sábado, 26 de agosto de 2023

Reflexão - The spectator (The endless hypocrisy ...)

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-endless-hypocrisy-of-the-comedy-class/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Editorial&utm_campaign=BOCH%20%2020230826%20%20House%20Ads%20%20HT+CID_fdaa3dd36aca9a26d5a5bae57f0cf9ae

The endless hypocrisy of the comedy class

22 August 2023, 8:26am

Personally I find TV panel shows pretty unbearable. They’re like being at a student party full of lairy smartarses you don’t know, and probably wouldn’t want to. But now a clip from one has, in the journalistic parlance of our time, ‘resurfaced on social media’. It is never a good thing for the people involved when a clip resurfaces on social media. It’s the kind of resurfacing that Jaws did in his heyday.

This particular eruption from the deep comes from the Big Fat Quiz Of The Year 2008, the fourth edition of the annual Channel 4 institution. (Its twentieth anniversary edition is due this December. It’s still going because of course it is – long running TV brands used to be like hens’ teeth, but now they linger on and on. The Big Fat Quiz will always be with us, like the poor or herpes or Ken Barlow.) Jimmy Carr is the host, and the three teams consist of a variety of comedians and presenters: Michael McIntyre and Claudia Winkleman, Sean Lock and James Corden, and Dara Ó Briain and Davina McCall.

2008 may seem like ancient history to the young, but all of these people – with the obvious exception of the late Sean Lock – are still around and still working. If anything, they are more prominent now. Interestingly, there are few visual clues, apart from the comparative youth of those featured, to suggest that this was filmed any time other than yesterday. A TV clip from 1972 would’ve seemed like an archaeological wonder in 1987, but everything on the cultural surface has seized up in this century. Under the surface it’s a very different story.

Because my, this clip demonstrates how the tunes of these people have changed. The question is about a man who ‘announced he was going to have a baby – but what was unusual about the whole affair?’ Ó Briain is first up, saying that he and McCall’s answer is that this person ‘was a pregnant male transsexual, it was him having the baby’. You might almost think Ó Briain would get away from this clip unscathed, but stay tuned.

Next is Lock and Corden, and up the balloon goes. ‘We wrote: it was an abomination’ Lock deadpans, to an outburst of laughter from all sides and the studio audience. Ó Briain adds, ‘Our team will accept that answer as being the same as ours, that’s fine’. Corden, giggling, next, ‘You said what was different about it, and we’ve decided it was an abomination, and we’re sticking by it’. Finally, over to McIntyre and Winkleman, pulling amused, confused faces; ‘He is a woman / she is a man… he had a baby, but he is a bloke, with a womb?’ ‘A womb-man’ ventures Carr, before cracking jokes about portmanteau words for transsexual genitalia that I can’t repeat here. McIntyre goes on, ‘When the baby was born, and he or she said to the doctor “is it a boy or a girl?”, do you think the doctor just went “How dare you”.’ More big laughs, and on the show goes.

What’s astonishing about this clip is that it’s proof that these people knew exactly what a woman was about five cultural minutes ago, and found the idea of pretending not to know hilarious.

Dara Ó Briain has been quite the empty space to his former friend Graham Linehan in this regard. James Corden (full disclosure, the guest star in two episodes I wrote for Doctor Who shortly after this) has been conspicuously compliant with every new and fashionable ideological wheeze, as we can see demonstrated here.

At times in the last ten years, I have felt like I am going mad. People I knew or worked with in this milieu, who were far more un-PC than me, suddenly changed lanes, leaving me where I’d always been but somehow a pariah. Ironically, I was mocked in the noughties by colleagues for being a bit humourless about identity-based banter that I considered ‘nasty’ and bad form.

Now some might point out that times have changed. Oh indeed they have, and don’t we know it. But there are still two sexes, and no man can get pregnant. It is ludicrous to pretend otherwise, and ludicrous ideas are funny.

Of course, these people know this now, as they knew then. Everybody does. And this is the crux of this matter. Because fair enough, you might well think that the ‘abomination’ joke was unkind and cruel to transsexuals and the real people involved. I suspect if I’d seen this in 2008 I might well have thought that. I do now – though I don’t think people telling cruel and tasteless jokes should be cancelled because I’m not a lunatic.

But some of these same people hooting and howling in this clip have gone far further than that. They swallowed the big bitter pill of genderism – sex is a spectrum, it’s fine to medicalise kids who don’t fit into the cultural stereotypes of their sex, trans-identifying men have the right to enter women’s private spaces – whole, in one gulp. Either they celebrated it, or they pretended not to see it.

This is because a few years after this particular Big Fat Quiz, a small cadre of well-placed cranks, empowered by Californian tech giants, did a quick sprint through the institutions, public and private. The comedy ‘industry’ – supposedly so daring and edgy and outspoken – said nothing. Almost to a man, they merrily complied.

We often see modern people looking at clips from very old TV – The Black And White Minstrel Show or Are You Being Served?, for example – and looking horrified. Imagine the reverse; showing these people in December 2008 the gender world of 2023. Heck, even the world of 2016 – where stating that there are two sexes or that kids should be left to grow up gay is described as ‘utterly abhorrent’. They’d be appalled. And then you would have to explain to them that they went along with it.

sexta-feira, 25 de agosto de 2023

Cartoons

Livros lidos - A Energia da Razão

quinta-feira, 24 de agosto de 2023

Reflexão - The Spectator (children on restaurants)

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/its-time-to-ban-young-children-from-restaurants/

It’s time to ban young children from restaurants

Let's save parents from themselves

22 May 2023, 5:01am

When you have small children just getting them out of the door can be traumatic. Finding and applying each shoe can be enough to provoke a tantrum – and not just in the parent. And no, they can’t bring their Power Rangers swords, because we are going out to lunch and everyone knows that plastic swords and restaurants don’t mix.

