Unbelievable.
{Programme Name:} Sarah Kennedy
{Transmission Date:} 19 – 11 – 08{Comments:}
At around 7.10am on 19 November, Sarah Kennedy wondered how, given that ‘so many Muslims are called Mohammed’, teachers could differentiate between them in class. Mohammed is indeed a fairly common Muslim name, but Sarah is a fairly common English name – indeed, I was once in a class with two Sarahs. My teacher then differentiated between them by calling them ‘Sarah A’ and ‘Sarah M’, cunningly using the first letter of their surnames. Why would or should this be any different with Muslims or children called Mohammed? Does Ms. Kennedy consider Muslims to be special cases in some way? I consider Ms. Kennedy’s singling out of Muslims in this manner to be – at best – passively racist.Ms. Kennedy has form in this area and regularly comes out with ‘ambiguous’ statements that are open to misinterpretation: indeed, just a few moments before this comment Ms. Kennedy needlessly announced a record by Tanita Tikaram (born in Germany, grew up in Basingstoke) in the sort of mock Indian accent that I thought had died with Peter Sellars.
Given the new puritanism currently sweeping the BBC (and Radio 2 in particular) please can the BBC explain why this sort of output is considered appropriate?
Regards,
[The Minister]
From: reception@bbc.co.uk
To: [The Minister] Date: Sat, 27 Dec 2008 5:54 PMDear [Minister]
Thanks for your e-mail regarding the ‘Sarah Kennedy’ programme.
Firstly, I should apologise for the delay in getting back to you. We realise that our correspondents appreciate a quick response and I’m therefore sorry that you’ve had to wait on this occasion.
I understand that you were offended by comments made by Sarah during the programme concerning children with the name Mohammed. I note that your concerns lie with her comments as to how teachers would differentiate between the many children with this name and that you feel that Muslim children were being singled out in this instance.
The editor responsible for this show passes on the programme’s apologies for any offence caused. He has also spoken to Sarah about this.
I can assure you that your complaint has been registered on our audience log. This is a daily report of audience feedback that’s circulated to many BBC staff, including members of the BBC Executive Board, channel controllers and other senior managers.
Thanks again for taking the time to contact us with your feedback.
Regards
[name removed to protect the innocent] BBC Complaints
____________________________
www.bbc.co.uk/complaints
Quite right too. Is Ms Kennedy supremely ignorant, or do we suspect something more sinister?
And good that they were too polite to pick up on the fact that you had referred to Peter Sellars the opera director (not especially renowned for ‘funny accents’) rather than the actor Peter Sellers (who used a particularly unfortunate Indian accent in both The Millionairess and The Party and from memory, played Fu Manchu in Murder By Death). Neither are to be confused with Peter Sallis (the voice of Wallace and one of the three old geezers from Last of the Summer Wine).