The OOglies is a popular slapstick animated series aimed at kids made by BBC Scotland for the CBBC. A sketch from 2012 showed an egg having it's head sliced was hailed by one viewer as inappropriate for children. The complainant, a mother said "Kids could think extreme violence like beheading is normal."
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/mums-fury-over-isis-style-6979486
I suppose we are in a situation where anything can become offensive to anyone so where do we draw the lines ?
and with a straight face... phew!
Superb !
Nigel Hawthorn was made for the part.....
"While it has been government policy to regard policy as a responsibility of Ministers and administration as a responsibility of Officials, the questions of administrative policy can cause confusion between the policy of administration and the administration of policy, especially when responsibility for the administration of the policy of administration conflicts, or overlaps with, responsibility for the policy of the administration of policy." Sir Humphrey, at his best (one of many!)
There are people sitting by the radio/TV, with a pen and pad, waiting to be offended.
Mrs T's favourite programme apparently Graham.
Strange thing about that series was that I can't ever recall any politician or Civil Srvant ever coming out and criticising or denegrating the series in any way. Douglas Jay and the other writiers really knew their stuff it seems !
PC is very simple in my book. It is taking a position where inference has been gained through over thinking to come to a conclusion were there could be possible offense if that offending word, name, phrase, programme or picture was explicitly and literally broken down and pointed out to where the offence might possibly take place. Then the band wagon is jumped on.
I remember when Obama had to apologise for a comic compliment to Kamala Harris - a US Attorney general - "Obama said Harris is “brilliant and she is dedicated and she is tough,” adding that “she also happens to be, by far, the best looking attorney general in the country.”"
The whole PC world jumped down his throat.
In the example of the original post. This is case of over thinking and hence PC nonsense!
The gratuitous violence of Tom and Jerry and Roadrunner doesn't stand a chance... Beep Beep
But just think how recent it is since public execution finished here in Europe. It was in Versailles during 1939 when a German criminal Eugène Weidmann, known as the 'Teutonic Vampire' was beheaded in public. People arrived early, many of them taking a 'picnic' and included children. There will be people alive who remember that, perhaps even a couple alive who were there in they were just children.
A century earlier it was common, some countries still displayed the corpses after the execution and other still disembowelled them as part of the pre-execution with parts of the body removed after. In some places it was compulsory to attend executions, children were not excluded.
We have a belief in having 'civilised' ourselves, yet we allow the powers that be to develop weaponry and use other things as weapons that defy belief when one sees what they do to humans. Death by burning is still one of the most common causes in wars, but when there are heroic movies made all we see are big, strapping GIs shooting the baddies who fall down dead on the spot. Apparently that is rarely the case. Very few are lucky enough to be gone instantly, far more suffer a lingering, painful death.
We are a strange species. Those are realities. Yes, they are gruesome and perhaps we do not want to see them but they are the reality whereas the clean kill is still the myth. We hide everybody from that. Then we are shocked when somebody who was a quiet, pleasant, well mannered boy goes to Syria and becomes the best known executioner. We are not obliged to look at the videos but many people do and may be people we believe we know and trust better. Being PC then hides what really happens in the world but can never erase that from people imaginations which are sometimes more lurid and obscene that life itself.
There are so many ways that offence can be taken. Putting in the (Christian?/First) name and initial seems to be a small gesture but doable. You are not allowed to use the description Christian name these days either, unless that is your first name actually is Christian (I do know one- I mean called Christian). Anyway you know what I mean. There is a Rue d'Enfer in Paris, and we have a rue de Paradis in our village. Which brings us on to Christmas.....
That episode is a classic indeed. The whole three series (that's all it was, 21 shows!) epitomised a lot of what I actually experienced in the days when I had a great deal of contact with MPs and used to visit a couple of ministries and the HoC quite often. It was all, of course, international work. I even got the classic questions whether one of the countries I would be going to still had cannibals. It was not a joke, just deeply ingrained Victorian ideas still alive in the early 1980s!
Anything can become offensive to anyone, indeed. David Lynch needs to change his name?
Students at a small Pennsylvania college are demanding that administrators rename a building called "Lynch Memorial Hall" because of the racial overtones of the word "lynch."
The building is named after Clyde A. Lynch, who was president of Lebanon Valley College from 1932 until his death in 1950.
Students want school officials to either rename the building entirely or add Lynch's first name and middle initial, saying the word recalls the public executions of black men by white mobs in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
and so true to form Peter...
Our local MP (whom I knew quite well) in the 80's was appointed a Junior Health Minister and his tales of life in the office were fascinating. Never allowed to wander round the office unescorted... his intray constantly topped up by a flunky when it fell below a certain level to keep him 'busy'. He learnt quite early on that if he emptied to contents of his intray into the outray without even looking at the contents, only the important stuff came back to him!
I'm reliably informed that the great lady herself used to watch it....
