Words Dept.: entry

Apparently, 112 people complained to Ofcom that Sir Trevor McDonald’s jokey description of Bernard Manning as a “fat, white bastard” was “inappropriate and/or racist”.

On News Knight with Sir Trevor McDonald on 24 June, Sir Trev said:

“It’s time for Racist and Dead, this week, it’s the turn of corpulent, narrow-minded northerner Bernard Manning. Personally, I never thought of Bernard Manning as a racist comic… just a fat, white bastard…”

Personally, I thought it was a pretty neat gag. The deliberate use of bad taste humour is funny because it’s the type of joke Manning would make (fairly obvious, this, but beyond the understanding of at least a hundred ITV viewers).

What type of person would complain about “racist” jokes against white people on television anyway? I reckon the sort of person who believes that “double standards” are at work by a “liberal” conspiracy in the media and that political correctness has quite possibly “gone mad”. There seems to be this popular idea that if a white person mocks a black person for being black that’s bad, so if a black person does the same to someone white, that’s equally as bad. Which, of course, is far too simplistic a formula to make any sense at all. It’s an infantile line of argument.

Interestingly, Ofcom is unswayed by the “double standards” brigade, arguing that the deceased comedian’s own style of “humour” can be used to justify the comments:

The comments were clearly intended to parody Manning’s own comedy, where he claimed he was not himself racist, but simply made ‘jokes’ based on racial stereotypes. It was in such a context that Sir Trevor McDonald could therefore state that he did not consider Manning to be a racist but then went on to say that he was “…a fat white bastard”.

It ruled today that the programme was not in breach of the broadcasting code.

Meanwhile in a separate ruling, a single viewer complained to Ofcom about the promotion of a premium rate phone line on the encrypted adult channel, Hustler TV, which he (I assume it was a he) thought “looked like advertising”. I reckon there aren’t that many people thinking about rules 10.2, 10.3 and 10.9 of the broadcasting code while watching Hustler TV, so hats off to this eagle-eyed viewer. Who says this sort of thing makes you go blind?

(For the record, Hustler was found to be in breach. The phone numbers have to go. Luckily, the porn part is entirely legal.)