Roald Dahl’s family is seeking £500,000 (US $790,300 at current rates) to transfer the hut in which the late author wrote some of his famous children’s novels to the grounds of the Roald Dahl Museum, which has a page dedicated to the appeal here. The family claim that the hut is in a state of “accelerating decay” and might not survive the winter; another report says that nobody in the family has been into the structure in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, for some time. There is some difference over where the money is expected to come from, with much expected to come from “trusts and foundations” but it has also been suggested that a public contribution will be requested.

Roald Dahl’s novels were some of my favourites as a child, and I read all of them up as far as Matilda. I never read Esio Trot or The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me but I read all the earlier ones. I remember reading of his death in 1990 when away at boarding school, and saw it tucked away in a broadsheet newspaper (the Telegraph I think) and recall noticing the distinct lack of any discussion of the event. Still, I cannot justify spending public money on maintaining the hut at a time like the one we are in, and question whether any charity money being spent on it could not be better spent on something else, like providing books for children. The Dahl family clearly did not think it was so valuable until now, when they saw an opportunity to raise publicity and money and attract people to their museum. They should really have acted years ago, rather than letting it sink into ruin by not touching it for more than twenty years after Dahl died.

Image source: Shedworking.

The article (extracted from Chua’s book “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother”) was published in the Wall Street Journal, and an interview with her was published in yesterday’s Guardian, in the Family supplement. It actually reveals that one of her daughters actually rebelled (in public), leading to Chua back-pedalling on some aspects of her parenting methods.

The article made me smell a rat from the beginning, actually. Where are all these Chinese math whizzes and musical prodigies? I’m sure they exist, but they exist in other ethnicities as well. It’s no secret that the Chinese minority in this country has among the best academic results, but the idea that they always get A’s is ridiculous. After all, if it was that easy to get an A, then not every A would be an A. And there is the small fact that there are plenty of Chinese in Europe doing menial jobs, or running restaurants (OK, it’s a skill, but you don’t need to be an academic to run or work in a restaurant). Go to any Chinatown and you won’t find lots of Chinese playing violin concertos, you’ll see them selling food. And if you value playing a musical instrument, why must it be the piano or violin, rather than the cello or the oboe? You can’t have an orchestra only composed of pianists and violinists.

Other writers in the WSJ (including parents and children who were brought up by Chinese immigrant parents) have pulled apart Chua’s arguments better than I can. Hanna Rosin, in an article on WSJ titled Mother Inferior, counters that although people hothoused to master an instrument may achieve technical mastery, that doesn’t mean they will learn to enjoy listening to music — even the Chua women, she says, “rarely express pure love of music; instead they express joy at having mastered it”; one friend who had been raised similarly to the Chua daughters (albeit by German parents) came to hate classical music and has not picked up a violin in a decade. Another mother notes that her dyslexic daughter put herself a punishing programme so as to learn to read, against her parents’ advice, so Chua’s thesis that nothing is fun until you can do it, and kids will not learn on their own initiative but only because of parental bullying, is shown to be groundless.

Then there are the other issues, such as what exactly is wrong with kids staying the night with a friend, or having one over to play? I didn’t have sleepovers, as far as I can remember, as a kid (I hated staying at other people’s houses, even my aunt’s) but my sister did, and it didn’t do her (or her friends) any harm. There can be some embarrassments such as if they wet the bed, but as long as it doesn’t stop them doing things they actually need to do (it’s actually possible to make friends with your kids’ parents, you know, such that you can arrange that they will do their homework there), I fail to see why it’s something to be avoided altogether. Kids have to have fun, rather than spending every waking moment learning to do something they will never particularly enjoy.

(Image source)

Drama productions like ‘Casualty’ aren’t always best served by meticulous attention to detail and accuracy and a certain amount of dramatic licence can be involved in trying to capture the essence of an issue or profession and then conveying this to an audience. We appreciate that even the most minor deviation from accuracy can be irritating to some viewers but there are constraints which mean that we cannot or do not always want to keep as closely to the level of accuracy that some viewers would like us to.

