Matthew Norman: Oh Carol – you just don't get it
Ignorance is no defence and those who defend her only show their own ignorance
Her mother saw nothing intrinsically wrong with the apartheid regime of which her father was a trenchant admirer in private, and her twin brother helped to prepare a coup d'etat on another African nation from behind the gates of a Cape Town home serviced by black people housed in tiny corrugated iron shacks in the garden. Given this thermonuclear family's credentials, there may be small irony in Carol, always until now the Good Thatcher, being the one to come a cropper over race.
Exactly what this overgrown Labrador puppy of a woman said in the green room after BBC1's The One Show last Thursday while chatting with its magnificent presenter Adrian Chiles, the glorious Jo Brand and others is disputed, and speculating about the tennis player's identity has a whiff of decomposing red herring. But when Carol, well known for sharing her late sire's fondness for a tincture, opined that Roger Federer would struggle against "that golliwog" in the Australian Open, she wasn't referring to a white guy.
Some cite Andy Murray, purely as a diversionary tactic, but she must have known he'd been knocked out, and his severe new haircut rules him out anyway. Apart from Federer, in fact, the only men left in the draw by then were Rafael Nadal and Fernando Verdasco. Since neither has a corpuscle of black blood or any other feature that might have lent itself to a jam jar, Carol's grasp of Grand Slam contenders is matched only by her mastery of the prevailing mores of racial nomenclature. Unless, of course, "golliwog" is the code word among those of her age and Sloaney background for any man who hits topspin forehands down the line for a living. Which seems a long shot, if not way over the baseline.
Her bemused reaction to the ensuing melodramatics confirms that she no more comprehends the distasteful nature of the word than does her media claque. If these supporters include a few writers, broadcasters and phone-in callers whose barely repressed rage at the latest evidence that PC wears a straitjacket hints at nightly wet dreams of driving through Stockwell screaming the n-word through a megaphone, the vast majority are, like Carol herself, dense rather than malevolent.
Theirs is a failure of the imagination, the inability to imagine that words spoken without conscious ill intent might be heard with anguish and revulsion. To them, the racist spectrum has the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan at one end and those soundly against lynching at the other, with nothing in between. That vast quagmire of nuance in the middle remains invisible to them, which is why every now and then one of them strolls blithely into the quicksand.
In poor Carol's mind it is all no doubt a load of rot. Foolishness on this scale may verge on the endearing (imagine talking like that with no conception that your audience, being white, might be startled). But ignorance is no defence, and those who defend her reveal nothing but their own ignorance.
Yet if Carol and her voluble clique of what's-wrong-with-golli-anyway-cos-I-had-a-doll-as-a-kid-and-loved-it-to-bits merchants just don't get it, neither does the BBC. It too has not the faintest grasp of nuance, and the dearth is proving catastrophic. No one present in the green room asked for her dismissal, or wanted it. They merely did the sensible thing, informing management that a damaging story might break, as tends to happen when a sleb gives voice to rampant idiocy in a crowded room, and the wise response would have been a stern word from a senior executive.
He or she needed only explain what should need no explanation: that even if the French player Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, whom I assume she had in mind, does bear a passing resemblance to the character on the old Robertson's jar, this is the sort of phrase not be uttered again on BBC soil; and that if she was naively unaware of the implications, she might think of educating herself as to why golli, wog and the two elided are offensive both to black people and to the civilised of any colour.
To sack so good-natured a character for an imbecile remark in a private conversation, and cause her far more distress than she herself could have caused, is in its comparatively trifling way as absurd a misjudgement as the refusal to screen the Gaza appeal. These errors are symptoms of the illness paralysing this last great national institution like some kind of motor neurone disease of the soul. It is the pathological terror of causing offence, and it seems to me far more lethal and pernicious than the casual insensitivity to causing offence of Carol and her ilk.
In her case it was the fury of the liberal left the Beeb acted to avoid, and with Gaza the outrage of the illiberal right, so in this regard we can discern some kind of balance. But then it's hard to think of any group of which the BBC isn't scared to death these days, other of course than that shrinking, squealing band of us who watch its disintegration with breaking hearts. For there's a dreadful, ominous sense, mounting and solidifying up all the time, that the BBC as we knew and adored is dying; that the rank cowardice inherent in these pitiful errors has become so corrosive and endemic among its management that the decline is irreversible.
If we are witnessing an assisted suicide in slow motion, there's no knowing precisely when the Swiss clinic will finish the job, but no doubting when the work began. This systemic loss of nerve stems directly from the specific loss of nerve whose fifth anniversary just passed, when Greg Dyke and Gavyn Davies were meekly bounced into resigning in the immediate aftermath of Lord Hutton publishing his unspeakable report.
That initial surrender to bullying opened the floodgates for so many more that the official BBC flag would now be a white flag on a white background were it not for an internal commission warning Mark Thompson that the design might be interpreted as offensively racist.
If Carol Thatcher is too lazy to outgrow the casual assumptions of her generation and background, those who sacked her are craven apparatchiks who yield to panic before even attempting to distinguish between the daft and the malicious. This isn't exactly a banquet of choice, but of the two I know which I'd rather carried on working in a building to which staff inexplicably still refer, despite the pre-apartheid South African roots, as White City.
