Questiontime

[Stickman]

Ah so that's why Mr Billie Piper has been so controversial he wanted to get his "music" out there for the masses...

 

Come back that other white privileged male James Blunt all is forgiven

 

 

[cloggypop]

I hate wankers that get a different accent when they sing. 

[Scooby Dudek]

Calling out racism again, what a guy. The fact that he is totally ignorant of facts won't stop him.

 

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-51233734

Laurence Fox apologises to Sikhs for 'clumsy' 1917 comments

 

Laurence Fox has apologised for comments he made about the inclusion of a Sikh soldier in a World War One film.

The actor had previously referred to "the oddness in the casting" of a Sikh soldier in Sir Sam Mendes' movie 1917.

"Fellow humans who are Sikhs, I am as moved by the sacrifices your relatives made as I am by the loss of all those who die in war, whatever creed or colour," Fox tweeted.

"Please accept my apology for being clumsy in the way I expressed myself."

His original comments attracted widespread criticism and historians drew attention to the contribution of Sikhs in the British Army during World War One.

About 130,000 Sikh men took part in the war, making up 20% of the British Indian Army, according to the WW1 Sikh Memorial Fund.

Image Copyright @LozzaFox@LOZZAFOX

Report

Speaking on the James Delingpole podcast at the weekend, Fox said: "It's very heightened awareness of the colour of someone's skin because of the oddness in the casting.

"Even in 1917 they've done it with a Sikh soldier, which is great, it's brilliant, but you're suddenly aware there were Sikhs fighting in this war. And you're like 'OK, you're now diverting me away from what the story is'."

Media caption"We like to say that we're the warrior race" Kameldeep Singh Samra explains the importance of remembering the role of Sikh soldiers in the First World War

The former Lewis star also responded to Delingpole's comments about film-makers "shoehorning" people of different ethnicities into dramas.

Fox said: "It is kind of racist - if you talk about institutional racism, which is what everyone loves to go on about, which I'm not a believer in, there is something institutionally racist about forcing diversity on people in that way. You don't want to think about [that].'

What was the contribution of Indian Sikhs in World War One?

Former Coronation Street actress Shobna Gulati responded with an image of Sikh soldiers and queried the inclusion of just one in the film.

Image Copyright @ShobnaGulati@SHOBNAGULATI

Report

Fox later appeared on ITV's Good Morning Britain, where he said the film, which has 10 Oscar nominations, was a "great movie" but that the casting "felt incongruous". He also said people "shouldn't be afraid to say how they feel".

Presenter Piers Morgan told Fox his comments were "insulting to solders who had served" and were "an unfortunate thing to have said" and co-host Susanna Reid added: "Sikhs fought with British forces, not just with their own regiments - it's a historical fact."

Morgan said he had agreed with other things Fox had said in the last two weeks, referring to the actor's high-profile appearance on BBC One's Question Time.

Media captionActor Laurence Fox clashed with an audience member over whether Meghan's treatment in the press was "racist"

The actor clashed with audience member Rachel Boyle, a university lecturer and race and ethnicity researcher, who said the way Meghan Markle had been treated in the press was "racist".

Fox responded to her by saying: "It's not racism, we're the most tolerant, lovely country in Europe. It's so easy to throw the charge of racism at everybody and it's really starting to get boring now."

Footage of Fox's appearance was widely shared on social media - with some praising his comments but others calling them offensive.

The programme received more than 250 complaints, the corporation revealed in its fortnightly report for the BBC complaints service.

The main issues cited were that the "audience [was] not representative of the local area, leading to a pro-Conservative bias" and a "discussion on racism [was] felt to be offensive".

[Stickman]

Good article by Brian Reade on Mr Fox 

 

Brian Reade: Let’s hear it for white, wealthy, middle-aged snowflake melters

Inspired by Laurence Fox's Question Time appearance Brian Reade has written a Blokes Guide to Being Anti-Woke...

