Liken a tennis player to a "golliwog" but don't apologise: lose your BBC job.
Say the word "Paki" and liken someone of Moroccan descent to "a terrorist" but apologise: keep your BBC job. I wonder where the BBC would have stood on Ron Atkinson? Big Ron thought Marcel Desailly was a "lazy, thick nigger". But he did apologise. Which makes everything OK. Isn't being both politically correct and staggeringly hypocritical in the 21st century so awfully tricky…?
Fragrant Carol, I think, only lost her job with The One Show, but remained free to discharge her other Corporation commitments. Not that I’d know whether she had or still has any.
I would be slightly concerned if the BBC took a consistent line and sacked Tony Beke, because then he might be available to make more of the execrable Hole in the Wall. Which my elder son forces me to watch with him.
Forgive me if I’m wandering off topic, but my ideal scenario would be for the BBC to sack him from all its content and get Austin Healey to present HITW. I would get pleasure from imagining his deep shame as he stared at himself in the dressing room mirror before each recording: donning an acrylic sweater, practising his catch phrase (Three! Two! One! Go!) and wondering whatever had happened to the intellectual persona he had spent years faking. There’s a chance he’d realise that his career choices were making Jeremy Guscott’s brief stint on Gladiators look dignified, if not competent.
This sort of incident is a consequence of there being more people on telly. They can’t all have any talent, or be pleasingly evolved. But it is interesting that the little slips twixt racist cunt and lip are not always cosily kept within the celebrity club. I have reservations about what idiots say in comparative private being considered news, and I have considerable doubts about the motives that lie behind every newsplash of this ilk, but the apparent increase in our willingness to expose hypocrisy, ignorance and prejudice does say something positive about the society that we live in.