Well, I wouldn’t call this a “minor deviation from accuracy”. It’s a case of ignorantly turning reality on its head. While I don’t have any statistics to hand, I can point to a number of stories of ME sufferers experiencing abusive treatment at the hands of medical staff, as well as callous treatment by some relatives (there are also plenty of stories of selfless dedication among this group, however) and other professionals, such as social workers and teachers. One of my friends, who has severe ME, told me when I showed her (and some other of my friends, including several others with ME), “I don’t have the strength to hit anyone and can’t stand arguments because of the noise”.

I pointed out in my response that, if there had been other BBC dramas which depicted ME more accurately, I would not be making this complaint. There is a widespread perception — perhaps lessened among the public, particularly since the Gilderdale case — that those with ME are ill only psychologically and are at worst putting it on. This is the first dramatic depiction of ME in some time and the so-called sufferer is a manipulative and abusive individual. How does this benefit the public perception of those with ME?

This latest episode starts with him having caused a car accident by driving his (and his wife’s) car off the road, injuring himself and his and Kirsty’s daughter Nita in the process. He does not display violence in this programme, but is on his feet most of the time and sometimes running (keep in mind, two weeks ago he needed Kirsty’s help just to get up off the sofa). Kirsty tells him, within the earshot of a doctor, “you shouldn’t be driving in your condition”, and when the doctor asks what condition that is, Warren says he has ME. Kirsty tells the doctor, “so he says, anyway”. Later on, Warren gives Adam Trueman a list of his symptoms and tells him that he has seen one doctor after another and had no joy; Trueman says that there is “no definitive test” for ME, but that the symptoms do match.

We don’t see Warren’s reported abusive side in this recent episode (although, in the clips of past episodes, we do see him lashing out at some object), but “spoilers” which can be found on various UK soap websites reveal that he “shows his violent true colours” near to Christmas, and that his diagnosis might be muscular dystrophy rather than ME. Still, it begs the question of why they have to link ME to a storyline about an abusive patient when the reality is much more likely to be the patient getting abused.

So how do they cover M.E.? Well, that took until a couple of weeks ago, but Casualty has a cute nurse named Kirsty, who lately has been turning up to work late and disappearing, has collapsed and has presented with bruises on her arms. Last Saturday we saw her husband, named Warren, played by Stephen Lord who played Jase Dyer in Eastenders. The guy was slumped in a chair and asked Kirsty to help him up so he could go to the loo; he told her something to the effect that “they all don’t think M.E. is real” (meaning Kirsty’s colleagues). So, here’s a frustrated M.E. sufferer, cooped up in his flat, requiring help to get up to go to the loo (and no doubt other basic things), and needs his wife back pretty much all the time, even though she needs to work to keep a roof over their heads.

Uh, no. Apparently Stephen Lord has a history of playing nasty characters and this one is no exception:

FORMER EastEnders star Stephen Lord laughs: “People haven’t started throwing things at me yet. But I’m from Salford. I’m always ready for it.”

The actor, writer and director, who played Jase Dyer in Albert Square, has swapped Walford for Holby in his latest role as ex-fireman Warren Clements.

Casualty (BBC1, tonight, 8.20pm) sees nurse Kirsty’s (Lucy Gaskell) working day disturbed by mysterious phone calls from her husband Warren, who is playing one of his mind games. What is his secret and does it explain the bruising on Kirsty’s arm?

Viewers have yet to learn the full story about Warren. “He’s got an abusive nature which comes through mentally and also, as will be revealed, physically. I was living in America when the BBC offered me this part, which is quite a complex role,” he explains.

A few facts about M.E. and abuse wouldn’t go amiss here. M.E. patients are one of the most abused patient groups in the world and have been for years, because large sections of the medical profession have long been under the misapprehension that it’s a mostly psychological illness, or rather, an “illness belief”. There are numerous true stories of children with M.E. being seized from their families and abused in hospital, of parents being accused of causing or perpetuating their illness, of sexual abuse, of people being sectioned when they refused particular types of treatment (and, in one case, suffering a devastating relapse and subsequently dying), of patients being expected to endure noise and light when they are hypersensitive to both, of patients facing strenuous efforts to get them to “admit” that they weren’t really ill, all when they were really ill, really weak and in an awful lot of pain. The story of Lynn Gilderdale would not be believable if it were fiction.