It looks like we’ve found our first hero of the decade in Laurence Fox.

The little-known actor, even in his own family, has remarkably achieved Man of the People status for speaking up for some of society’s most neglected victims: liberal-hating, well-off, white middle-aged males who think the world is run by “woke snowflakes” who stop blokes like them “telling it as it is”.

Not content with informing Question Time’s audience it’s racist to call him “a white, privileged 

male” he went on to tell other media that women under 35 are “primed to believe they’re victims” and Sam Mendes putting a Sikh soldier in his film 1917 was racist because it was “forcing diversity on people”. Despite thousands of Sikhs dying for Britain in that war.

He’s been cheered to the rafters by fellow rich, white, middle-aged, PC-hating media voices who feel their time has come.

And with Britain being led by one of their own, who thinks women MPs who beg not to be addressed with violent language are talking “humbug”, some Muslim women look like “bank robbers” and gays are “tank-topped bum boys”, maybe it has.

So it’s time for all men to get up to speed if they want to be taken seriously in the 2020s. To help, I’ve perused right-wing columnists, plus Toby Young on Twitter, and come up with a Bloke’s Guide to Being Anti-Woke.

It tells you what to think on issues that don’t affect you but which you must be enraged about to feel you’re still relevant.

Here goes:

 

 

What to say about black faces in British dramas: There shouldn’t be any before 1960 unless they were bus conductors or minstrels.

On trans issues: It’s b*****ks. You’re either Arthur or Martha.

On vegans: Don’t you anaemic weirdos tell me to try a fake sausage when it doesn’t have the quality of one made from the leftovers of a butcher’s slab encased in a pig’s intestine.

On immigrants: They come over here picking our veg, cooking our curries, performing our heart by-passes, but I ask you, who needs them?

On Katie Hopkins: Phwoah.

On cyclists: Who pays the bloody road tax, you Lycra-clad jessies?

On Brexit: You lost. We won. It’s our time now.

On Boris Johnson: See last answer.

On burkas: See last berk.

On child poverty: I’ll believe it exists when I see the bleeders staring at their iPhone 12s with no shoes on their feet.

On teachers: There would be a lot less violence among kids if they still beat the 10-times tables into them with canes.

On gay rights: Why do they have to rub it in our faces?

On atheists: Religion is the bedrock of our constitutional monarchy and if you don’t believe in it then, as a good Christian, I hope you rot in hell.

On global warming: It’s a lie. Let me tell you how much I’m spending on electricity to keep my house warm.

On benefits claimants at the bottom: A shower of work-shy parasites.

On benefits claimants at the top: They’re great for tourism, gawd bless ’em.

On gender pay equality: Why, when they’re only there to make the tea and look pretty?

On #MeToo: When my missus used to get her bits felt she took it as a compliment.

 

And on, and on, until they get so angry about issues they know nothing about they collapse snarling, in a heap.

Never to be a-woken.

 

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/brian-reade-lets-hear-white-21352977.amp?utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=sharebar&__twitter_impression=true

 

 

[Bobby Hundreds]

The mirror should change it's website layout to look exactly like the daily mails. The mail has absolutely nailed it in providing utter horseshit wrapped in celebrity bollocks that looks like a clean news set up. The mirrors site is an eyesore even under Reades article there the banner is a woman in a wedding dress saying "this woman ruined her wedding dress by gambling on a fart and lost". May aswell be the sport.

[cloggypop]

7 minutes ago, Bobby Hundreds said:

The mirror should change it's website layout to look exactly like the daily mails. The mail has absolutely nailed it in providing utter horseshit wrapped in celebrity bollocks that looks like a clean news set up. The mirrors site is an eyesore even under Reades article there the banner is a woman in a wedding dress saying "this woman ruined her wedding dress by gambling on a fart and lost". May aswell be the sport.

I thought you were joking. 

 

 

But things went from bad to worse and ended up with the couple feeding each other wedding cake with "poo-stained hands".

