride becomes your maid". Will he let the chorus step out of the wings and put the views that shock us all in their mouths? Time will tell.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Click to watch Citizen Khan S2E1: Alia's college - BBC i-player

Click to watch Citizen Khan S2E2: Naani's Day Out - BBC i-player

Al Stewart, Dave Nachmanoff and Tim Renwick at the Corn Exchange, Cambridge

In the early 1980s, aged 17, I went to live in Italy with my head full of vacuum-packed pop. Very soon I met a friend who played me Al Stewart’s Year of the Cat album, which knocked the other music I was listening to into a paper bag. Stewart’s work introduced me to a new world of music that was all around but not necessarily making the Top Ten, and I’ve bought his back catalogue and followed his career since.

So when I saw the ad for Al Stewart playing the Cambridge Corn Exchange with Dave Nachmanoff, missing it was not an option for me or for my wife, who’s heard me raving about Al for many years and become a fan herself.

Dave Nachmanoff opened both sets: he didn’t so much play his guitar as sing to the accompaniment of a six-string orchestra, so I knew this was going to be a good night. One of his songs really spoke to both of us: how he had come to sing Freight Train onstage with its composer, the remarkable Elizabeth Cotten. I love songs that tell stories.

And that’s why I adore Al Stewart’s corpus of narrative songs, many of whose stories are historical. Flying Sorcery, for instance, is a meditation on the history of flight, while Palace of Versailles compares the 1789 revolution with the 1968 riots.

An unexpected guest was Tim Renwick, serial session player, Stewart collaborator and Cambridge resident. Although it was the first time he and Nachmanoff had been onstage together, the two swapped acoustic lead parts as if they’d been born playing together. Then came the curtain-closer: what else could it be? Year of the Cat!

This was the first date of Al’s 2013-14 tour. If you’re able to catch him at any of the other dates, I thoroughly recommend that you do.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Click for more details of Al Stewart's tour

Tom Clancy RIP

Much of the comment upon Tom Clancy’s sad death seems to centre around, as the Telegraph puts it, his "gung-ho techno-military thrillers".

However, my own favourite among his thrillers was The Sum of All Fears, which tells the very human story of his serial hero, Jack Ryan, slipping into depression and alcohol addiction as his dream of a lasting peace in the Middle East is sabotaged by extemist Palestinian elements. (That the villains in the film were neo-Nazis shows the extent to which Hollywood, once having slavered at Hitler’s door, now protects his successors.) Clancy is often criticised for his "two-dimensional" characters and seems to hit back in this book with the character of Marvin Russell, a Native American psychopath – a swipe at shibboleths? – who is killed precisely because he is two-dimensional: in the words of his executioner, "there was something missing in this man".

Executive Orders, featuring Ryan as president, starts with a devastating 50-page character study of one of the few people qualified to do politics: one who didn’t want the job.

The death of an artist at the height of his powers guarantees his next work’s sales. Command Authority is expected to be a not-to-veiled analysis of Russian president Vladimir Putin’s past in the Cold War; a war which, he observed through his works chronicling its endplay and aftermath, elevated many but left many more broken.

It’s not clear that Clancy’s departure must needs be that of Jack Ryan and his "dark side" John Clark, but it’s difficult to see who could handle the characters with equal skill. In any case, one of Clancy’s quotes on writing comes back to me as his home country, with its federal government shut down, slides from tragedy into farce: “the difference between real life and fiction is that fiction has to make sense”.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Juvenal and the internet: Fear and Loathing Online

If Old Holborn’s been trolling to the extent stated by Jonathan Maitland in ITV’s Tonight program, his Twitter feed shows he’s been behaving himself recently; but he knew the program was coming out.

The Libertarian Alliance compared OH to Juvenal (left, who admittedly railed bitterly against those who he saw as his lessers), but ignored the dearth of literacy and materials in ancient Rome relative to today. And also satire’s traditional targets, as Maitland pointed out: not “the weak and vulnerable” but public figures, especially those in power.