People with ME that’s severe enough to leave them housebound have nothing much to gain from being abusive to partners or family members who care for them; the carer or partner can leave and he or she will still be ill. They are certainly less capable of dishing out abuse, particularly physical abuse. All the literature shows that they are much more vulnerable, and receive abuse, disbelief and denial from family members as well as healthcare professionals.

Of all the stories they could have picked to feature M.E., why this one? It’s a bit like having one opportunity to cover domestic violence, and using a fictional story in which a woman abuses a man. Oh, and the victim is a nurse, of all things. It’s not impossible for an M.E. sufferer to abuse a medical professional, of course, but it’s much more likely to happen the other way round, so what is the purpose of covering this issue in this way? Of course, if it was done more realistically, it could knock a the haloes off some characters’ heads, but there are plenty on both programmes who are not angels by any stretch and are known as heartless or as backstabbers. There were so many ways they could have handled this, and they take the option that is least convincing for anyone who knows anything about M.E. and potentially very distressing to some of them. It’s another opportunity lost in this area by the BBC this year.

Update 18th Nov: I submitted this complaint letter, via the BBC Complaints form. If you want to submit your own, it is better that you have watched the show, and do not copy this one, as it will make both look like part of an orchestrated mass complaint.

Recent episodes of Casualty have featured the nurse Kirsty collapsing at work, presenting with unexplained bruises and being absent during working hours. The most recent episode reveals that her husband, Warren, has the neurological illness ME and requires help doing basic things such as getting up to go to the toilet. Interviews with the actor, Stephen Lord, who plays Warren, reveals that he is likely to show an abusive side “physically” and it is already being reported that he is playing “mind games” with Kirsty.

This is an unrealistic portrayal of an ME sufferer, which is offensive given that this is the first instance of Casualty covering this issue in some time, if at all. It is the first appearance of ME in Casualty since the highly-publicised Gilderdale court case.

ME sufferers have historically been the victims of abuse, both at the hands of their relatives and, particularly, the medical and nursing professions, including removal from their families as children, sectioning because their physical illness was judged to be mental, various cruel means of forcing them to “admit” that they are not really ill, and hospital environments that fail to take into account their environmental sensitivities (requiring quiet or low light, for example), all of which has been known to cause the sufferers’ condition to drastically deteriorate, sometimes permanently.

An ME sufferer also has little to gain from being abusive to his or her carer (and most sufferers are female), as such behaviour is likely to persuade the carer to leave. They are also unlikely to have the strength to inflict physical harm, particularly if the illness is so severe that they cannot get up to use the toilet on their own.

If there was a rare opportunity to cover domestic violence or rape, surely the storyline should feature a male perpetrator and a female victim, since this is the norm for both crimes. To feature a storyline about ME and abuse in which the perpetrator is the ME sufferer and the victim is a nurse is a similar back-to-front approach.

I recommend that the story-writers read some literature on ME; I suggest “Shattered: Life with ME” by Lynn Michell (Thorsons, 2003) to start with, and re-write this story rapidly before much more damage can be done.

When will people get it into their heads that rape is not funny? (Perhaps when they experience it themselves.) Why do the BBC, and doubtless also the commercial British TV networks, put out pre-recorded shows containing this kind of material? Didn’t they learn from the Ross & Brand affair?

The fact that George Michael is turning into a cut-rate Michael Jackson, a once distinguished musician now known only for scandals, is not at all relevant. If what they were laughing about (and yes, the audience were laughing) can happen to him, it can happen to anyone, regardless of the severity of his offence (assuming he has even committed one). Rape is just not funny, and if comedians can’t figure this out, TV bosses should make it clear that it’s not acceptable on their time.