[Mudface]

22 minutes ago, Stickman said:

Good article by Brian Reade on Mr Fox 

Good stuff from Marina Hyde too.

 

Want to know what racism feels like? Ask Laurence Fox

He may not have learned much history at his minor public school, but the left-behind luvvie knows it’s wrong to cast a Sikh in a first world war film


Cold open: an Oxford police station. Maybe a guy with a long scarf bicycles past with a pile of books and an oar on each shoulder. Inside, we find a black woman attempting to report a crime to a police inspector, who is theatrically banging his head on the desk and shouting: “Bo-ring!” Could she just tell him about how – . No, she couldn’t, he says, because this is a lovely country, so her experience simply hasn’t happened. He wants us to come together.

 

Why doesn’t she? She needs to stop being the – what’s the expression? Fly in the ointment? Skeleton in the closet? It’s on the tip of his tongue. In fact, if anything, says the inspector, he has been the victim of a crime. Warming to his theme, he rules that the real criminal is her for raising it.

 

Cue opening titles of ITV’s big new Sunday night detective drama: HATHAWAY.

 

In any sane world – I know, right? – this show would already be in production, because that’s the way it has always been, meaning it’s the RIGHT way. First, there was Inspector Morse, starring Inspector Morse, and he was deferentially assisted by Sergeant Lewis. Then, when Morse went to the great whodunnit in the sky, Sergeant Lewis made inspector and, in due course, he got his own show: Lewis. Inspector Lewis was in turn deferentially assisted by Sergeant Hathaway, who I assumed was real, but was apparently played by the actor, musician and thought leader Laurence Fox. In due course, Inspector Lewis himself bowed out, by which point Hathaway had been promoted to inspector.

 

And yet: no eponymous Sunday night show of his own. No deferential sergeant of his own. It’s a scandal. This was the way things were – but now they are not. Similarly, just as there had always been iconic roles for James Fox back in the day, so there would surely always be the same for his son Laurence.

 

But now, evidently, there aren’t. So I want you to forget everything you think you know about what happened since Laurence went on Question Time last week and told a mixed-race audience member she was being racist to him by making boring charges of racism. Tempting as it might be to misdiagnose, this is not just the sort of midlife crisis you would expect from one of the lesser telly chefs.

 

No, THIS is the reality: Laurence’s story is a tale from acting’s rust belt, about the hollowing out of the theatrical heartlands, where the job and dignity your father could count on have been stolen. By whom? I don’t know. Sikhs maybe? We’ll get onto that later. For now, it is increasingly clear that the old certainties have evaporated. And there are some people who are going to feel very, very left behind. We should listen to these actors.

 

Indeed, this is why Laurence could be found on Julia Hartley-Brewer’s TalkRadio show by Monday morning, expanding on his QT rant, going: “We lay all our troubles on the working man. And the working man has had enough of it.”

 

Damn straight. I’ve always felt Laurence has huge second-toughest-at-Rada energy to him. And just like him, I’m sick of these elites who have never done a tough day down t’acting pit. The hardscrabble truth is that the theatrical economy no longer works in the way it did for your daddy or his daddy before him. Or, to put it more specifically re Laurence’s situation: how come HE’S not admiring Hitler in Remains of the Day, while Tony Hopkins has to miss his own dad’s death because he’s got the dinner to serve? Instead, Laurence feels as if his only choice is going on James Delingpole’s podcast to lose his shit that there’s a Sikh in Sam Mendes’s 1917 movie. I mean, I guess it’s zeitgeisty. But set against his dad’s zeitgeisty stuff, it’s not exactly sharing some acid and a French chick with Mick Jagger in Performance, is it?

