HAIKU:

phil collins has made

a tit of himself again

now there's a surprise

Just lately, the hating-of-Phil-Collins has reached an epic peak. Those two South Park guys devoted an entire episode just to hating Phil Collins. They have said as much in interviews. There is even a website dedicated to hating Phil Collins. Disappointingly, it appears to be run by disgruntled Peter Gabriel fans, who perceive him as "the man who fucked up Genesis". Which is akin to hating Hitler for his moustache. The words "gap in market" spring to mind.

Lo! Just when people are waking up to malevolence in their midst, up jumps Phil Collins kicking up a fuss over the fact that he was duped into appearing on the Brass Eye Special which "spoofed paedophilia". Hmmm.. is this the same Phil Collins that we know and generally fail to love?

2.11.1989 London, Royal Albert Hall: Roger Daltrey, John Entwistle, Pete Townshend Tommy - Show with special guests: Steve Winwood (Eyesight To The Blind), Patti Labelle (The Acid Queen), Billy Idol (Cousin Kevin), Phil Collins (Uncle Ernie)

Can the same Phil Collins who was recently crying to the world about having been tricked into "spoofing paedophilia" have actually appeared live onstage at the Albert Hall, enacting a part which, for all the world, spoofs paedophilia? Surely that would give Phil Collins Not A Leg To Stand On re; the "Brass Eye" controv, reducing his entire objection in one swell foop to "I WAS NOT IN ON THE JOKE"?

Non UK readers who don't know what the whole "Brass Eye Special" furore is about can read up on it in a multitude of places.

UK readers don't have to, as the tabloid press had a right old field day making sure everyone knows all about it.

Thanks to all this hoo-hah we people who had the foresight to tape it, just as we tape all Brass Eyes, are constantly begged for a looksee by persons who had not said foresight, but found out about it via the tabloid press. This is but the least of the ironies which have piled up in the course of this extraordinary furore.

Such a controversy begs a question, in fact several questions which are kinda intertwined: if we cannot make jokes about paedophilia, what exactly can we make jokes about? If we cannot make jokes about it, in what ways can we refer to paedophilia in the media?

As one who has been acclaimed as a satirist by people in American universities who know big words, I would say that you have to take the piss out of everyone/everything or else you are prejudiced. I would put it to you that curtailing That Which We Can Joke About leads pretty swiftly to a philosophical position where we can make jokes about nothing. As a Zen Buddhist I find jokes about nothing objectionable.

It has been said that the Brass Eye Special was more about the nature of the hysteria surrounding media coverage of paedophilia than paedophilia itself. Having seen the programme in question (and - have me pulled apart by percherons if you will - I quite enjoyed it) I would say this was a fair assessment.

Richard Littelejohn devoted an entire column in The Sun to the contrary position. He went on to end his column with a flip little aside about farmers in Wales allegedly injecting sheep with foot and mouth in order to gain compensation. "I didn't know foot and mouth was a sexually transmitted disease". Hey RJ: Morris cannot make paedo-jokes,(though it is not really fair to suggest that Brass Eye made anything like a "paedo-joke") but you can make bestiality/racist jokes about a national tragedy? Frankly I'm baffled.

Ah yes, jokes about the Welsh. I thoroughly objected to Ann Robinson's joke about putting the Welsh into "Room 101". Inconsistent, moi? Well for a start, scientists using electron comedy microscopes have been able to find no trace of humour in what the Schoolmarm Superstar said. She just came out with a Hitlerian rant about how she did not care for us. Host Paul Merton made a few jokes, mainly at the expense of Robinson's racism.

Few of her fellow celebrities objected. Only the Great Helmsman Nicky Wire and that guy out of Hear'Say. Someone sent her a death threat. It was sent from Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobw-llllantysiliogogogoch. And people say the Welsh have no sense of humour…

Two sorts of jokes are customarily levelled (mainly by English people) at the Welsh. To wit: we fuck sheep and speak Welsh. The first is not only racist but so plain hackneyed that no humorist worth their salt should consider it. As for the second - customarily it revolves around Welsh taking words from other languages. Of course it does. Welsh, as any other language, does not exist in a vacuum. Put like that, it has no comedic resonance, so jokes about Welsh have to contain the underlying assumption that it is the only language that actually does this. Which is surely (albeit subconsciously) racist also. Look, I don't make these rules. My position is clearly delineated above. These are "broadcast guidelines" of which I speak. In the case of Robinson, the Welsh were exempted from these guidelines because we are in a position of power in the UK (sez who?), and because the programme was "light entertainment". Huh? The Black & White Minstrel Show was "light entertainment" - when are they bringing that back then?

When I say you can joke about anything, I have to make one proviso: it is the quality of the joke that matters. Indeed, when you think of a good joke about something, it is downright bad manners not to share it with the world. So-called "non-PC" jokes are not bad because they deal with objectionable material, they are bad because they are inaccurate. Jim Davidson's "Chalky" was not crap because it took the piss out of black men, it was crap because it was like no black man ever in the history of the world. Similarly, Littlejohn's joke about Welsh farmers injecting sheep is not crap because it is a racist/bestiality joke based around a national tragedy (and therefore should not be permitted by his own criteria earlier in the column), it is crap because it is based entirely on a loosely-constructed series of facile, hackneyed lies. Nowhere does it touch base with reality in any shape or form.

"Brass Eye" touched base with reality only too well. There was not one thing in the entire programme that did not resonate comedically with the mass media it chose to satirise: the Eminem parody, the seventies glam rock, the crazed anti-Paediatrician mobs, the American junior beauty pageants, the ludicrously lax treatment of paedophile repeat-offender Sidney Cooke.