Update: the letter I did submit is over the fold. You can submit your own using the BBC Complaints page, by email, fax or letter. (Please don’t copy mine, as it detracts from both this and yours by making it look like an orchestrated campaign.)

Dear Sir or Madam,

I watched a brief section of last night’s edition of “Mock the Week”, in which a panellist made an offensive joke regarding the recent imprisonment of George Michael. The joke was that George Michael might get a “new entry in the number 2 slot” after slipping in the shower in prison.

This appears to be a joke about the possibility of the singer being raped, which is not a suitable subject for jokes as rape is extremely serious, given the devastating and traumatic effects it commonly has on its victims. Perhaps some people think this is acceptable given his present reputation, but if what was described can happen to George Michael it can happen to anyone, regardless of their offence, their status in prison or their guilt or innocence.

I am not interested in a personal apology from the “comedian” responsible for the joke - I would like such jokes to stop, because they trivialise a very serious subject. Anyone who has been the victim of any kind of sexual abuse, even if nothing like as serious as rape, could tell you that it is not at all funny.

Yours faithfully,

Matthew J Smith

Update 5th Oct: I had this response from the BBC this morning. Clearly, people who think rape is funny have to be catered for.

Dear Mr Smith

Reference CAS-319989

Thanks for contacting the BBC.

We’re sorry if you were offended by the content of ‘Mock the Week’ on 23 September.

We can assure you its never the intention of the BBC to deliberately upset its audience.

As the BBC is a public service financed by the licence fee it must provide programmes which cater for the whole range of tastes in humour. We believe that there is no single set of standards in this area on which the whole of society can agree, and it is inevitable that programmes which are acceptable to some will occasionally strike others as distasteful. The only realistic and fair approach for us is to ensure that the range of comedy is broad enough for all viewers to feel that they are catered for at least some of the time.

We’d nevertheless assure you your feedback on this matter is very much valued by us.

We’d assure you your concerns have been registered on our audience log, which 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 trouble to contact us.

Kind Regards

Lucia Fortucci

There’s a feature in today’s Guardian about the Anti Design Festival, which starts this coming Saturday in London and is a response to what they see as “25 years of cultural deep freeze”. One comment was on how, for example, the Beijing Olympics had a state-of-the-art stadium “by probably the world’s top architecture firm”, while the symbol of the 2012 London event will be a double-decker bus. In other words, British design is stuck in the past; a recent issue of British design postage stamps featured nothing designed after the 1960s.

One British design that was mentioned was the iPhone — designed by Jonathan Ive who is British, albeit working for an American company. Now, I have an Android phone, a competitor to the iPhone which also runs apps — not the same ones, necessarily, but apps all the same and they do most of the same stuff.

My Android has buttons — there’s a phone-up button, a phone-down button, a menu button, a home button, a search button and a back button. There’s also a scroll ball which you can press. And a touch screen.

I may be a geek, but I managed to get to grips with my phone in a very short space of time (and had some idea of how it worked from playing with one in the T-Mobile shop). Most of the buttons do what they say they do — if you press Home, it goes to the main screen, and if you press Search, it opens a search window (so as to allow you to do a Google search or search the Android Market). The only button which sometimes foxes me is the back button — it often features as an “up” button, taking you to the next level up in the application, such as the main menu in the Facebook or Twitter app, and sometimes it takes you to the app you were using when you clicked the link to take you to that app. It can be a bit confusing.

I’ve tried using the iPad (the upsized version of the iPhone and iPod Touch) in the Apple Store in Kingston. That’s got one button, which also doubles for scrolling purposes (you run your finger across it). It’s meant to be so easy to use, but to get the knack of using it, you’d have to buy one and read the manual, or at least play with it for quite some time. It may be a cool minimalist design, but it’s bare and its operation is not exactly intuitive, for me at least.

I rang up and talked about how it was part of a big tendency towards nasty comedy which made light of serious subjects like rape, and mentioned the incident in which Ricky Gervais caricatured ME sufferers as being people too lazy to go to work. I wasn’t allowed to mention his name on air (although I told the researchers who it was), but who it was isn’t really the issue anyway, just the fact that people think a devastating disease is some kind of joke.