 

And, of course, when hope moves out, Trump moves in. I think this is why Laurence recently announced that he put on a Maga hat and walked round wherever he lives in south London. He says one woman told him he was crazy. A bit like that scene in Die Hard 3 where Bruce Willis has to stand in Harlem wearing a racist sign or everyone’s going to get blown up by villain Jeremy Irons. (Sidenote: a contempo version of that is exactly the sort of part Laurence should have had. But they have skipped him and gone straight for Tom Hiddleston, haven’t they? The shits.)

As for what attracted Fox to Trump, maybe it was the president’s deathless comment: “I love the poorly educated.” And putting my own public school heritage to use, I want to attain the levels of empathy Laurence rose to on Question Time. So I’ll just inform him definitively that a huge amount of his bitterness springs from the fact he went to a minor public school. (Harrow. I will not be taking letters on this classification; thank you.)

 

Certainly his outsider shtick is my favourite since Jacob Rees-Mogg (who didn’t go to a minor public school) told last year’s Conservative party conference: “But as I grew up in the British establishment, I know how awful it is. I see its faults perhaps more clearly than most do, and its determination, its anti-democratic wish to cling to its power come what may.” Then again, I think we all have to make a lot of time for the latest effusion from Lily Allen (Bedales), who reacted to Laurence’s nonsense by announcing she was “sick to death of luvvies forcing their opinions on everybody else” and advising him to “stick to acting”. Say what you like about this story, but it really has brought all the preposterous pricks to the yard – and yes, I certainly count myself in that.

 

As for where Laurence could have gone after QT, I suppose he could have donned the Black Poloneck of Poorly Essayed Contrition. I refer of course to the night that Dapper Laughs opted to become Dapper Tears, and appeared on Newsnight to apologise for “pushing the boundaries”.

 

Instead, Fox decided to double down, telling Delingpole of the “oddness” of casting a Sikh in 1917. “It is kind of racist,” he honked, “if you talk about institutional racism, which is what everyone loves to go on about, which I’m not a believer in, there is something institutionally racist about forcing diversity on people in that way.”

When the contribution of Sikh soldiers to the first world war was later mentioned to him, he replied: “I’m not a historian.” But luv: you don’t NEED to be a historian. You honestly just need access to the website google.com. Because if you search the words “Sikhs” and “first world war”, every single result from the very first one down will tell you how Sikh soldiers arrived on the Western front from 1914, how they were instrumental at Ypres, and so on for miles and miles. It literally couldn’t be easier to find out about. But you see, basic investigations aren’t the Hathaway MO. The Hathaway MO is to be profoundly incurious, to not ask any questions at all, or attempt to learn anything, or to think that people with different experiences may have a different point to make from yours. You just accuse the Sikh of ruining the movie.

 

As for where people of colour go after their latest tedious schooling, perhaps they could take #inspo from Laurence himself. After all, this is a man who has repeatedly hawked his divorce experiences round the TV interview sofas, in return for the show plugging his band or whatever – yet who begrudges people of colour having the temerity to have their own problems.

 

Yet again, I think the conclusion is that people of colour need to be EVEN more creative in the way they talk about their experiences to snowflakes like Laurence. Just spitballing here, but would it help if they got caught up in a celebrity divorce, then had a crap album to promote? Because I feel like then it might finally be permissible for them to speak. Until then, his message is clear: you’re still doing it wrong, guys! Pipe down.

[Dougie Do'ins]

Just about to start on BBC1 a couple of hours earlier because of the arl virus.

 

Fiona Bruce presents an hour of topical debate from Weston-super-Mare. On the panel: secretary of state for health Matt Hancock MP, Mayor of Greater Manchester and former secretary of state for health Andy Burnham, chair of neurology and director of the National Institute for Health Research, Health Protection Research Unit in Emerging and Zoonotic Infections at the University of Liverpool Tom Solomon, general secretary of the British Trades Union Congress Frances O'Grady and chef, author, television presenter and restaurant owner Angela Hartnett.

[Bjornebye]

Just now, Dougie Do'ins said:

Just about to start on BBC1 a couple of hours earlier because of the arl virus.