Old Holborn didn’t help himself, coming across as something of a psychopath:

It isn’t my responsibility what other people find offensive. If you don’t like it, turn off.

But it’s not always possible to turn off. Even the act of looking at a computer screen increases cerebral arousal and can create a compulsion to look further.

That’s maybe why some people can’t look away, most notably 14-year-old Hannah Smith, who killed herself after trolls – anonymous hyper-offensive posters – ground her down so much on ask.fm living didn’t appear an option.

Maitland traced a troll, "Jamie Card", who posted offensive comments about a woman’s 2-year-old child with Down’s Syndrome. However, under present laws, he has to be caught “with his hands on the keyboard”.

Old Holborn (Robert Ambridge - masked, right) defended himself as a championing free speech. But, as one victim pointed out, trolls curtail the free speech of their victims. The internet becomes a lawless expanse where only the brave or the abusive dare tread, and where both statutory authorities and social-media operators fail in their duty to enact Tim Berners-Lee’s principle that they must "prevent the Web from being abused by destructive forces to an extent that the overall pain is greater than the gain".

Given that the Internet enables communication and organisation like nothing before, is Establishment inaction in the face of these abusers totally coincidental?

Charles Bond
300 words

Resources

How to deal with an Internet Troll - wikihow.com

Fear and Loathing Online - ITV player, until 11 october 2013

Fear and Loathing Online Homepage - itv.com: scroll to bottom of page for sites to help you if you are a victim of trolling

Old Holborn's Twitter feed

Old Holborn: a Juvenal for our times - Libertarian Alliance blog

Facebook troll ["Jamie Card"] hijacked woman's account and pretended to give her child away

Tim Berners-Lee's internet archeology principles: filtering

musicians oppose bullies, but they have strong friends

The last time I bought Kerrang!, New Wave of Heavy Metal pioneers Iron Maiden and Saxon were were regulars; Helloween and older hands like Ozzy Osbourne and Gary Moore, of blessed memory, were frequent flyers in its pages.

So when I bought a copy for old times’ sake the first thing I felt was a vague sadness that I wasn’t familiar with any of the bands mentioned. Then I noticed a special feature on bullying.

Black Veil Brides are part of an army of rock bands participating in MOB – Musicians Opposed to Bullying – and a line of their song Unbroken (which featured in Avengers Assemble) has been used on T-shirts funding a film, The Bully Project.

I was very interested in what Bride founder and vocalist Andy Biersack had to say. He was bullied because his hair was longer than the norm. When I went to school blokes with long hair were the cool ones, but tempus mutat mores, as we were always saying in the East End of Glasgow.

Then he said he was a bit chubbier than the rest. Unfortunately fat(ter) kids have always been punished by their peers, but don’g always get better treatment from adults. A 2007 Telegraph article reported authors were "making fat children bully targets", but I’m thinking about real life. In the British government’s first "Change for Life ad, we see a kid sitting playing video games then the huge word "fat". Then we have school uniforms: chain stores are only stocking uniforms for stick insects, while one Surrey newspaper’s story on shops that did stock uniforms for fat kids was headlined "our shame". Welcome to nudging.

It’s good that bullying is being dealt with by rock musicians. But while governments and their friends effectively encourage bullying to further their agendas (eg on health), the problem will infest all sectors.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

Government Change for Life video

Unbroken by Black Veil Brides

Click to watch The Bullying Project full movie

Authors making fat children bully targets - The Telegraph

Our XXXXL shame: Oversize Sussex school uniforms puts spotlight on child obesity - The Argus

since when was rape a freedom of speech issue?

Freedom of speech is used to justify all sorts of things which are antipathetic to reason. Ricky Gervaise used it to justify jokes about paedophilia, Jimmy Carr made a disgusting insinuation about women liking rape, and Frankie Boyle demanded he be free to apply the n-word to non-white people if used "ironically".

