Angry (Blog)

As I have mentioned in a couple of previous blog posts I have an extremely obsessive love of the comedian/actor/writer/musician Tim Minchin – in fact, my love of him borders on addiction. Recently, I have been unable to keep up my cyber-stalking due to other commitments and tonight (22/12/2011) I was excited because I would have time to catch up on all that I have missed. So you can imagine how genuinely excited I was when I opened up YouTube and saw that Tim Minchin had a new video up, I stopped talking to everyone on Facebook and focused all of my attention on this. I opened the video and watched it. The video started with Jonathan Ross, introducing Tim Minchin, on his show, this got me even more excited because I knew it was a new song, which meant one thing – Timbo was going to be on Wossy this week. I watched the video, listened to the song and loved it. It was a mild yet funny song about Christmas, describing Jesus with modern references i.e. Derren Brown and Dawn of the Dead. It did strike me as weird that the song would be put up before the show so I read the video information and you can imagine how thrilled I was when I saw that this song had been cut from the programme due to the offence it could cause a small amount of people who probably don’t even watch Jonathan Ross (the guys from “The Inbetweeners” were on that same episode. I seriously doubt that the prudey-right-wing-conservative-anti-condom-Mary-was-a-virgin-the-Earth-is-only-6,000-years-old-Brigade, who think “raping children is fine but falling in love with a member of the same sex is wronger than evolution” are hardcore clunge fans.

This song, “Woody Allen Jesus” was inoffensive (in comparison to what it could be like), well worded and brilliant. I thought ITV was a great network but if they can’t allow this song to be put on, when (previously) the BBC allowed “5 Poofs and 2 Pianos” to be performed, then I’m going to have to rethink my preferences (not women, they’re always tops, except when they’re bottoms – oh yeah!)

Here’s one verse of this song:

“Jesus was a great entertainer
Doing cool tricks all of the time
Turning water into wine
Making stormy weather fine
Even now his stunts confound us
Kinda did what Derren Brown does”

Does anyone see the offensiveness there? Seriously?! It’s ridiculous! This is how the verse breaks down:

Compliment

Examples supporting the compliment

Further flattery

Pop-culture reference to explain why the compliments are deserved.

Turns out the song was cut out because one gutless-fuckwit at ITV was worried about all the complaints they would get due to the offence that would be caused by the song. Jesus – fucking – Christ, for all the fuss it’s caused, you’d think he’d played Pope Song for fuck’s sake. I would actually understand it if people made this much fuss over Pope Song because (as a friend of mine told me) the word “fuck” is used (including, within words like “fucker” or “fucking”) 108 times in that short song and people don’t like that word much.

This whole situation drives me crazy. I hate it when comedians get (basically) punished when they’ve done nothing wrong. I know, I get offended by stuff but I don’t go to the papers and complain about it, I don’t even write about it on here (I write about stuff that angers/confuses/frustrates me but never something that simply offends me, at least I don’t think I have) I discuss it with my friends – specifically (if it’s LGBT...related, as it mostly is) Jo-anna, and we: rant about it; talk about it; agree about it and that’s how I get it out of my system. You don’t need a massive media-hype about shit that doesn’t even matter. This is just one time I have read a story like this and thought, “grow the fuck up!”

