In this morning's Telegraph, there is a report stating that the BBC have made rules as to what you can or can't say in scripts. Of course, you can't offend anyone. So that's the end of comedy. With these rules, there would have been no Basil Fawlty; the bit in Blackadder goes forth where the General is advised of the unsuitability of a woman and he askes, "Why? Is she Welsh?" ( I am half Welsh, so don't get the wrong idea), or any of the episodes of "Allo Allo", where just about any European is sent up including ourselves. All not allowed.
The world has gone crazy.
Bev.

I reckon in general the only people who take offence are those who like to take offence. I don't mind anyone being offensive about things I like, do, am. To quote the great philosopher Jeff (the Dude) Lebowski "that's just like your opinion man".

In these stupidly PC times it's great to see Frankie Boyle on TV.

The Aussies obviously don't care about all the PC rubbish...

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol...icle6865623.ece

Would Al Jolson have been battered to death in this day and age? The funny thing is, it's perfectly acceptable for a couple of black fellas to be "whited up" in a film called "White Chicks" - no-one said a word. As long as the mickey-taking isn't malicious or deliberately done to offend, what's the problem?

It's amazing how a lot of the race-card playing and outrage comes from the white chattering classes. I think that these kind of outcries could be interpreted as insulting in the way that it suggests that the people being sent up can't (a) speak for themselves and/or (b) take a joke.

You rarely hear the same people complaining when someone takes the mickey out of say, Christians and the CofE. One way street it is, then.

IMO we have sold our birthright, free speech, for the mess of pottage which is political correctness.

I never thought as a teenager that I would live in a Britain where no-one dares say what they really think about things, but I'm afraid that is the position we're in. Don't get me wrong - I think it's good when people don't bash foreigners, gays and other minority groups. But I'd far rather they weren't bashing them because they didn't want to, than because we'd made up laws about it.

However did a once proud nation come to this?

I take the mickey out of gay friends (as they do me) . They know it's a bit of fun and not malicious at all Contrary to popular belief, most minority groups do have the ability to laugh at themselves.

I agree! It's no use using politically correct terms but then being a racist underneath. My gran on the other hand can never remember what terms to use (they have changed so much during her life time) and is scared of saying the wrong thing but she is no way a racist. I remember her trying to tell me that my cousin was marrying someone of a different race (just realised - I don't know what to say either!) and she ended up describing him very politically incorrectly as "a friend from the Commonwealth".

In a country where a councillor loses their job for using the perfectly innocent and non-racial word "niggardly" what hope is there?


On the general subject of loss of liberty and political correctness, David Hockney is quite eloquent:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/p...man-513175.html

If you are generally interested in the ever more incredible insanity of political correctness there is a whole web-site tracking it here:

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com/

Here is an extract, to give you some idea (bold added by me):

"When my offspring and their friends have been mugged on buses, or attacked on the street by teenagers, no one has helped. Every passing adult has looked the other way. The idea that it’s the responsibility of grown-ups to look out for one another’s young is disappearing fast. That isn’t making our children safer. It’s making their lives more fearful, more dangerous and more constrained.

Last week the charity Living Streets reported that half of all five to 10-year-olds have never played in their own streets. Almost nine in 10 of their grandparents had played out and so had many of their parents, but now children were kept inside, imprisoned by the twin fears of traffic and paedophiles. As the Play England organisation has found, parents keep them in because they believe that if they aren’t watching over their child, no other adult will do it for them. Older children, too, are affected. Two years ago research by the Children’s Society showed that 43% of parents thought children shouldn’t be allowed out on their own until they were 14.

What began 25 years or so ago as an understandable desire to raise awareness of child abuse is turning into something extremely destructive – an instinctive suspicion of any encounter between grown-ups and unrelated children. It has happened without any political debate or rational discussion. It’s starting to poison our society. And with every passing month it’s getting worse.

Last month in Bedfordshire, 270 children from four primary schools had their annual sports day without the normal audience of proud parents watching them compete. All adults except teachers were banned. The reason? The organisers could not guarantee that an unsupervised adult might not molest a child. They preferred the certainty of ruining the pleasure of hundreds, and the instilling of general paranoia, to the phenomenally slight possibility of a sexual attack.

This is part of an insidious new orthodoxy that’s taking hold: that only authorised adults have any business engaging with children. It is no longer just about sexual abuse. In Twickenham last month the mother of a five– year-old who was being bullied decided to talk to the offender. She knelt by his chair and asked him politely to stop. The next day she was banned from the classroom for doing something that would have been regarded as rational and responsible behaviour at any other time in the past century. "


etc. etc. ...