When the daily news talks openly about beheading, stabbing etc I isuspect that children these days know rather more than my generation did at the same age, and about most things. Question is does it make things better or worse? We know that over protection can ruin a child's development. Whilst I had know about the Isis beheadings including the one by the late Jihad Johnnie the news had not shown the full extent of the horror. Yesterday a French friend sent me the link to the full Isis video of that event. I reckon I have seen most things. It was extremely professionally made in a technical sense. Bizzarely it started in an olive grove, which should surely be a metaphor for peace and understanding. The clip, about eight minutes long developed into a sordid orgy of the most revolting things I have ever seen, totally degrading. I was swooning and thought I was about to have a heart attack. Should any child see it I think profound damage would be done. I feel it damaged me in many ways and certainly damaged my belief that any peaceful solution to the Isis crisis will ever be possible. I refuse to believe that Islam as a religion is solely responsible for this appalling situation. Is the human race beginning to self destruct? I think it's quite possible.
Do you recall the PM making Leslie Potts, a chain smoking overweight member as the new Minister of Health ? A classic episode (The Smoke Screen) in which the newly appointed was unable to accept the post due to uncontrollable coughing and spluttering !
Surely the best-written comedy series ...ever ?
Quite! Behind every Jim Hacker there is a Sir Humphrey Appleby who is actually as clueless as his political, clueless master but is good at juggling doggerel to make it appear to be sense. PC is more often than not a variant on that very same theme.
In my day PC meant police constable and even then we could find variants of that.Ahem, ahem, it would be very un-PC to say what they may be. However, a Sir Humphrey could inventively do so by skirting round the actual choice of words, choosing his own and clearing muddy water by making it cloudy...
A friend returned A Town Like Alice to the library a couple of years ago. When asked if he’d enjoyed the book he replied, yes, it’s refreshing to read a book that isn’t PC.
We had better take it off the shelf, was the reply!
Sounds like a scene straight from Yes Minister Brian...
`What's your name, child?'
`My name is Alice, so please your Majesty,' said Alice very politely; but she added, to herself, `Why, they're only a pack of cards, after all. I needn't be afraid of them!'
`And who are THESE?' said the Queen, pointing to the three gardeners who were lying round the rosetree; for, you see, as they were lying on their faces, and the pattern on their backs was the same as the rest of the pack, she could not tell whether they were gardeners, or soldiers, or courtiers, or three of her own children.
`How should I know?' said Alice, surprised at her own courage. `It's no business of MINE.'
The Queen turned crimson with fury, and, after glaring at her for a moment like a wild beast, screamed `Off with her head! Off--'
`Nonsense!' said Alice, very loudly and decidedly, and the Queen was silent.
The King laid his hand upon her arm, and timidly said `Consider, my dear: she is only a child!'
The Queen turned angrily away from him, and said to the Knave `Turn them over!'
The Knave did so, very carefully, with one foot.
`Get up!' said the Queen, in a shrill, loud voice, and the three gardeners instantly jumped up, and began bowing to the King, the Queen, the royal children, and everybody else.
`Leave off that!' screamed the Queen. `You make me giddy.' And then, turning to the rose-tree, she went on, `What HAVE you been doing here?'
`May it please your Majesty,' said Two, in a very humble tone, going down on one knee as he spoke, `we were trying--'
`I see!' said the Queen, who had meanwhile been examining the roses. `Off with their heads!' and the procession moved on, three of the soldiers remaining behind to execute the unfortunate gardeners, who ran to Alice for protection.
`You shan't be beheaded!' said Alice, and she put them into a large flower-pot that stood near. The three soldiers wandered about for a minute or two, looking for them, and then quietly marched off after the others.
`Are their heads off?' shouted the Queen.
`Their heads are gone, if it please your Majesty!' the soldiers shouted in reply.
`That's right!' shouted the Queen.
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That is one of the bits in which the Queen of Hearts demands a wee bit of decapitation, a well beloved children's book. I wonder if the PC censors spend hours tippexing over such passages in libraries?
I grew up with Alice in Wonderland and I’m sure that there was a bit of beheading mentioned in that.
The biggest problem with political correctness is that it has become politically incorrect to be politically correct but some people have not yet caught up with that, so now the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing with the outcome that the standard accusation for something that a person does not like is likely to be that something is PC therefore wrong. However, to justify something is wrong because it is PC requires mental acrobatics that would make most Olympians gasp for breath. If that pathetic excuse for a person actually thought about the egg in question then she would have thought further about the inundation in water to immolated by said water to be sacrificed as a breakfast and worse, to immerse a toast soldier in its symbolic brain. Eh what? Go that far and no more peeling spuds, making carrot sticks and rapid starvation as a consequence. Yet is the same mother likely to stand behind six-year-old Sebastian-Jake as he watches the latest IS-show on Facebook? Or, to state the more likely, whilst he is playing games in which one of the protagonists is likely to kill off anything up to 40 enemies in the same amount of time as the top of an egg can be sliced off.
Doh!!!!