You can hear the whole thing here if you’re in the UK. The feature on Frankie Boyle starts at the two-hour mark. My bit starts half an hour later. There was discussion on comedians who make anti-gay jokes and of the guy from Seinfeld who delivered the N-word rant on stage after being heckled.

OK, here’s the transcript of my bit.

JG: Right, let’s go to Matthew in New Malden. Hello, Matthew.

Me: Good morning.

JG: Right, yeah, go on.

Me: Right, this thing Frankie Boyle came out with is part of a whole tendency towards this kind of offensive comedy, and there’s this “lighten up” tendency, where people will tell shockingly offensive jokes about serious subjects, rape being one of the more common ones nowadays, and, you know, “it’s just a joke”, “lighten up”, “we’re just having a laugh”, and the problem with making jokes about people with mental impairments is that these people get harassed in the street all the time, and virtually ev — and there’s been surveys done on this subject, and virtually everyone has said in response to these surveys, “yes, this type of harassment, particularly from kids, is a daily feature of our lives, and there was an interview done with people who ran a sort of drop-in centre, and the drop-in centre’s open at [i.e. until] five, but all the people who use it leave at about three so they can get home before the kids get on the bus; they don’t have to share the bus with the kids, because the kids will harass them.

JG: Mm.

Me: And when comedians make money out of this kind of thing, and it’s not that new — there was apparently a time in the 1980s when people like Ben Elton could make a career out of humour that wasn’t offensive, but since about the 1990s in particular, a lot of comedy has been about terribly offensive subjects, and the response when you complain is, “oh, lighten up, get yourself a sense of humour”. But, like, you know, rape isn’t funny.

JG: But Matthew, do you see, what I’m dying to find out; what upset me is, I don’t know this Frankie Boyle guy, but it really upset me to think that people are paying to go and see him. I work for the BBC; Mel has already come in and said to me, “Jo, I don’t think ‘Down’s Syndrome’ is the phrase, I think it’s ‘people with Down’s’; now, my gut reaction is, does that matter, you know, people know what I’m talking about, and he went, “no, some people could be offended”. So here at the BBC, we have that amount of tact and decency, right …

Me: You can get really tripped up on terminology …

JG: Oh God, totally tripped up, I have to— and I don’t want to offend anyone, cos I am fascinated by this subject. But I have to be so careful about so many things, so many things. You know, swearing is one, and apologising is another, all this sort of thing. So, there’s this, there’s Ofcom, there’s all these people monitoring what all of us lot are coming out with. There are all these diversity groups going into schools saying “we’ve all got to embrace each other, we’ve all got to live together, it’s a melting pot”, blah blah blah. So, this is what we are trying to come to terms with, but what I’m asking is, basically, if we were left without the moral police around, would we all take the Mickey out of each other, because left to pay for a comic, we will go an pay for a man who is cruel, whether it’s to Down’s Syndrome (sic), or to people of certain races, or swimmers (a reference to another, personally offensive, Boyle gag); is that the norm? Is the norm the fact that we love to ridicule each other?

Me: Partly, that might be true, but someone might go and see a comedian they hadn’t expected to be too offensive and then find that he makes a really ignorant joke about a serious subject …

JG: But surely, Frankie Boyle, from what I understand that is his image. Wasn’t he taken off Mock the Week, or something, because he overstepped the mark …

Me: I don’t know about Frankie Boyle. But the particular incident I know about is a — do you mind if I name him?

JG: Uh, hang on. Mel? No, probably not, no.

Me: Well, I mentioned him to your researcher, but it’s a fairly well-known comedian, he’s done a particular TV series and then some kids’ books and then a stand-up show, and he did this routine in which he mocked people with the illness ME, and he did this routine in which he said he’d had someone collecting for ME, and he said, “oh, not MS, the crippling wasting disease, ME; that’s the one where, ‘don’t feel like going to work today’”, and he did this routine where someone was basically ringing up and pulling a sickie, and I think he compared it to people in third-world countries who are supposedly too ill or too tired to go to the well.

