“Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!” True, but the PC Inquisition is getting mighty predictable. The fetish for diversity reached a whole new level of stupid recently as the BBC introduced its new direction. Programming would emphasize “stories that haven’t been told” and “the voices we haven’t yet heard,” according to U.K. newspaper The Independent.
Sounds like a laugh riot. When someone mentioned the iconic comedy of Monty Python to the BBC’s VP of Virtue Signalling, President of Privilege Checking Controller of Comedy Commissioning (yes, that one’s real) Shane Allen, he pooh-poohed the old geezers:
If you’re going to assemble a team now, it’s not going to be six Oxbridge white blokes. It’s going to be a diverse range of people who reflect the modern world.
Even if Python isn’t to your taste, The Flying Circus was one of the most inventive comedy shows of all time, and a huge success for the BBC. To dismiss Python’s genius out of hand because they don’t check all the boxes in your corporate diversity guidance is blinkered and, well, silly.
The Pythons are men of the left, but they’re a damned sight more sensible than their former employers. John Cleese tweeted that the group, which included the late Graham Chapman, who was gay, was “remarkably diverse for our time.”
Terry Gilliam, the only American in the group, responded by telling a film festival audience, “I no longer want to be a white male ... I tell the world now I’m a black lesbian.”
He wasn’t done:
Now we need one of this, one of that, everybody represented… this is bullshit. I no longer want to be a white male, I don’t want to be blamed for everything wrong in the world: I tell the world now I’m a black lesbian… My name is Loretta and I’m a BLT, a black lesbian in transition.
Since of course the PC left lacks a sense of humor -- let alone irony -- Gilliam’s scorn won’t make a dent. Nothing but low ratings will dissuade the BBC from programming by and for grievance groups.
“[Allen’s] statement made me so angry, all of us so angry,” Gilliam said. “Comedy is not assembled, it’s not like putting together a boy band where you put together one of this, one of that everyone is represented.”
Nor is is it like turning everyone in England into a Scotsman so you can win Wimbledon. Or staging a thoughtful soccer match between the Greeks and the Germans. Or learning how to defend yourself against fresh fruit. Or climbing both peaks of Kilimanjaro.
But hey, good luck with your Inclusiveness Theatre or whatever is it, BBC. And now for something completely different ...