The latest use, as the Cambridge News’ Lizzy Buchan writes, is by comedian (why are they do high in the abuse stakes?) Mitch Fatel (right) making cracks about "spiking drinks to facilitate sex and scenarios of sexual assault".

Is it a coincidence that the butts of these abusive "jokes" are, in order, abused children, violated women, ethnic minorities and, again, abused women?

When exactly did abuse, especially of a sexual sort, become laughable?

In an enlightening case earlier this year, comic Reginald D Hunter was admonished by the Professional Footballers’ Association for telling jokes featuring the n-word at its annual awards ceremony. This might seem reasonable, but it’s less open-and-shut if you know that Hunter uses the epithet in context, to describe the experience of being a black American. But Daily Mail columnist Martin Samuel blew the whole thing apart when he revealed that in the previous year’s ceremony nobody protested when white player Ched Evans was honoured, despite having been imprisoned for rape two days previously.

Now come back to Cambridge, this February. Forty members of the English Defence League demonstrated against the Islamisation of society (and note not against Muslims); in doing so they railed against abuses of womens’ rights such as female genital mutilation, forced marriage, and corporal or even capital punishment for being raped.

Five hundred self-proclaimed and predominantly white "antifascists" turned out to try and drown out our message.

Samuel’s conclusion about football holds true for society: we are "no longer in a moral maze but a moral cul-de-sac".

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

Apology over crude comedy show at Lakenheath - Cambridge News

Stumbling through a moral minefield... football condemns the comedian but applauds the rapist - Daily Mail

The People's Songs: tubthumping

"They paved paradise, and put up a parking lot". This was Joni Mitchell’s farewell in Big Yellow Taxi to a middle-class apartment block in Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles. So it was fitting that the song closed BBC Radio 2’s latest documentary in The People’s Songs strand, entitled Tubthumping – Environmentalism and Anti-Globalism. In case we missed the Beeb’s cultural enclosure of environmental matters, presenter Stuart Maconie prefaced the song with the remark "being kettled has become as much of a modern middle-class youth experience as a gap-year in Asia" (I know middle-class people who have experienced neither).

I’m not trying to do down environmentalist issues and concerns. As Margaret Thatcher once remarked, “we are not only the friends of the earth, we are its stewards and guardians”. But any BBC presenter who unearthed that quote without audibly dripping with sarcasm would soon be sidelined.

Maconie was, in my view, totally right to play Robert Wyatt’s Pigs (…In There). Battery farming is a vile practice – but can only increase while our population is augmented from without virtually unchecked. So why not use the broadcast to suggest common land be used for keeping pigs and other animals who would otherwise be intensively farmed, while keeping a modicum of land free for those who have ethical or religious objections to humanely slaughtering animals for food?

The stars of the show were Chumbawamba and their 1997 hit Tubthumping, which they publicised by drenching John Prescott in water at the next year’s Brit Awards. I can understand that – Prescott occupied his position near the top of New Labour to market it to its traditional voters, while laying plans to abandon those voters in favour of a mass-imported electorate. Which is how predominantly left-leaning environmentalists seeking to protect green spaces were stabbed in the back by the party they worshipped, and which the BBC still does.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

Tubthumping – Environmentalism and Anti-Globalism - BBC Radio 2

The People's Songs homepage on bbc.co.uk

Pigs (...in There) - Robert Wyatt

Tubthumping - Chumbawamba

The Joy of Easy Listening: what you hear is what you get

BBC Four’s The Joy of Easy Listening was a welcome repeat. From Percy Faith to Adele and passing through Herb Alpert, the Carpenters and many more, it offered valuable historical and cultural insights into why and how this broad musical church developed from 1945 onwards. I was particularly glad to see Richard Clayderman, whose version of Let it Be in the early 1980s was my gateway to the Beatles.