And the thing is, ME is a terrible, debilitating illness …

JG: Course it is, yeah …

Me: And you remember the case, the trial earlier this year with the mother who’d nursed her daughter [Kay and Lynn Gilderdale, respectively] for, like, seventeen years …

JG: And took her life in the end …

Me: Well, she took her own life, with a bit of help from her mother, but this young lady had had to live for sixteen years in a dark room — and she’d been brutalised, this is another aspect that wasn’t widely reported on; that lady had been brutalised again and again by doctors who variously mistreated her because, basically, a lot of doctors didn’t believe that the condition existed. But also, she’d had rather brutal treatment, including a sexual assault. And this lady had had to deal with all this alone, in a dark room, in more-or-less silence, in pain, for years and years and years, and that is what ME does to people.

JG: Mm.

Me: And it’s not funny, it’s not “yuppie flu”, but this chap was making jokes about it like it was something trivial.

JG: And were people laughing?

Me: As far as I could tell, yes.

JG: Because what is shocking me is, as much as the performer, is the audience. Because I …

Me: People will laugh at these things, sometimes it’s ignorance. People often don’t know ME … when I mentioned the case of Lynn Gilderdale to people at the dinner table, they said, “don’t you mean MS” …

JG: Yes, aah …

Me: People didn’t realise this condition was so debilitating, but when it comes to mentally impaired people, they will laugh at jokes about it, because they think, most people … if I used the word “retarded” to people in my family — we have two teachers in my family — I’ll be told off about it …

JG: Yes, yes, of course …

Me: But people will use that, you know, people will just make jokes about mentally impaired people, and it’s good that there’s an outcry, because it leads to people getting attacked in the street, that’s where it leads.

JG: Yes, of course …

Me: If people think rape is funny, you know, it’s not going to lead to women getting pounced on in the street, because there’s a certain type of man that does that, but it’ll lead, for example, if people think it’s funny, the sort of rape that goes on at parties and that sort of thing, when people are drunk and …

JG: Matthew, I totally, I absolutely understand, thank you very much for your call. Thank you for that. I totally understand where you’re coming from. What really, really upsets me is that we have the moral police, which gets in the way of my job an awful lot, because I think they’re pedantic, and in life an awful lot, but without them, and if we were left to our own natural reactions, would we all be laughing at each other’s shortfallings? Because you know, this guy is sold out wherever he goes. Now, it’s not like, you go and see an act, like Mike in the USA said, he emailed me saying that often, you go and see an act and they will go off on a tangent and you think, mate, “don’t go there, it’s not funny, you’ve made a mistake” and usually, you can see in their recovery that they’ve gone wrong. This guy Frank Boyle, from what I’ve heard on the radio this afternoon, what I’ve read about him in the papers, that’s his style, he’s cruel. So do you think we basically like cruel humour, and if we were allowed, you know, that’s what we would …

I always thought of Hyde Park Corner [actually Speakers’ Corner which is at Marble Arch, not Hyde Park Corner], right, freedom of speech, that is the greatest example of freedom of speech, but you can’t stand on your soap-box and make racist comments, because there are the police all the way around, you know, they are watching. So, how can a guy stand up in a comedy store, in a huge auditorium, a huge theatre, and I think it was 2,000 he was playing to, and walk away from making jokes like that? Is there ever a way of allowing that sort of humour? By him coming out with those kinds of gags, does it dispel the myths about people with disabilities? I don’t know. I want to know what you think.

Admittedly, I saw this video after I read in January all about Lynn Gilderdale’s dreadful struggle with the condition he is talking about (Myalgic Encephalomyelitis or ME, otherwise mistakenly called Chronic Fatigue Syndrome or CFS), but even before that, I did know that ME wasn’t a trivial illness that made you “tired all the time”, but something that at worst caused people to become paralysed, mute and bedbound in the space of a few months (in its more moderate forms, it causes people to have extremely low physical energy, impaired concentration and pain). You can read an account of a typical day by another severely affected sufferer, Jodi Bassett, here; she also has a website.

