How very interesting to hear John Cleese explain how he’d be immediately cancelled or censored on the BBC, in comments made freely and at considerable length yesterday in the marquee 8.10am interview slot on the BBC’s flagship Radio 4 news programme. Explaining why he was about to become a presenter on GB News, the 82-year-old declared loftily: “The BBC have not come to me and said: ‘Would you like to have some one-hour shows?’ And if they did, I would say: ‘Not on your nelly!’ Because I wouldn’t get five minutes into the first show before I’d been cancelled or censored.” To which the only possible response is, “Morning, Major!”
These days, Cleese claims to “live in hotel rooms” – a bit on-the-nose, but there you go – and evidently boasts a lively range of views. In the strictest interests of accuracy, we should note that he was recently given a whole two series of a sitcom on the BBC, with the last episode of Hold the Sunset broadcast in 2019, a few months before the pandemic hit. Furthermore, it was barely a month ago that Cleese was tweeting: “GB News is sometimes referred to, rather wittily, as ‘KGB News’. To what extent is GB News influenced by Russian interests?” I don’t know – but perhaps it’s a matter that could be explored on his new GB News show. We’re told anything goes.
For now, what seems clear is that Cleese suffers one of the great afflictions of our age, a kind of delusional broadcast disorder that can make the sufferer believe they have been cancelled by the BBC even while they are literally on the BBC. The worst part of it is that we are not allowed to discuss this social sickness because of political correctness. I tried to tell my husband about it at breakfast yesterday – he works at the BBC – but he told me to be quiet so he could listen to John Cleese on the BBC. Like Cleese, I had been silenced.
In any rational world you’d be able to state the obvious reality – the condition is overwhelmingly suffered by men. But you can’t say it! You can’t say it! You can look at Cleese, or Noel Edmonds, or Nigel Farage, or Laurence Fox, but you’re banned from saying what you see. You have to pretend that women are out there every five minutes wanging on about how they’re not allowed to have a primetime show forever, as well as a bus pass or leadership of a political party, and how their only alternative option is presenting hours of gloriously bitter live telly every week on one of our bazillion-pound news-o-tainment channels.
In a sane world, you’d be allowed to say scientific facts, like the fact that 90% of heroically whingeing BBC cancellees are men, 95% of them are acrimoniously divorced, and 110% of them have “divorced energy”. (Obviously, it’s Not All Previously Primetime Men – Mr Blobby has behaved with perfect dignity.) Yet you can’t say it. You’d get cancelled in seconds. In fact, I don’t even know how I’m writing this next sentence.
Pity me. In my incredibly vulnerable position as a newspaper columnist, I have to think about this stuff constantly. Constantly! I once described a soon-to-launch TV news channel as sure to become “unmoored from facts” – and its CEO voided his pram of all toys. He spent rather a lot of time to-ing and fro-ing with the readers’ editor demanding some mean words be changed, before handing Press Gazette a copy of his very grand letter to the Guardian (which was also subsequently published by the Guardian). In it, he explained: “We are absolutely committed to our mission to report news in the most accurate and balanced way we can. It is unfortunate that your article failed to adhere to this basic principle.” The channel in question? Why, it was GB News.
Don’t get me wrong, I was and am still hugely amused by Angelos Frangopoulos, the adorable little Aussie snowflake who wrote that letter. But imagine how I felt last week when I saw his channel had given a guest spot to Naomi Wolf, who hasn’t been playing with a full deck of data points since the 00s. Wolf’s appearance was essentially a very, very long diatribe against the Covid vaccine. Her assertion that “mass murder has taken place” was bolstered by the GB News presenter Mark Steyn explaining that vaccines “cause every conceivable kind of damage”. Other lowlights of Naomi’s appearance, which was allowed to proceed without a single piece of disinformation being questioned? The claim that Covid vaccinations were “bioweapons” that were “sterilising people” and “poisoning breast milk”. Also, “civil society has been wholly co-opted by bad actors trying to destroy British civil society”. Wolf went on – entirely unchallenged – to compare today’s medical establishment to the eugenicists and exterminators of the Third Reich. Steyn just nodded along, repeatedly going “yeah”, presumably in “the most accurate and balanced way” he could. He booked her again the very next night.
Anyway, a fun new stablemate for John Cleese. Cleese famously decided that the Brexit debate saw this country sink “to the lowest intellectual level ever”, so I strongly urge him to push that envelope and book Wolf on his first show. In the meantime, those of us saddened by a former idol’s comic decline should comfort ourselves that some of the best recent comedy has happened on GB News. Last year on the free speech channel, presenter Guto Harri took the knee live on air, got suspended for it, quit and was soon made prime minister Boris Johnson’s comms chief. The whole batshit saga was easily funnier than anything Cleese has done since A Fish Called Wanda (1988), and we must look forward to his promising new show in that spirit.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
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