Delingpole: This Woke Comedy Is Why We Hate the BBC

LONDON, ENGLAND - NOVEMBER 13: The BBC headquarters at New Broadcasting House is illuminat
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James Delingpole

Just in case you haven’t cancelled your £159 licence fee, yet, the BBC has issued a helpful reminder.

It takes the form of the most nauseatingly woke ‘comedy’ skit this irredeemably woke propaganda organisation has yet broadcast.

Here it is. (Keep some needles handy to stick in your eyes in case it all gets too much)

In case you couldn’t bring yourself to watch, let me briefly summarise the contents of the sketch.

A skinny white blonde American girl goes into a hairdresser’s salon.

An overweight black woman asks how she would like her hair.

The blonde [somewhat implausibly, but hey, this is wacky comedy] shows a picture of Bob Marley in his trademark dreadlocks.

Blonde: Don’t you think I can pull that off?

Black Woman: I don’t, erm. But it’s not really about that. Don’t know if you’ve ever heard of the term cultural appropriation before?

Blonde [ditzily, stupidly, because she’s white and blonde, obvs]: Oh I love culture. I went to Berlin once and all my friends there had dreadlocks.

Black Woman: Yeah, I’m sure they did. OK. If I were to wear my hair in dreadlocks and I went in to work, say in an office, I would be told to wear my hair straight to look more professional. [Delingpole/Author’s Note: in the current climate, I find this unlikely to the point of near impossibility, but still…]

Blonde [ditzily, stupidly, because she’s white and blonde, obvs]:  That would be really cute.

Black Woman: OK. Yeah. You’re not getting it. Let’s not do this. I’m gonna ask you to leave.

Blonde: Wait, what? Why?

Black Woman: I tried to explain. But you weren’t listening. So let’s just end this now.

White woman [but an OK white woman because she’s probably a lesbian]: Oh it’s nothing personal. We just hate you here.

Blonde: Are you serious?

White lesbian type [ushering out blonde contemptuously, as if wafting away a bad smell]: Please hurry up. I just made food and you’re keeping me from eating.

All right, in the BBC’s defence you could point out that this is not a home-grown production but an import from the U.S. of some terrible woke sitcom, now in its third season, called Shrill.

But two points need to be made here. First, the BBC didn’t have to buy this excruciatingly unfunny piece of woke agitprop: the BBC chose to buy it, with licence-fee-payers’ money. Second, the BBC certainly didn’t need to extract that scene and post it on Twitter to draw attention to the sketch: yet it did.

Now it could, of course, be that the BBC posted this clip on Twitter in a state of sublime ignorance. Perhaps, whoever put it up genuinely believed that this was state-of-the-art humour, such as the kids enjoy, and that therefore this would be a good advertisement for the ailing broadcaster’s produce.

But I doubt it. This looks to me much more like a calculated gesture of contempt for the BBC’s traditional audience. It’s the equivalent of such old insults as rubbing up and down the buttons of your coat in someone’s face or parking your tank on their lawn. It says: We are your masters now. Surrender or die. But preferably die. You have no place in our bright new future.

What this BBC-endorsed, bright new future would seem to entail is a world where: it is now perfectly acceptable, nay, encouraged to show white people as being feeble-headed, insensitive, risible; to show a black person as simultaneously vulnerable to ingrained racist prejudice (eg the wholly imaginary scenario in which a black person is not allowed to wear dreadlocks in the office) yet smiling and patiently reasonable (for the most part) in the face of the unconscious bias and microaggressions of a stupid white woman); to show that ‘cultural appropriation’ is not a politically correct concept we should laugh at but rather something real, important, serious and to be avoided at all cost; to show that rudeness and contempt and removal of services and ostracisation are the correct punishment for stupid white people who infringe these sensible rules…

Oh – and as numerous commenters mentioned below the BBC’s post on Twitter, the claim that dreadlocks are an exclusively black thing is historically inaccurate. Numerous cultures have worn dreadlocks, including the Minoans – a civilisation which predated Bob Marley by several centuries.

There has been lots of negative press recently about the BBC’s disgraceful behaviour over the Martin Bashir interview with Princess Diana. This, so the narrative goes, is the reason why people have been abandoning their licence fee in droves. I don’t believe this. Sure Bashir was devious, dodgy, underhand; sure the BBC’s tacit endorsement of his tactics was inexcusable. But I don’t believe that people are in the habit of denying themselves their entertainment licence on a point of moral principle. People are much more likely to stop subscribing to something if they believe the product stinks.

The BBC’s product stinks. The BBC utterly despises its audience. That is why its viewers are deserting it.

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