Organica told me that Ricky Gervais was an atheist; I replied that this was his business, and that what I objected to was him making cheap jokes at the expense of seriously ill people (this was her reply). He called Multiple Sclerosis a “crippling wasting disease” while trivialising ME as “the one where … ‘don’t feel like going to work today’”. If he could have been bothered to use the same computer he wrote his spiel on to find out some basic facts about what he was talking about, he would have found out that not only did ME have much in common with MS, but that, particularly for severe sufferers, it is far more debilitating on a day-to-day level than MS except at the final stages of degenerative MS, or the final stages of a number of other fatal illnesses. On top of this, MS is recognised as a real, neurological illness (or at least it is now) and sufferers are likely to receive sympathy and good care; ME is officially recognised but is the subject of medical turf wars and patients are highly likely to experience professional disbelief, counter-therapeutic medical treatment, downright abuse and prejudice.

Years ago, I told someone that I didn’t find Woody Allen all that funny and she asked me if that was because he was Jewish (this was after I became Muslim), something I didn’t know about him at the time. I just found that Woody Allen’s jokes went over my head. Honestly, I’ve found Jackie Mason funny and he is much more extreme. As long as he sticks to jokes about Jewish mamas in New York and doesn’t make racist jokes about Palestinians. I wouldn’t pay money to see him, but the fact that he’s an extremist Zionist doesn’t mean that some of his jokes are not funny. The same cannot be said for jokes which trivialise a seriously debilitating and distressing illness. Someone posted in the comments to that video above that Gervais has since apologised, but he should have checked his facts beforehand and he wouldn’t have looked like an ignorant, offensive jerk.

I don’t know if this is on the material that Organica bought recently (and I don’t intend any of this as an attack on her, by the way). The show went out in 2007 and some bloggers objected at the time, and Gervais responded to some of them personally. Gervais’s response was to compare “complaints” about ME to third-world situations where people are starving and, supposedly, where nobody complains about ME. It’s a common stereotype that you don’t get ME on council estates or in third-world countries, but it is simply not true. In any case, if you’re in a third-world country and you can’t swallow and need tube-feeding and can’t get access to it, you probably won’t be around for long enough to “complain” about it. Around the same time, he also managed to get a joke about killing prostitutes into his routine; this was shortly after the time of the Steve Wright murders in Ipswich.

Do people really think about whether the comedy they watch is really funny? I’m sure Ricky Gervais wouldn’t make the same ME jokes now that someone in the audience could call out “hey, what about that Gilderdale woman?”, but over the last few years there has been an increase in “comedy” about highly offensive subjects, which include racist and variously misogynistic material; I commented on this with some of my own experience here. Last October there was a huge stink about a comedian called Jimmy Carr making a joke, probably sourced from soldiers at a military rehabilitation centre, about limbless soldiers making for a great Paralympic team in 2012, but the same man fills his routine with jokes about rape (they give two examples and they are both pretty unpleasant), without any of the same uproar; note that the Daily Mail article didn’t mention this fact, referring only to his “deadpan style and crude material”. The observation that many men are somehow indifferent to rape and see women as sexual objects is increasingly common nowadays (see Natasha Walter’s recent book, Living Dolls, for the porn-obsessed culture which feeds into this); Kira Cochrane noted that the serial murderer and rapist, Levi Bellfield, was fairly open about his misogyny, and his history and those of two other murderers convicted the same week “paint a picture of a society in which misogyny is taken as a given, in which someone can crow to his friends, without fear of redress or chastisement, as Bellfield did, that he had shaved himself from top to toe to ensure he didn’t leave any DNA behind at a crime scene”. (Bellfield is suspected of being the murderer of Amanda “Milly” Dowler, who was abducted in Walton on Thames and murdered in March 2002.) While these cases may be extreme, and certainly not all men would fail to bat an eyelid when one of their friends bragged about such deeds to them, the fact that careers can be made on the back of such extremely hurtful material is disturbing to say the least. What’s so funny about a man harming a woman for its own sake? Why would anyone want to do that anyway?