Ah but as I said, I don't make the rules. If there are to be rules, because certain topics might offend, is it not unreasonable to demand that these rules be applied right across the board? To do otherwise is to proliferate prejudice.

This is partly about what can or can't be done with comedy, but the general hysteria-about-the-place seems to stem from a notion that, by "making light of paedophilia", one is actually encouraging it. Indeed, the Daily Mail claimed in a totally imbecilic fashion, paedophiles were exchanging videos of the Brass Eye Special in prison and using them "for gratification". Even if there was anything in the programme which a paedophile would get turned on by (if there was I missed it) why are they freely allowed to trade salacious material in prison? But then, when did the right-wing tossers at the Mail ever let logic get in the way of a hot story of indignant pseudo-moral outrage?

Insofar as I know, no-one quite knows what causes paedophilia but it is generally supposed to be a) a "chemical imbalance" b) being paedophiled upon yourself as a child by an Uncle Ernie/Phil Collins type figure c) being depraved and corrupted by imagery which encourages paedophilism.

The furore surrounding Brass Eye suggests that the forces reacting against Brass Eye think (C) to be the chief cause. Let us pretend for the sake of pretending that we agree with them. If so, then it was thoroughly irresponsible of C4 to show the Brass Eye Special

Would it be sensible, however, to apply this rule merely to a comedy programme? Would it not be more sensible if this policy were employed thoroughly and across the board? I'm talking adverts here. Suppose for the sake of argument there is a danger of someone watching Brass Eye (a satirical programme shown well after the watershed with adequate warning) and getting turned into a paedophile. It would therefore follow that there is a greater danger of someone getting turned into a paedophile by some of the suspect imagery on advertisements. The GAP ones with young kids (wearing clothing from that very boutique) singing salacious songs. That goddam weird one where the two girls are comparing the looks of each others fathers, and one of their dads puts on some kind of get-rid-of-the-grey type gunk which results in his daughter asking her friend "what do you think of my dad now?" to name but two. Would it not be all the more likely that these and other advertisements (which are shown between programmes and do not have a huge sign marked "satire" hung about their metaphorical necks but are instead by their very nature a kind of idealised look at day-to-day existence) constantly chip away at the subconscious of this apocryphal latent paedophile? Wanna start a moral panic? It is there, every day, gentlemen of the press. Will the oh-so-responsible media be having a go at the advertisers who pay their wages? Somehow I doubt it.

The UK gutter press largely caused last year's moral panic re paedophilia. They've been doing it for years. "Mods and rockers" was one of theirs. They've got this weird way of reporting since they find it hard to write about anything other than what everyone else is writing about. For a few months they will see paedophiles everywhere, or maybe all the Rottweilers in the UK will start attacking babies and then just as suddenly stop. Recently it was race-riots. A white guy gets beat up by black youths. Suddenly there was interracial conflict everywhere. The fact there are many white-on-white crimes, black-on-black crimes, etc, and maybe the fact that in some of the black-on-white/white-on-black crimes the racial factor is incidental, buttered no parsnips. They just carried on hacking away at the same old subject until something more newsworthy came along, playing into the hands of fans of the old one-bollocked carpet biter.

The One-Bollocked Carpet Biter

If one of my main criticisms of the Brass Eye Special (apart from it having Phil Collins in which spoiled it a bit) was that it did not have a go at advertising, my other main criticism is that it left those hypocritical bastards the Catholic Church utterly unscathed.

Several months ago, I forget quite when, I happened to catch a news/debate type TV programme in the course of which Jeremy Paxman was quizzing some Catholic Church high-up. A priest had abused a young boy in his care, and the church had moved said priest to another parish without informing his new parishioners of the man's record. Paxman, bless his cotton socks, was growing as agitated at this outrage as his professionalism would allow. The fellow countered Paxman's arguments with the remark that paedophilia goes on in all walks of life and he didn't know why the Catholic Church was being singled out for this criticism. "BECAUSE YOU'RE ELECT OF GOD YOU FUCKING OAF!" I yelled at the TV. There is also the fact that, unlike Chris Morris, priests are in a position of trust. I fully expected there to be rioting in the streets the next day, and not a Catholic Church left standing by the weekend. You know what? Nothing. Not a sausage from the populace at large, nor from the newspapers.

Let me run that by you again. Someone makes a "funny TV programme about child abuse" and the newspapers carry on about virtually nothing else for a whole week until the Queen Mother falls over on her birthday and Prince Charles falls off a horse (see it's not all bad news) and they have something else to drivel on about. Someone actually commits child abuse, and not only does the Catholic Church tacitly condone same, openly and on TV, but there is not a peep out of anyone. What the fuck is the matter with people?

Folk Devils and Moral Panics - Stan Cohen, re how the UK press actually manufactured the Mods & Rockers riots.

Manning - Jonathan Margolis. Read about notorious non-PC comedian Bernard Manning. His black friends, his work for Asian charities, why he won't do mother-in-law jokes. Everything you know is wrong.

As co-author of the notorious Great Pop Things cartoon, Colin B Morton has had his work criticised on several occasions due to his conviction that pop stars are his to play with.

Great Pop Things has only once been criticised, in print, for making fun of what the author saw as a taboo subject. Was it

A) paedophilia B) the holocaust C) improvised music

The management of a certain act expressed distaste because a Great Pop Things cartoon referred to the matter of underage sex in a strip about said act. Which of the following?

A) Hanson B) Charlotte Church C) Bow Wow Wow

Which of the following have complained about being featured in Great Pop Things?

A) Morrissey B) Gary Numan C) The Fall