A separate (though not unrelated) example of this kind of idiocy is “Sachsgate” – if you don’t know what that is then where have you been?! This was the front-page news for at least a couple of months in the UK and it was ridiculous! Russell Brand had a radio show with the BBC. One week he had Jonathan Ross on his show (his name seems to be a pattern in these stories) and he was meant to have a comic actor called Andrew Sachs on as well. But Sachs did not show up, so Russell being Russell, he decided to phone him and leave a message. A while into the message when Russell is doing his thing Wossy shouts, “he fucked your granddaughter”. Not a very clever thing to say, I agree, but not worth complaining about. To be fair, only a few people actually complained about it when the show was on but when the papers wrote about it, people (who hadn’t heard the clip and never listened to the show) complained as well, which resulted in Brand and Ross resigning. This baffled me. These two guys were punished for saying something on a pre-recorded show (yes, editors had a chance to cut that out but they didn’t) that hardly anyone (who originally heard it) complained about. It’s pathetic! My motto for TV and Radio has always been “if you don’t like it, don’t watch it”. No one is sitting there forcing you to listen to or watch something (and if they are then you don’t have to pay attention). You can go to your friends and say “that was a load of shit, wasn’t it?” that’s fine but save the complaining for important issues not a joke that didn’t go well. Also, Russell and Wossy are great but was this really worth the front page in most papers, everyday for a couple of months? There are more newsworthy things to report (especially on the front page) than pathetic shit like this. I mean come on, did all other areas of life cave in at the exact moment that this kicked off? I doubt it.

I’ve only ever officially complained about something on TV once and that was something I actually saw on TV. It was a clip, that was recorded during the student protests in England, of a man in a wheelchair being dragged out of it by police and the distasteful interview of the guy in the wheelchair that followed a couple of days later. He was treated despicably and I thought he deserved an apology. That’s the kind of shit you should complain about! Not a fucking joke you didn’t even see!

Another example of these stupid situations involves JimmyCarr. Forgive me for this because I can’t remember the exact details of the incident but here are the basics. During a live (un-televised) gig Jimmy Carr made a joke (I believe it was about injured soldiers) and one of the audience members went to the papers, complained and Jimmy Carr was torn a new one. Complaints and criticism flooded in, bashing him and saying how shit he is. I heard about this and thought, “fuck right off!”

1)      This was not being recorded, it was a live gig in a theatre with no chance of ever being on TV. He can make jokes about anything – that’s the beauty of live comedy.

2)      Jimmy Carr does a lot of work with charities that help rehabilitate injured soldiers so any idiot would know (if they did their fucking research) that he didn’t mean it.

3)      This is for the original stupid bitch who complained. You paid over £25 for a ticket to see a comedy gig. A Jimmy Carr gig!!!!! A gig performed by a man who has said numerously about his shows,      “It's not for the easily fucking offended. It's not even for people that are difficult to offend. Essentially it's for people who are without a moral compass.” If you go to see him live, you know what to expect. It’ll be dark, twisted, belly-bursting jokes, thrown at you a mile-a-minute. You’re offended? Good for you! You have a right to be offended, but surely if you pay attention to the rest of his material then you’d realise other people in the room might be offended too. His material covers every social group! In his last tour he did a mime of “two lesbians breaking up” he used his hands to motion scissoring and made suction noises as he pulled them apart – I was at a gig when he did that, I found it hilarious!

4)      Finally, the key point in this argument. It’s Jimmy – fucking – Carr he tells jokes about everything. He doesn’t mean half the shit he says, it’s just funny. And even more to the point, that’s his job!  

I’ve already written a lengthy blog about the other situation, which got to me, regarding comedians and inappropriate, uneducated, ignorant complaints. It’s called, “Newsflash: Tim Minchin’s Transphobic and Bears StopShitting in the Woods!” give it a read, it’s one of my favourites (and leave a comment, if you haven’t already).

Coming to the end of this post, I feel (as I usually do) like I have rambled on for too long without making my point clear. So, I’ll do one final bit to push the message home. To clarify, I do not, in anyway think that a group’s feelings are illegitimate just because they are a minority, I mean DUH I’m part of a minority. I also do not disagree with censorship in order to protect people’s feelings and lives. I do, however, believe that when censoring anything, you need to be realistic. There is no point removing a song about Jesus from a programme because it might offend people, when the people who might be offended, probably don’t even watch it. Basically, there is no point putting “F**K” instead of “FUCK” in a because, as Tim Minchin pointed out,“F**K means ‘FUCK’ more than ‘FUCK’ means ‘FUCK’”.

HAPPY NEWTONMAS EVERYBODY!!!!!!!!!!