The inclusion of Guardian journalist Paul Morley puzzled me, as his function seemed solely to voice the BBC’s cultural Tourette’s. He complained that easy listening music was "non-ironic"; Maybe he was thinking of the Beeb’s in-house definition of irony:

An ironic statement must appear as if you are sincere, [and] the line must be delivered straight, so that the recipient misses the hidden message but onlookers get it loud and clear.

Is it so insulting that with Easy Listening what you hear is what you get?

What really annoyed me was his comment that Easy Listening represented a parallel world where pop music is "non black" – shortly before the start of Easy Listening Hits at the BBC, which included Aretha Franklin, Johnny Mathis and The 5th Dimension, none of whom appear in the credits on the programme’s webpage. Is the implication that performing in a genre the BBC disapproves of abrogates black artistes' ethnicity?

The crack was probably a reference to the old saw that popular music was stolen from black people. The irony is that if any music was stolen from black people it is modern jazz, with rich and complex time signatures unheard of in the West until the 1940 Dennis-Roosevelt expedition to the Belgian Congo brought back and analysed recordings of music by Watusi, Batwa and Bahutu peoples, to name but three. Cue herds of privileged white BBC executives stampeding to justify their Dave Brubeck collections.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

The Joy of Easy Listening BBC Four webpage

Easy Listening at the BBC BBC Four webpage

Irony h2g2 (BBC)

Denis-Roosevelt Expedition: The Belgian Congo Records of the Denis-Roosevelt Expedition Hip Wax (12th record down)

letter to Daily Mail: "ignoring Savile's crimes"

As the BBC tries to tough out its complicity in Jimmy Savile’s sex crimes in the hope that the storm will blow over, a letter appeared in the Daily Mail of Tuesday 19 March that hasn’t made it to the website. I think it deserves to speak for itself to a wider audience.

Every day we are subjected to more revelations and accusations that nothing was done about Jimmy Savile, with all declaring ‘We didn’t know’. We’re all told he might have been actively abusing as early as 1964.

As a child in the Fifties, my school friends and I were more than aware of the shenanigans at the Mecca ballroom in Leeds. Older, racier girls told us lurid tales of ‘the room behind the curtain’ and ‘the mattress on the floor’. There was no suggestion of underage sex, but every girl who went behind the curtain knew exactly what was expected of her. in return, they received free tickets into the Mecca, drinks and cigarettes.

The lady who posted on the BBC obituary web page 'He was notorious in Scarborough, I wouldn’t let my son sit on his knee' was absolutely correct. He was equally notorious in Leeds. Our parents warned us to stay away from him.

On his visits to the Leeds General Infirmary, the nurses and staff regarded him as a nuisance, getting in the way by demanding special attention. Many nurses asked to take their breaks when it was announced that he was coming to a ward, rather than be around when he was there.

The few staff outside the LGI when his cortege passed had been told to stand there. The absence of Leeds citizens of a certain age who knew about his past, and the absence of other celebrities at his funeral, spoke volumes. It wasn’t hidden – everyone knew. They just chose to do nothing.

Click to go to Daily Mail website

smart drugs: Limitless?

Tonight Channel 4 showed Limitless with Bradley Cooper, Anna Friel and Robert de Niro. The film’s about a down-at-heel writer, Eddie Morra, who hasn’t managed to put a single word on a single page.

A former drug-dealer introduces Eddie to a new "smart drug", NZT-48, that changes the way he synthesizes disparate pieces of information while under its influence to produce insights and predictions people not on NZT can’t match. To cut a long story short, he overcomes his problems and by the end of the film has customised the drug to minimise the side-effects that has caused others to fall after sudden rises to fame, thus freeing himself from the need for a supplier.

It’s a story that would have warmed the hearts of those Enlightenment philosophes like Condorcet and Bentham who, in their different ways, believed humankind was endlessly improvable. Grumpier and more realistic individuals like Hume and Voltaire, however, would be more satisfied with the book on which the film is based. In Alan Glynn’s The Dark Fields, a sinister thread of growing conflict between the US and China is threaded through the book and, at the point of dying through withdrawals, the protagonist sees the US President on the TV, gorged on the drug, announce a war.