 

Fiona Bruce presents an hour of topical debate from Weston-super-Mare. On the panel: secretary of state for health Matt Hancock MP, Mayor of Greater Manchester and former secretary of state for health Andy Burnham, chair of neurology and director of the National Institute for Health Research, Health Protection Research Unit in Emerging and Zoonotic Infections at the University of Liverpool Tom Solomon, general secretary of the British Trades Union Congress Frances O'Grady and chef, author, television presenter and restaurant owner Angela Hartnett.

Sex rampage? Ive had bigger stiffies watching playbus 

[lifetime fan]

Weston is a fucking shithole.

[Dougie Do'ins]

BBC1 Tonight 20:05 From West London, live at 8:05pm

 

Audience questions from Rugby and live question and comments from social media. On the panel.

 

Matt Hancock MP, health secretary.

Yvette Cooper.

Dame Donna Kinnair, nurse and chief executive and general secretary of the Royal College of Nursing.

John Sentamu, the Aarchbishop of York.

[Sugar Ape]

 

[Bruce Spanner]

I've not watched Question Time for god knows how long as it became something which did my blood pressure no good, but against my better judgement i turned it on tonight.

 

Bercow laying in to the Gov, Jenrick being the horrible spiv he is and Debbonaire somehow managing to bite her tongue and not call him a cunt.

 

Then to the audience 'This isn't about diplomacy, how dare they block a British port? We should have sank their boats'

 

Is this where we are now with debate and access to ministers?

 

'Sink their fucking boats.'

 

Fucking hell.

 

It's been turned off, life's too short.

[Section_31]

Olivia Utley, what fresh hell is this? 

[Bruce Spanner]

11 minutes ago, Section_31 said:

Olivia Utley, what fresh hell is this? 

 

Just bumped another thread!

 

What the fuck is this worthy, worthy fucking drone.

 

'Oh, don't hurt the flowers as they might stop the suns energy allowing other flowers to bloom, but so I'm not misrepresented, let the cunts die, 'cause I'm nice'

 

Fucking baffling how this is a real person.

 

Just imagining Nandy's internal monologue 'Shut up you utter, utter simpleton'.

 

[Captain Willard]

Fiona Bruce just called a women “that man at the back” . She’ll be posting on the trans thread next. 

[Bruce Spanner]

Nandy taking names!

 

Decimating all before her.

[Jairzinho]

4 hours ago, Captain Willard said:

Fiona Bruce just called a women “that man at the back” . She’ll be posting on the trans thread next. 

About a month ago there was some question about racism in cricket and she asked the one non white panelist first who made a half serious "Oh, you're coming to me first as I'm the brown person?" comment. 

 

She spent the rest of the programme visibly sweating, apologising every 20 seconds. It was some of the most awkward television I've ever watched. 

[Rico1304]

I have to admit she was good last night. 

[Captain Willard]

4 hours ago, Jairzinho said:

About a month ago there was some question about racism in cricket and she asked the one non white panelist first who made a half serious "Oh, you're coming to me first as I'm the brown person?" comment. 

 

She spent the rest of the programme visibly sweating, apologising every 20 seconds. It was some of the most awkward television I've ever watched. 

Yes I saw that. I think she was happier on antiques roadshow valuing a brooch that was “ a gift to my great grandmother when she was in domestic service in the big house” I.e stolen. 

[Section_31]

Who's this filthpot?

 

 

[Bruce Spanner]

3 minutes ago, Section_31 said:

Who's this filthpot?

 

 

 

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/feb/14/dehenna-davison-new-tory-mp-pictured-with-alleged-far-right-activists

[cloggypop]

She was on Newsnight last night as well. Dehenna Davison.

[cloggypop]

Mumford & Bums

[Gnasher]

2 minutes ago, cloggypop said:

She was on Newsnight last night as well. Dehenna Davison.

She was one of those rumoured to be joining the Labour Party the other month.