Sim-O

Upponnothing…

My thoughts on Clarkson’s comments are simple: make them on TV and you can expect to get lots of complaints and outrage; make them in a newspaper and you’d be handsomely rewarded as a ‘star’ columnist. If anything, Clarkson has just provided a perfect example of the kind of jokey hyperbole he gets away with in print without a whisper of outrage being deemed as the work of Satan just because he said it on TV.

There is a very interesting double standard in this country when it comes to what is acceptable on TV compared to what is acceptable in print. Just imagine – for example – a TV news broadcast flicking from a serious news story to an upskirt shot of some female celeb getting out of a taxi or a video report about what Suri Cruise has worn during the week or how ‘she looks all grown up’. It, of course, would probably crash the phone network as outraged masses call in their disgust and complaints.

Yet this is what we get in the tabloids. It seems to me that British Society finds the medium of TV inherently more offensive than the medium of print.

Scottish comedian Brian Limond (@daftlimmy) expressed how happy he would be when Thatcher dies and Louise Mensch, the Conservative MP for Corby, is horrified, horrified I tells you, that the BBC would employ such a man…

Free speech includes the right to be offensive. It includes the right to describe an old woman in terms of such bitter hatred that you talk about her death being a jackpot. It includes the right to post faux-serious arguments like saying you are “removed from reality” if you don’t see that old woman’s death as a celebration. But the point is that our license fee should not go to BBC Scotland so they can commission multiple series from a healthy, middle-aged male who chooses to rain such hate on a woman of eighty-six, now mentally frail, vulnerable and unable to answer him back or defend herself. I hope Mr Limond feels like a big man for frothing over the forthcoming death of a very old woman.

Brian Limond didn’t say he would kill the ex-Priminister, just that he would be so happy he doesn’t think his heart would be able to take it.

I can only imagine how upset and disturbed Louise Mensch is about another BBC employee stating how, if he were in charge he would execute people in front of their family for striking…

Clarkson was asked what he would do with strikers, he replied: “I would have them all shot.”

He continued: “I would take them outside and execute them in front of their families.”

I await an outraged article in a newspaper somewhere calling for the BBC to give this psychopath the sack instead of our hard earned licence fee.

(last paragraph amended so it wasn’t a load of gibberish)