Smart drugs exist. Oxbridge Biotech argues that popping a pill to help you access more of your brain-power is no different from paying for private tutors. I disagree. Passing an exam - tutors or not - involves engaging your own mind and working hard to learn, because that is how to organically lay down neural connections that didn’t previously exist. The brain is the universe’s most complex machine, and boosting its performance with even the most smartly-engineered chemical is fraught with peril.

Where did I put that coffee?

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

Check out reviews for Limitless on Amazon.co.uk

Check out reviews of The Dark Fields by Alan Glynn on Amazon.co.uk Smart Drugs: Are you Tempted? - Oxford Biotech

at risk: our non-right not to be offended

Lead candidate for the author of the principle that "nobody has the right not to be offended" seems to be John Cleese, defending The Life of Brian. It’s been recycled to defend The Satanic Verses and Jerry Springer: The Opera.

Offence has an important history of breaking down barriers, sometimes with unexpected help: in 1960 during the Lady Chatterley’s Lover obscenity trial, the Establishment could scarcely have been lampooned more effectively than by prosecutor Mervyn Griffifth-Jones: "Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?" A decade later Charles Murray, defending his part in the "Schoolkids’ Edition" of Oz, identified a crucial ingredient of offence: it is "overtly radical work concerned with ideas".

Fast-forward to now: surely the inheritors of 1960s/70s cultural iconoclasm welcome more of the same?

But something’s changed – the self-appointed heirs of the liberal intelligentsia tell us there are areas too important for satire. OK: Ricky Gervaise’s jokes about paedophilia and Jimmy Carr’s quip about women enjoying rape were vile – but these two are lionised by liberal media outlets because of their material, and Frankie Boyle only had to tell a court he was an "antifascist" for it to accept his use of the n-word was "ironic", not racist.

What is The Innocence of Muslims but our generation’s The Love that Dares to Speak its Name? Why is Stonewall rightly allowed to campaign that "Some people are gay, get over it", but the Core Issues Trust’s message "ex-gay, post-gay, get over it" is banned?

Human-rights lawyer Paul Diamond is representing the above on the principle that there’s no right not to be offended. But those who stormed the Establishment on the self-same principle now constitute that Establishment and have pulled up the ladders. I wish him luck.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

Click to read about the Lady Chatterley's Lover controversy at penguinclassics.co.uk

Click for the text of The Love that Dares to Speak its Name

The Gay Poem that Broke Blasphemy Laws - Pink Times

Clickto watch The Innocence of Muslims on YouTube

A Paedophile Joke for Ricky Gervais - 300 words

Frankie Boyle sues Daily Mirror over "Racist Comedian" Line - Daily Mirror

Click to go to the Core Issues Trust

thought-control is more than conspiracy theory

One of the new channels provided by Youtube carries Conspiracy Theories with Jesse Ventura. The doughty former Minnesota governor’s forays into X-Files territory are fun to watch but indicative of deeper suspicions that out leaders are out of control.

Brain Invaders was no different, centring on suspicions that US authorities are using microwave radiation to disrupt people’s thinking and even insert thoughts.

Somehow I doubt the programme’s thesis; yet behaviour control has been practiced since Pavlov showed he could condition dogs to salivate at the ringing of a bell, despite the absence of what had originally caused salivation. Later, BF Skinner wrote about how people could live sustainably in societies where their lives were planned in meticulous detail in a book was chillingly titled Beyond Freedom and Dignity.

But much more useful to the Establishment is to shape the very self to their designs so that our thoughts, and therefore our behaviours, fall within the parameters they set.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is a "talking cure" whereby, in conversation with a therapist, the patient gradually learns to change the way they think about themselves, which in turn transforms harmful or even pathological behaviour. It is a wonderful tool and eases much misery, but it would be naïve of the Establishment not to see its wider applications.