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Comments
The strength of your argument would come through if you wrote in a less florid style. Do you really need to make so many references to sources to make your point ? How many of your readers will actually know what you are referring to in every case and do you really need to bring them all on board to make your point ? Your article reads like your trying to impress an examiner with your background reading.
I also note that one of your sources described the BBC as "hideously white" which I would regard as pretty unacceptable.
She remains sacked - 4/9
Form: a product of a dysfunctional family. Carol will urinate in public, her mother disliked the concept of society, her father liked a drink and her brother is a crook. Will middle England come to the aid of this woman?
Also, when Carol and millions of others were growing up the 'g' word was part of every day life and the back of most jam pots which you collected for little badges... This does not make us all racists that must never look back on that part of our lives again without repenting for our 'sins'...can we allude to the 'little jam jar doll/creatures' LJJDC perhaps ?? But, what sticks in the craw is the assumption of how we should deal with this experience - Perhaps there is someone in the tennis world who looks a bit like an image from the back of a jam jar but thats all it is...a bad joke...I have heard worse things on the 'The One show' that show a real lack of imagination and intelligence....
Perhaps we need legislation to make it an offense to be disproportionatey intolerant.
As is often said, the problem with common sense is that it's not that common.
Mr Norman's tortuous literary style doesn't help him make his case very well, either.
All we're left with is pathetic lilly-livered shrinking violets, whose boldest audacities are seen to be parading mock horror when someone with ten times their guts offends their totally warped PC view of the world.
Why DO you give column inch space to people like this ?
Is this Mark Thompson acting on his own again?
If and when the BBC board ever have the guts to empty out Mark Thompson I am pretty sure that we won't witness similar scenes of support.
Having said that I must declare that if I heard somebody referred to in such a fashion by Carol Thatcher, I too would be pretty offended.
Did the BBC, this confused, lumbering monolithic organisation, overreact to Carol Thatcher? Probably, as they belatedly underreacted to the nauseating antics of Ross and Brand. They remind me of the airlines security policies - do nothing until an outrage occurs, overreact for a few days or weeks, then lapse into the old ways.
Growing up in the East End in the 70s I got used to an array of racial slurs, wog, coon, darkie, gollywog etc. Not everyone didit and I didn't spend my time getting upset about it. Mostly you just got on with because otherwise you'd spend a fair amount of time fighting. But it was offensive and was intended to be so. Please don't presume to tell me what I am offended by.
We've come a long way since then...mostly.
I agree though, the lunatics really have taken over the asylum where the Beeb is concerned.
Having said that though, Ol' Carole does make a 'career' (for want of a better word) out of not 'being in private'; being a slebritee, so she must understand that if people hear what she says, they will judge what she says.
You wouldn't hear the headline 'Man in street uses the g-word' because it isn't newsworthy, people only think it's newsworthy because it's a name they know.
I dunno, it was made in jest, I doubt anyone was overly offended (apart from at her stupidity) but then again, I doubt anyone is overly upset that she has been sacked either (apart from her). Maybe it was the excuse beeb was looking for?!
I've just seen on the news some over-excited woman from the One Show editorial team banging on like Supernanny that Carol said sorry but it wasn't a good enough apology.
Is there anyone with editorial control at the BBC with the ability to make intelligent judgements about what is appropriate and proportionate?
What we have here is a situation akin to those in totalitarian dictatorships - people reporting their colleagues and neighbours for ideological impurity, and the wrath of the Powers That Be making examples of any offenders it can unearth. It's sickening that the likes of Adrian Chiles thrive in our societyL toadies, snitches, and drips.
If no-one said anything directly to her at the time, they are cowards lacking any moral standing.
So, what's this about Adrian being 'shocked' by Carol's simile? Adrian, a divorced forty something who attends football matches with Frank Skinner and goes downn the pub.
A job reinforcing reaction perhaps?
PATHETIC and CRAVEN.
As for the po faced BBC exec. whose been defending the OTT reaction of OUR corporation, she sounds just like Yvette Cooper, Beverley Hughes and the rest of the humourless, risk averse, PC drones that populate the higher echelons of politics and broadcasting.
Dont misundestand me i abhor genuine racist language and behaviour but the extremists are seeing shadows where no light has been shone.
Can I ask then, how do you construew the use of the word golliwog used to describe a black person as non-racist?
And I think pretty much the same sort of wisdom should have pertained in this case. I'm no fan of Carol Thatcher, in fact I'm entirely indifferent to her, and I hate racism in all its forms. But to sneak around, telling tales, when a quiet 'word to the wise' would have been so much better. Ignorance is everywhere and in everyone. If we went around sacking every ignorant person there would be no one left in work.
Sometimes people make unpleasant, unthinking remarks and someone else pointing it out to them is usually enough to put them right. If after that a person's behaviour is seen to be deliberatly offensive, even intimidating, then fair enough, action must be taken.
Racism is ugly, but so is sneaking round telling tales.
Do the media think that the people are too stupid and irresponsible to grasp the really big nettles of the day? Do they all think we deserve nothing better than more crappe about the asinine antics that so-called 'celebrities' get up to? The country is falling to pieces, for Christ's sake! Do something worthy of the country, instead of acting like an orchestra playing sentimental schmaltz while the bloody ship sinks.
Yank,Wop,Pom,Taff,Paddy,Yid,Kiwi,Ossi,Sh
Tony Scott