Sad. All terribly, terribly sad...

I don't think you could spend 4 seconds molesting a child inside a sack at sports day without anyone else noticing and the whole audience descending upon you to give you a good shoeing.

The sooner this ridiculous trend of automatic suspicion gets reversed the better.

Yes. I'm afraid I can't recognise the country I grew up in.

You can't say "nitty gritty" either now...

WHAT????


Who says, and why ever not...

I think the whole thing is a shambles. We use word "A" to describe someone or something. "A" becomes associated with that person. Someone considers it derogatory. So we cant say "A" and have to use the word "B" instead. Now "B" becomes assoiciated with that person. Someone considers it derogatory. So we cant say "B" and have to use the word "C" instead. Now "C" becomes assoiciated with that person. Someone considers it derogatory. So we cant say "C" and have to use the word "D" instead. Now "D" becomes assoiciated with that person........

Apparently, it's something to do with the human waste left at the bottom of slave ships.

I was expecting you to say that it was in case it offended somebody who had nits

That will be the next thing - affliction-ism!

There was an article recently about the song 'Hockey Cokey' being abusive since it was originally to poke fun at the catholics!

I agree with all the above posts, though I do think part of the blame is with the tendency of people to stay silent rather than argue back. We've never been stopped from going to our children's sports days, but if we were, I hope that the parents would simply refuse to let their kids take part.

It's time the silent majority woke up and fought back against the vociferous and loony minority.

Steve

You called???? My doctoral research was on the aesthetics of comedy...but it can't have been very amusing, because I ditched it before submitting my thesis.

Maybe laughter starts out as a gasp of shock and surprise at what is unexpected or different - so the people we laugh WITH are by definition US rather than THEM...jokes might be a gentler version of the bonding people seem to experience while beating somebody up in the park, though I don't care to dwell on that thought.

No wonder we love a comic who even gets paid to be laughed at ... we get all that nice comfy bonding, and no guilt. So while it's very nice of our moral betters to remove the velvet glove and expose the iron talons, I expect they will be surprised to find that despite the murky nature of the reassurance, laughter that says "Yep, them's claws, but they are not going to be used on you" probably does a better job of healing rifts than official warnings.

I wonder if satire is on the decrease in English, at the same time as it seems to be increasing in Japanese. Satire presupposes that we are free to show that we don't subscribe to the "received values"...Japanese satire took a nosedive when the Tokugawa militocracy came to power, and a cuddly kind of socially acceptable humor developed, involving laughing at foolish or absurd behavior rather than at people's values or identity (ring any bells?), but perhaps that kind of humor is just a little too good to be true.

If you get the chance, do watch a Japanese movie called The University of Laughs (Warai no Daigaku, 2004). It's about a playwright whose works are constantly censored by a wartime official who complains that he is making fun of worthy Japanese citizens, worthy Japanese leaders, worthy Japanese traditions, etc. The more the guy is censored, the more cunning his humor becomes...but by the time he's got the censor in stitches without offending a single public moral, he's been drafted into the army, and his actors are calling him the "hound-dog of the State", so his last and finest work has an audience of only one.

Does anyone have comedy that they used to find amusing that they no longer do? I thought that "On The Buses" was funny when I was a child, but it's cringeworthy now. Is that age or socialisation?

Good taste I never like it

I'm trying to think what I really enjoyed watching, but I think it was comedians rather than sit-coms - Morecombe and Wise and the Two Ronnies - I still enjoy those . Strangely enough, the only sit-com that I can think of is My Wife Next Door with John Alderton and Hannah Gordon, which I haven't thought of for years! I can't remember any really laugh-out-loud ones at all - can anyone jog my memory for me?


By the way, do the new rules mean that the very funny Goodness Gracious Me! writers won't be able to pen their 'going out for an English' scipts any more?

NO not at all. Poking fun at the English, C of E and suchlike is not a problem. It's everything else.

Did you not like Blackadder, Fawlty Towers, Porridge, Dad's Army, Allo Allo, Monty Python and so on?

I love Blackadder (especially the "Goes Forth" series), and also Fawlty Towers. I still laugh aloud at Father Ted too...which is probably very un-PC in today's world!

I was bought up watching the likes of Dads Army, Are You Being Served?, The Good Life, etc etc. Some of these are still quite amusing, but I wouldn't find On the Buses quite so funny nowadays. I enjoyed Porridge too. Though Going Straight wasn't so funny.