Through the diversity industry, individuals get messages from all around about what they can and can’t say from day one, the intention being to condition what they can and can’t think. For example, why are British people of all backgrounds being discouraged from questioning the motives of those who agitate for an end to democracy, mutilation of young girls and use of rape as colonialist policy?

So let’s apply a talking cure of our own: let’s keep talking about the growing oppression under which we labour.

Charles Bond
300 words

Resources

Click for episodes of Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura on YouTube

Click for text of Beyond Freedom and Dignity by BF Skinner

Find out more about Cognitive Behavioural Therapy at Resilient Mindset

How does our Language shape the way we think? by Professor lera Boroditsky

the n-word: is hate based on race?

I’ve only ever said the word "nigger" once, at home after having heard in primary school. My Mum had lived in the US in the early 1960s, and was probably more aware of the word’s cultural history and emotional import than the person who had used it: her face fell into such a mask of disappointment that I never said it again.

What brought this back was a debate on Jeremy Vine’s Radio 2 talk-show about a white man who has been cleared of using racially aggravated words or behaviour after shouting the n-word at a black man. Christopher Jones, a rap fan with more black friends than white, argued successfully that he could not be racist because the word is part of his everyday vocabulary.

On Vine’s show was Pauline Pearce, a jazz singer and radio personality who famously upbraided rioters in London. She was debating with a hip-hop fan on the acceptability of the word, and both got into a muddle because they use the word as a term of endearment with black friends, but agreed that the term is offensive when used by white people.

Then Vine read out an email from a Yitzhak Hussein, who said sometimes the n-word was acceptable, but the "p-word" never was. Jeremy’s had that debate before with similar conclusions: Pakistanis can call each other Paki – as in "Paki live TV shows" – but from whites the word is an insult.

Could it be that laws banning hate-speech are creating linguistic ghettos on the basis of the sinister and outmoded concept of race, where freedom of speech depends on the amount of melatonin in one’s skin? In that case I’m with Rowan Atkinson on his opposition to hate-speech laws: "feel free to insult me!" Just don’t take offence when I reply in kind.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Click to go to the Jeremy Vine Show 5 December 2012

11.22.63

11.22.63
Hodder
pp740
Check out 11.22.63 at Amazon

A novel centred on the assassination of John F Kennedy that was published the year before Barack Obama’s re-election campaign was always going to be controversial, especially when written by a Democrat who has compared right-wing "hate" towards Obama to the hate that culminated in Kennedy’s death on 22/11/63.

However, when the author is Stephen King, there’s always more to the tale – which is named after the above date, in American notation 11.22.63.

King mentions in passing in his time-travel epic that the "Tea-Party Society" sponsored leaflets promoting segregation: subsequent debate has historiann.com stating that this organisation was an invention of King’s, while a Daily Kos article identifies it with a shadowy Democrat splinter-group called the Dixiecrats. Was he inviting comparison with the Tea Party, or commenting on the complex skein of prejudices within which the Civil Rights Movement would shortly emerge?

He ponders whether a re-elected JFK would have turned Vietnam into the quagmire that Lyndon Johnson did, and emerges with an answer I hadn’t foreseen. In fact, as the story progresses the number of tantalising possible routes to denouement increases, with the author following the line of least predictability. But conspiracy-theorists rest easy: from Lee Harvey Oswald (left) to George de Mohrenschildt, the usual suspects are all there.

But what of a JFK who survives 11.22.63? King offers an interesting take on Enoch Powell’s (right) dictum – Obama-worshippers take note – that "all political careers, unless cut off in mid-stream, end in failure". Posterity blesses the beautiful, and for political beauty being young and doomed is sine qua non.