As for Ricky Gervais, his stand-up routine included the line that “one false move and I’m Jim Davidson”, one of the “old-school” offensive comedians. The fact that Gervais’s crass ME jokes are out there and people will, no doubt, still be laughing at them reflects on how much ignorance there is about the condition. I was recently in contact with two women who had been friends online with Lynn Gilderdale, or Jessie as they called her, and one of them told me that “Lynn always wanted to raise as much awareness of M.E. as she possibly could; it was very important to her”. This lady was perturbed by the fact that, in the time since the end of Lynn’s mother’s trial, the debate had been all about assisted dying and not about the condition itself and what needs to be done for people who suffer from it. Although the media was largely sympathetic to Kay Gilderdale, there was a fair amount of nonsense in there as well, including Esther Rantzen promoting the so-called Lightning Process, supposedly a cure for pretty much every illness under the sun (it has been called the “Lightening Process”, after its effect on the client’s wallet), and there was also the grave-dancing of “Dr Crippen”, an anonymous GP fond of slagging off his patients, in the Guardian. One would like to think that, following the publicity of the appalling stories of Lynn and of Sophia Mirza back in 2006, someone who fell ill today would not suffer the same abysmal fate, but given the sneering scepticism and the ongoing problem of lack of funding for care of ME patients, along with the perception in some places that it’s all a big joke, one can’t really have such confidence.

People are defending Roman Polanski because he made some good movies? Are you kidding me? He made some good movies thirty years ago, Jay! Even Johnny Cochrane don’t have the nerve to go, “well, did you see OJ playing against New England?”.

Yakoub thinks Gary Glitter (a glam rock star from the 1970s who was subsequently convicted on child pornography charges and was later jailed in Vietnam for sexually abusing children) is a better comparison than Simpson. However, Roman Polanski is, despite his crime, a respected director, while Gary Glitter was a has-been from an embarrassing bygone age, and I suspect some people were only too happy to see him fall on his face (as with Jonathan King). (More: Dictator Princess.)

Still, I’m wondering why so many people from the world of showbiz are falling over themselves to excuse him. Is it really the case that these people are so blinded by his ‘brilliance’ or his ‘authority’ that they don’t see that a 13-year-old girl was raped, or think she is insignificant compared with him? Or is it a case of fear: fear that they might do their careers damage by offending him or one of his powerful friends?

I’m not convinced by the argument that sending him back to the USA would cause more trauma to his victim. The victim will not have to give any more evidence; it would be different if she did, as there were in fact several sexual assaults and yes, she did say no to him. Admittedly, perhaps she does not want to continue being reminded of the event, but it is too late for that now that the wheels have been set in motion. The victim could also have been spared this ordeal if Polanski had simply served his time thirty years ago.

Well, as anyone who has experience of the planning system knows, it is not democratic at all; it is simply bureaucratic. Recently, we opposed a development near us which involved building three extra dwellings on a plot of land which currently holds one small house and a large garden, which widens towards the back as its side boundary is next to an alleyway which runs at an angle from the road. The local planning department refused the development, but the developers appealed to the planning ombudsman, who approved it.

If there is one bitter aspect of Charles’s intervention in the Chelsea affair, it is that he only intervenes to oppose high-profile ugly buildings; there is nobody to save ordinary people from having unsuitable housing developments foisted upon their neighbourhoods by a central government bureaucrat. None of those who make planning decisions are elected; it’s all done by appointed staff, and while there is eventually political responsibility for it, it’s usually a long way down the list of issues at every general election.

In any case, the argument that Charles is “unelected” is not valid, since we have a Parliament which could choose to get rid of the monarchy, or replace the Windsors with another family, and has never seen fit to do so. The intervention did not consist of striding into the planning department and throwing his weight around, but having a word in the ear of one of the major investors, something he is quite entitled to do. Elected or not, and regardless of his bias towards Neoclassicism, his views on concrete and glass buildings are shared by many ordinary people; quite apart from the fact that many of them are ugly, this kind of architecture dates very quickly and will be passé — in favour of a different kind of ugly modernism, of course — within much less than a generation.