Eventually you will arrive at the restaurant, although it will 20 minutes later than the booking. As you push the buggy inside, the establishment falls quiet like the Slaughtered Lamb in An American Werewolf in London. There’s a scrape of chairs – a pause – then the chatter resumes. But in that moment everyone is thinking the same thing: please don’t sit next to us.

You are led to a table by a waitress who feels like a goddess – she has the power to make or break the mealtime of all she surveys. At the table, usually in the darkest, remotest and most joyless corner of the restaurant, the fun begins – coats are discarded; the buggy is folded away or pushed aside to be a tripping hazard; a high chair is wedged in against the back of a diner behind, performing an impromptu Heimlich manoeuvre on them and doubtlessly spilling a drink all over them, too.

If your fidgeting children haven’t already upset the water jug, then this is the moment. The next victim will be a glass of wine – smashed to smithereens as soon as it arrives by a flying menu card that the kids can’t read but can fight over. The waitress immediately disappears to get a dustpan and brush and large roll of blue paper to mop up the mess.

Once the destroying stops, the complaining begins. ‘I’m bored,’ one will yelp before administering a sadistic Chinese burn to the other. The youngest will then erupt in agony – tears springing from his eyes as you attempt to decide between the fillet steak or the leg of lamb and whether that should be dauphinoise potatoes or twice-cooked chips.

Then the waitress returns and begins cleaning away the wine and broken glass – only to cut herself. She races away clutching her arm as if she’s been set upon by dogs. You, meanwhile, still have no glass of wine, even though its nearly 2 p.m. on a Sunday and God alone knows you’ve earned it. Eventually, the table is cleared of hazardous shards, and you’ve all avoided having to take anyone – granny included – to A&E. Forty-five minutes after arriving you are finally presented with a glass of wine by the waitress whose hand is now swathed in blue plastic tape and supported by sling.

You order, a process that resembles a nutritional interrogation and requires several returns to the kitchen to establish the antecedents of certain ingredients, down to molecular level. All the while the children refuse to settle. One moment you snatch the cutlery away from Child A just before he impales himself with it; the next you are removing the salt cellar from Child B just as he draws a face on the table with its contents. By the time you’ve ordered everything on the table is piled in a heap at one end out of reach of Child B, who is bawling ‘Pepppppper!’ at the top of his voice.

When the whimpering fades, you make an attempt at conversation with your spouse – only to be interrupted by another Chinese burn. But it’s when you see your eldest prancing across the restaurant waving two napkins like a Morris dancer, with no shoes on, that you throw in the towel.

You hand your phones to the children and you become those people. It’s for the best, you remind yourself, as you offer your offspring up to the gods of Samsung and Apple in exchange for peace, digital Danegeld. As they sit their agog, their little brains melting quietly, the disapproving looks and sideways glances begin. But what do you care? Pah! You say ‘cheers’, clink glasses and remark about what a nice time everyone’s having.

The children’s food arrives – organic chicken nuggets, priced to the point of pain – and you butcher it into tiny non-choking pieces because even though the blighters can open jars with their teeth you constantly worry that a waffle or a cumbersome strawberry will be the end of them. Then, wonder upon wonder, your fillet steak arrives with pepper sauce and sides; the children are eating, too – albeit with their hands – and you take up your knife and fork. At last. It might not look like it, but right now, you are Napoleon after Borodino…

Suddenly there’s a tug at your arm: ‘Daddy. I need a poo.’ By the time you return your steak is cold, the pepper sauce is congealed and funnily enough – after padding about playing ‘I Spy’ in a poorly ventilated disabled loo, your appetite has been eviscerated.

You get through pudding, coffee, and then coats are fought back on. Once the staff have gratefully closed the door behind you, you remember that this is exactly what happened last time. And it’s a sign. You shouldn’t do it. You should stop trying to take your small children to restaurants. Small children and restaurants go together about as well as potassium and air. They hate each other. And everyone else in the room hates them too. The problem is that we forget this and we delude ourselves with a fantasy that it’s feasible. But it isn’t. It’s folly.

So we should save parents from themselves. Like denying cigarettes to the under-21s, we should ban all children – say, under the age of eight or nine – from restaurants (with exceptions for the likes of McDonald’s, or Nando’s). While this isn’t for the benefit of child-haters, they will be overjoyed, and – who knows – even the restaurants themselves might profit since having fewer tiny brutes ruining it for everyone else might allow others to enjoy themselves more.

Yes, a ban sounds a bit 1970s, but the truth is that young families have a better time at home: the toys are there, the environment is kid-proofed and you know what’s in the food you’re serving. Plus, for the amount of money you have to part with in a restaurant these days you can probably buy a rib of beef the size of a Mondeo – and what’s not to like about that?

Finally, you also have the television on at home. And as every parent knows, when it comes to pleasing young children, Peppa Pig is far more important than Michelin stars.