More than this, King offers meditations on the nature of love, of duty, and ultimately of reality itself that kept me coming back for more: once I started work bleary-eyed through reading instead of sleeping. I heartily recommend that you read 11.22.63 for the 40th anniversary of JFK’s date with cultural apotheosis.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

public outcry confirms age of consent in UK remains 16

Before 1875, the age of consent to sexual activity in England was 12 in those cases where officials could be bothered to investigate a complaint. Ten years later, crusading editor W.T. Stead (right) pointed out in a series of articles that "the moment a child is thirteen she is a woman in the eye of the law, with absolute right to dispose of her person to any one who by force or fraud can bully or cajole her". The age of consent was raised to 16 and, ever since, politicians and academics – predominantly from the left/liberal axis – have chipped away at the ruling.

That’s why the Savile child-abuse controversy is so significant. Peter Rippon, it is alleged, dropped Newsnight’s exposé on Savile because he considered the bulk of victims were "teenagers, not too young".

We plebs recognise sexual crimes by adults against under-16s as paedophilia. On our side is the UN definition of children in its Convention on the Rights of the Child: "every human being below the age of 18". Underpinning the UN’s assumption is a view of childhood as not just a biological stage but a social construct, extending through the changes of adolescence, a time when the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune can be lethal, as in the case of 15-year-old Claire McAlpine (left).

We cannot lose this momentum, both for Savile’s victims, and for those of child grooming gangs – for example the burgeoning bands of beasts in Rochdale, whose supporters insist that puberty renders a girl a woman.

Nevertheless, authorities still seem to see abuse as a foregone conclusion for a child from a troubled family. Let us hope those authorities see the danger of the outcry against the BBC spreading to all who think it is their right to bully and cajole our children for adult pleasures.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

UN Convention on the Rights of the Child

W.T. Stead Resource Site

Savile and the BBC: let's stay focussed

Have you ever met a paedophile? If you’re fortunate enough not to have been sexually abused as a child, there are only two answers to this: yes, or I don’t know.

I was unfortunate enough to have had to work with beasts in a "therapeutic" environment, and have seen first-hand how extraordinarily manipulative many can be, so much so that even outside the sexual arena they can make the most outrageous propositions seem like perfect sense. Until, that is, they’ve got what they wanted and you’re left wondering how on earth you were fooled.

So in a sense I can empathise with Edwina Currie (right) who, when Health Minister in 1988, put Jimmy Savile at the head of a task force running Broadmoor Hospital, where he abused residents. Her decision must of course be investigated, but hopefully by a team staffed by people with experience of the persuasive and chameleon-like qualities of intelligent abusers.

Whether the same latitude should be shown to the BBC is in the balance. While I’m sure that many of its foot-soldiers are devastated by what the Corporation’s enabled Savile to do, senior people at the Beeb knew precisely what that was. At best they washed their hands of his victims, at worst persuading families not to pursue action because the fans wouldn’t understand.

What we have to do is stay focussed on how the BBC buried reports of Savile’s tendency and not get distracted by minutiae. Yes, Savile looked odd; he acted bizarrely; many thought him weird; he didn’t have a life partner. Yet these are not indications of predatory intent, either singly or in combination. We need to cast light on how ratings matter more than lives in the BBC’s shadowy corridors of power, not let our rage dissipate heatedly and ineffectively on our own straw men.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

Exposure: The other Side of Jimmy Savile - ITV documentary that started the ball rolling

Jimmy Savile - what the BBC Knew - Panorama documentary due to be broadcast 10:35 on BBC1: follow link for i-Player

Newsnight and Jimmy Savile - blog by Newsnight editor Peter Rippon on why the Savile investigation piece was dropped

End of the license-fee for post-Savile BBC? - 300 words

BBC abd Savile: remind you of anything? - 300 words

Frankie Boyle: "antifascist" and racist

Frankie Boyle’s "racist" libel action against the Daily Mirror continues. Unable to conceive of any context in which a white person can use the “n-word” to describe black people in a non-racist context, I will welcome his defeat.

