Another Monday has appeared on the horizon, with all the depressing inevitability of an unloved season. As such it is time for my prestigious "Prats of The Week" Award.This week it goes to Nanny's chums in the Northamptonshire Police.
It seems that they are prepared to spend time, money and effort on investigating Basil Brush (a children's TV puppet, that has been entertaining generations of kids and their parents since the sixties).
Basil's crime?
Racism!
It seems that one of his shows featured a gypsy selling pegs and heather.
Needless to say, this provoked outrage amongst some members of the gypsy community, and at least two of them complained to the Northamptonshire force.
The police, clearly having solved all of the reported crime in Northamptonshire, having nothing better to do are therefore investigating the matter.
The programme features Basil's friend, Mr Stephen, falling under a gypsy spell which makes him attractive to women.
Dame Rosie Fortune, who lives above them, tries to sell Basil pegs and heather – but he turns her down.
She then offers to tell Basil's fortune, but he says:
"I went to a fortune teller once and he said I was going on a long journey."
Mr Stephen then asks him what happened, to which Basil replies:
"He stole my wallet and I had to walk all the way home."
Boom Boom!
The irony is that this episode was first shown on the BBC six years ago, and has been repeated eight times since. It is also available on DVD "Basil Unleashed".
Best rush out and buy it now, before the police ban it.
Seemingly the force are studying the video for evidence of the racism.
Joseph Jones, vice chairman of the Southern England Romany Gypsy and Irish Traveller Network, said:
"This sort of thing happens quite regularly and we are fed up with making complaints about stereotypical comments about us in words that we find racist or offensive.
Racist abuse of black people is quite rightly no longer deemed acceptable, but when a comedian makes a joke on TV about pikeys or gippos, there's no comeback.
Travellers have historically sold heather and pegs, but they don't do it anymore for a living. It could be that someone thought this was a kind of stereotyping."
When I was a student at Edinburgh University I was referred to on more than one occasion (in a jocular manner) as an "English bastard", yet I didn't go running to the police.
Why should I?
Had I done so, the police would quite rightly have pointed out that they had better things to do with their time.
Northamptonshire police, well deserving "Prats of The Week".
Bulletin for Mr Jones & his bands of loveable, law-abiding, tax-paying merries:-
ReplyDelete"If you don't like the heat stay out of the kitchen".
And as for the Northamptonshire Constabulary, a well deserved prats award. "Come along quietly now Mr Brush" (having smashed in door without warning at 0600 dressed as Secret State Police thugs from film 'Brazil') "Anything you say can and will be used in evidence against you. Anything you don't say will be taken as your admission of guilt, which in any case has already been decided by the media we now spin to, pre-judice. We have a camera crew with us and press officers at taxpayers expense to tell the public all about your guilt and how the twenty-five of us managed to track you down, break down your door while you were sleeping dangerously and arrest you. This will put film in the can for our next reality TV show: Fox Hunting With Northamptonshire's Finest"
Just what is it with these SWAT team "heroics" of breaking down doors? In my day we used a little intelligence, common sense and detective work. We knocked quietly and discreetly on most doors and did not need a truck full of masked, SS lookalikes to collar our villains. We were Englishmen.
Another Monday has appeared on the horizon, with all the depressing inevitability of an unloved season.
ReplyDeleteKen! Ken! Cheer up!
Do something! Go and buy yourself a St Patrick’s Day bucket of KFC and fries with double lashings of salt and vinegar. How could anyone still be gloomy after a bucket of KFC?
And anyway ...
Is there such a thing as an “unloved season”? I think not.
Summer: Today it's another glorious Monday reminiscent of the height of summer - a beautiful blue sky, the baking sun .... Granted, there may be clouds in the way so you can't actually see them but who cares? Just knowing they're there; what more could anyone ask for?
Autumn: It's so heart-warming, reminiscing about a visit to my bank manager last autumn saying I thought the bull market was over and I wanted out, so that ...
Spring: Today I can look at the global financial turmoil and crashing markets and delight in how much I haven't lost so far this year.
And then there's your web site. Thanks for those Falling Down YouTube snippets. I bought the DVD last week and must admit, it's one of the funniest movies I've seen in a long time - also highly applicable.
So hurry up and put those rose-tinted spectacles back on. We barely recognise you without them.
Racism is a strange thing really, I was told at one of Nanny's diversity and difference lectures (Pass the sick bag please) which I was forced to attened as an employee of the NHS, that if someone made an accusation of racism (or homophobia) the police are obliged to take it seriously and it is up to the accused to PROVE THEIR INNOCENCE....This goes against the principle of innocent until proven guilty that has always been at the centre of our legal system.
ReplyDeleteNow as I understand it, traveller is not a race, I accept the original Gypsy people maybe a race, but the people that we see in this country that move around from site to site are not pure gypsies.
BTW....I see the film censors in the People's Republic of Liverpool are trying to implement a policy that will give an Eighteen certificate to any film that has anyone smoking in it....Where will this lead? ....Will Coronation Street and Eastenders be reclassified as adults only as it shows people drinking...another of Nanny's pet hates....Oh I know....Let's ban Ready Steady Cook as that shows people eating, something else that will not be tolerated...Papers Please. Boom Boom.
Tonk, our legal system has been well and truly nobbled. So much new legislation has been introduced so hastily and with so little democratic scrutiny by twenty-something oiks who know not of that which they advise that we are pretty much doomed on the justice front. When a government establishes a Ministry of Justice I think watch out because it usually means the opposite. The erosion and undermining of ancient rights and freedoms, laws that have stood the test of time and a disinterested, impartial police and judiciary have taken their toll. The police and judiciary have become politicised, burdened by the notion of political crimes and the most stupendous, stifling bureaucracy worthy of 1960's East Germany. As an old fashioned ex-copper the way suspects are treated nowadays, dependent upon how politically sensitive the alleged crime is, disgusts and horrifies me. Guilty until proven innocent has not just entered the justice system it is symptomatic of the way central and local government treats every citizen. And it is all made to appear so normal.
ReplyDeleteDixon,
ReplyDeleteRe the law being made by oiks, you are quite right.
The jaw dropping irony of these ill thought through laws is that the oiks who made them up claimed to be lawyers (or people with connections to lawyers); eg Bliar, Lord Forkbender, Lord Puginwallpaper etc.
Where was Her Majesty's Opposition when these laws were passed?
It used to be said that the reason 'Property Crime' usually attracted greater punishment than 'Violent Crime' was because the Law-makers had no experience, and therefore little fear, of criminal violence, whereas they did have great concern for their property.
ReplyDeleteIt seems that the same principle still applies: Since the lawmakers have no contact with the world in which most of their constituents live, how can their legislation reflect anything more than their half-brained, half-arsed view of the world?
As can be seen from the case of Mayor Livingstone a few years ago and from all sorts of semi-scandals in Parliament more recently, when they have made the laws, their involvement with them is over; the laws are there for us to follow, not them!