I hear they are going to make a new series of Only Fools and Horses. I doubt if this will be as funny as the original...especially if the Green Green Grass of Home (the off-shoot with Marlene and Trigger) was anything to go by.

Must be getting old...

Father Ted in the lingerie dept.

And training Jack to say "That would be an ecumanical matter"!

Speed 2 has to be my favourite episode though! Dougal driving the milk float with the bomb underneath! Classic.

I loved that show! . You are the only person to have ever mentioned it so I thought I must have been the only one to watch it. I periodically search for any DVDs from it, but in vain. I remember a really funny scene where John and Hannah are in a restaurant together and he suddenly wants to hide her - so he pushes her into the Gent's Toilet. She emerges a few moments later with the line "Don't ever do that to me again" and the words, the way she delivered it and the look on her face made me a fan of Hannah Gordon for life.

The fact that I was seriously in love with her has nothing to do with it .

Coming back on topic, maybe that type of show is offensive to people who have had a divorce, and as they are beginning to advance in numbers the powers that be have decided to bury the show. I just thought is was very funny.

Oh, well - can't resist joining the chorus of nostalgia ...

I loved the Two Ronnies, Morecambe and Wise, Porridge, Reggie Perrin, Dad's Army, Are you being Served? It ain't alf 'ot Mum, and dare I say, Billy Connolly.

Yes Minister - all of them!

And the first series of Auf Wiedersehen Pet - for some unfathomable reason, my favourite was Oz I still remember cracking up at the scene where he got up one morning in his underwear - holey vest, grubby pants, unwashed... and as he was wiping his nose with his hand and scratching himself, he was talking about going to the public swimming pool - classic

I still think Felicity Kendal looks great. When she was in "The Good Life" though... wow!

That's a thought. But strangely, looking back, perhaps that's partly why I liked it. My parents were divorced when it wasn't so common (where we lived, anyway) and not particularly amicably. Perhaps I liked the sit-com approach better



I was trying to thing right back to stuff I used to watch - the first sit-coms I saw. I love Black Adder, Porridge and Dad's Army - I still watch them and enjoy them immensely - such clever writing and brilliant performances I watched Fawlty Towers the other night and couldn't bear it - it was the 'don't mention the war' episode. I didn't mind the war part, I just can't take John Cleese at his most manic. It's my cringe threshhold - there was a certain point in each episode of Some Mothers Do Have e'Em at which I had to stop watching for the same reason! I used to like Monty Python but having lived with a real fan for the last hundred years, who has introduced our sons to it as well, I now have a limit on how long it can be quoted before steam comes out of my ears

I LOVE Father Ted! How about The Vicar of Dibley?

I think VoD has it's classics and also its turkeys to be honest. I got a bit bored with it after a while.

so did I. Definitely not as funny as some others.

Blackadder is always good, I never tire of it. Rowan Atkinson is my hero (if you hadn't noticed yet, I am a sarcastic git pretty much 24/7).

Do you like all the other stuff he's done (Johnny English, Mr. Bean, Not the Nine o'clock News etc.)?

I agree with Sol, Blackadder's amazing ..... Ooh, and Thin Blue Line, fantastic! Personally can't stand Mr Bean, I think it's because he reminds me of a few aquaintances

I love Johnny English - it's brilliant!

I used to enjoy many of the comedians from my youth - Dave Allen, Benny Hill, Tommy Cooper - and of course Morecambe & Wise and The Two Ronnies. I don't find modern comedians appeal to my sense of humour in the same way; maybe they connect with the under-40s.

Sit-coms have become a bit predictable now, I think. Most of the best ideas had already been done. Reggie Perrin (Leonard Rossiter version), Yes, Minister and Blackadder were probably my absolute favourites. Anyone remember "Please, Sir!" with John Alderton and "All gas and gaiters" with Derek Nimmo?

I think Morecambe and Wise and Tommy Cooper are all pretty much untouchable. Not a single swear word needed to raise a laugh, either!

Benny Hill, D1ck Emery, and Kenny Everett were good too!

I think everyone should watch the Andre Previn (Andrew Preview) sketch at least once...

I love that famous line:

"I AM playing all the right notes....... though not necessarily in the right order!"





I loved the first two and have loads of Yes/Prime Minister as audio mp3 files. I vaguely remember 'Please Sir', but I never understood it. I was only young and it seemed loads of grown-ups pretending to be kids. Totally unrealistic.

Then came Grange Hill which seemed to condense into 30 minutes all the worst of schools. God, I was only 12 but I hated that programme!

Steve

How could I have forgotten Yes Minister?? Wonderful stuff..........the speech by Humphrey about the readers of the newspapers