Boyle has long been a darling of the left for his scathing misrepresentations of working-class attitudes and values, so it’s significant that he was taken to task by the left-leaning Mirror – followed closely by none other than the Guardian. Perhaps the Savile scandal has reminded them that celebrity does not coat bigots in Teflon, in which case the mighty will fall in such numbers that we’ll need brollies.

The Guardian’s Bim Adewunmi – a bystander in Diane Abbott’s racism scandal – points out that "racist" has become a problematic word. It was once applied to people and behaviours that made, for example, the lives of many black people a misery.

But it’s problematic because of its misappropriation to be applied to whoever the politically correct disapprove of. So-called antifascist movements call, for example, the English Defence League racist, when all we demand is equality under one law for everybody: as the British Freedom slogan goes, it’s about culture, not colour.

All the more reason for Boyle to react with fury and fear at the appellation of "racist". As a self-confessed so-called antifascist, he helped torture the term into its present meaning, and knows well that in his circles if somebody is called "racist", the speaker means "fascist", ie "not one of us".

I make no apologies for talking about an ongoing case, because the BBC made none for appointing itself judge and jury on Question Time, 9 February 2012, over John Terry while his (unproven) case for allegedly using racist language was ongoing. As institutions and individuals are relearning, what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

Comedian Frankie Boyle sues Daily Mirror for libel over 'racist comedian' line - Daily Mirror, 15 October 2012

I hate racism, Frankie Boyle tells libel case - Daily Mirror, 16 October 2012

The Frankie Boyle 'racism' case makes me question the language we use - The Guardian - Bim Adewunmi, 16 October 2012

Click to go to Question Time (9 February 2012) to see a discussion of the John Terry racism case when the case was ongoing and adjourned - discussion begins 43m 05s.

BBC and Savile: remind you of anything?

Is the developing story of Jimmy Savile’s abuse and suppression of same sounding familiar? Let’s look at some relevant points, from a Daily Mail report into the affair:

• A [BBC Newsnight] report into Savile shelved, and conclusions not passed on to police;
• Individuals gagged by [BBC] authorities;
• Reports from rank-and-file police officers in several police forces ignored.
• Savile rendered ‘untouchable’.

Psychiatry defines "perseveration" as the continuation of a learned behaviour in response to new stimuli. This matters because individuals who managed the BBC’s studied denial of Muslim child-grooming will have moved onto different jobs, including reputation management. Upon hearing of the charges against Savile, they will have reacted to the new situation according to the old rules: oppose, obfuscate and obstruct.

I’m not using Savile‘s crimes to have a cheap shot at Muslims, many of whom are as much victims of Islamism as the rest of us are. Take Malala Yousafzai (right), the Pakistani schoolgirl shot for her brave stand against Taliban opposition to girls’ education. She’s a hero, like the women who found the strength to stand up and testify in The Other Side of Jimmy Savile, the ITV documentary that started all the furore. And all of them are victims of systemic ways of thinking that put abusive males at the top of the tree then maintain their position.

In February 2011, English Defence League founder Tommy Robinson told Newsnight’s Jeremy Paxman about a series of issues relating to Islam in Britain, ending with 15-year-olds being "raped and pimped". Paxman’s response to this was "these are all personal issues of yours".

My contention is that such an automatic denial on the part of BBC apparatchiks to Islamist abuses became a learned behaviour that was then directed towards the victims of Savile and his accomplices. It’s time to shine some democratic light upon these reflex responses so that justice can start to be done upon the monsters who have enjoyed the BBC’s protection.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

Click to watch The Other Side of Jimmy Savile on ITV

Click to watch Jeremy Paxman interview Tommy Robinson for Newsnight on Feb 2011. The exchange ending with Paxman's comment "these are all personal issues of yours" begins at 5min 45sec.

Click to find out more about Malala Yousafzai on the Provoking Thoughts blog