Читать книгу The World and London According to Nick Ferrari - Nick Ferrari - Страница 5

This is how it works on the radio. You set up a story, and then you line up an interview. ‘The price of fish has gone up this week by 500 per cent, and this means that nobody can afford to buy a nice bit of halibut for their supper. Here to talk about it is the spokesman for the British Fish Board, Arthur Cod.’

So far, so good. But the way things are going, this is how the conversation is likely to progress:

‘Actually, Nick, it’s spokesperson.’

‘Pardon?’

‘I’m the spokesperson for the British Fish Board. Not the spokesman.’

‘Why? Aren’t you a man?

‘Yes, I am a man, but that’s not the point.’

‘What is the point?’

‘I think it’s derogatory.’

‘No, it’s de-radio, actually.’

And we end up not having a conversation about the price of fish, but what word I should use to describe this bloke.

A case in point is the use of the word ‘coloured’. To the innocent among us it was just a word used to describe non-white people and there was no suggestion of it hiding any insult or bad meaning. My generation, and perhaps the one above, then grew up in a very different kind of Britain – multi-coloured, multi-ethnic, multi-cultured – and it was suddenly decided that we shouldn’t say ‘coloured’. Black was black, white was white, and suddenly the word seemed to have some slightly unpleasant undercurrent. Now the pendulum seems to be switching again: I recently had Trevor Philips, head of the Commission for Racial Equality, on the show. He told me he had been addressing a Muslim Conservative association at the Conservative Party Conference, and that he had explained to them that he felt that there was perhaps, after all, a place for the word ‘coloured’. So now we’re all bloody confused about what we can and can’t say. Of course we don’t want to offend anybody, but we don’t know how to go about not offending them.

At seven o’clock in the morning, most of London is just getting up (although some of London is just getting home). People should be lying in bed, scratching themselves as they wake up slowly and wonder what the day has in store for them. They should be grappling with issues no more serious than whether they fancy Shreddies or Weetabix, or whether or not they want jam on their toast. Or honey, perhaps. So what makes them pick up the phone at such an ungodly hour and call a radio station like mine? What are the subjects that make them forget their Crunchy Nut Cornflakes and sit up and listen – and sometimes speak – instead?

This is the one subject that is always bound to get the switchboard lights flashing: race and religion, and what is offensive and what is not. My chats with ordinary Londoners from all sorts of cultural backgrounds are, for me, a masterclass in what it is acceptable to say, where sensibilities lie and what people find to be offensive. And I have come to the conclusion that there is a white, middle-class, liberal, Guardian-reading chatterati so hell-bent on perceiving slights and insults where none exist that not only do they risk turning our country into a humourless, bland place to be, they are doing serious harm to the very people they think they are, in some perverse way, protecting; and in so doing they are denuding our very language.

On the same show that Trevor Philips appeared on, I took a call from a man in Walthamstow. ‘I’m sick of all this political correctness, Nick,’ he tells me. ‘Look, I’m a black bloke. I just want to get on and live my life. You can call me coloured if you want, just so long as you don’t do it in an offensive way. Or you can call me black, I don’t care.’ Then he gave me an example of what he has to put up with. ‘I took some time off work recently. When I got back, I went into a meeting and my boss said, ‘Ah, Gary, good to see you back.’

‘As a joke, I replied, “What do you mean, it’s good to see that I’m black? I’ve always been black. How dare you say that!”

‘My boss freezes with absolute terror. “I didn’t say that.” He turns to someone next to him. “You noticed that I said back, not black, didn’t you? I want it written down in a report.”’

So far, so Ricky Gervais. In Gary’s case, this fear of seeing offence where there is none meant that he couldn’t even make a little joke at his own expense. But it can have even more ridiculous outcomes. When workers at a certain West Midlands borough council were sent novelty stress-relievers in the shape of a pig, they ended up being banned on the basis that they ‘offended’ one woman who worked there. The toys just happened, by unfortunate coincidence, to be delivered around the beginning of Ramadan: this Muslim employee went to her boss and told him she didn’t think it was right that they had toy pigs. The pig, she said, was not a toy in the Muslim religion.

So the council had two options:

1. They could go completely bloody mad and ban all pig products in the office. Or,

2. They could take the employee aside and say, ‘Look, there’s honestly no offence intended. These are just little pig toys. Obviously you don’t want one, and we quite understand that, but ultimately what can we say? That we mustn’t have cows advertising milk because it’s offensive to Hindus?’

Of course, there are no prizes for guessing which way it went. All the toys were banned, calendars in the office that depicted pigs were banned, one person even had a tissue-box cover with Winnie the Pooh on it – that was banned too. The whole office was excised of anything to do with pigs.

The upshot of this is that it sets the cause for integration for ordinary Muslims back about twenty years. Why? Because there is bound to be a vicious, evil, nasty, pernicious group of white Brits who see what has happened and say, ‘There you are, those Muslims are at it again.’ Only of course it’s not the Muslims at it again – it’s one woman finding offence where there is none.

Some people just wake up in the morning wanting to be offended. (I have a sneaking suspicion that it’s the same people who ride bicycles.) At best their complaints are just funny; at worst they put us under the jurisdiction of a kind of thought police who believe they are in a position to stop us from, as they see it, seeing no evil, hearing no evil and speaking no evil. As a result of the machinations of these people, two advertisements were recently taken off the air that perfectly demonstrate the ridiculous situation we now find ourselves in.

The first was for KFC. The advert depicted a bunch of people singing a song while they munched their chicken and rejoiced about the value they were getting for a couple of quid. The advert was withdrawn because people considered that it encouraged children to have bad manners. What a dereliction of duty on behalf of the parents! It’s their job to teach children not to speak with their mouths full, not the television’s. The reason I’m the size I am is because I like the occasional glass of wine. This is not the fault of Oddbins – it’s something I take personal responsibility for myself.

The second advert was for the Renault Megane. It featured the tune ‘I See You Baby Shaking That Ass’, and it showed people dancing and shaking. This, it seems, offended people for two reasons. Firstly they were upset that it showed – and before you read the next word please look away if you are of a sensitive nature – bottoms (albeit fully clothed ones). Secondly, it was deemed to be offensive to sufferers of Parkinson’s disease. Now I have nothing but sympathy for the sufferers of Parkinson’s – my late grandfather was afflicted by it, and I know how terrible it can be. But do these people honestly think a bunch of executives in the ad agency came up with this idea and said, ‘It’ll sell lots of cars. Oh, and we can offend Parkinson’s sufferers into the deal as well.’ I think not…

So now we don’t have fat people, we have people with an enlarged physical condition; we don’t have foreign food, we have ethnic cuisine; we don’t have sex changes, we have gender reassignments. We have to be careful about blackmailing people, or writing on a blackboard. And we most certainly cannot refer to a chairman, or even a chairwoman. It’s even making us lose the respect of our kids.

‘What happened at work today, Dad?’

‘I had a fantastic day today, son.’

‘Really, what happened?’

‘I got a big promotion.’

‘That is fantastic, Dad. What are you now?’

‘I’m a chair.’

‘A chair?’

‘That’s right son. A chair.’

‘Er … great, Dad. Nice one.’