What We Gonna Do? Life On Mars Behind Playground Bullying
AS the nation struggles to understand the violence of today’s youth culture, The Times offers a couple of pointers. (Pic: The Spine)
“GCSE writing contains ‘sickening violence’,” it declares. This refers to complaints by examiners that pupils taking English are writing increasingly violent prose when given titles like… er, “The Assassin”.
OK, so maybe that’s not a very good example. But surely no one could argue with the claim that gay-bashing is caused by the BBC time-travel drama Life on Mars.
Teachers unions have apparently claimed that the homophobic language of old-school seventies detective Gene Hunt was “harmful”, and that “Hunt’s use of ‘bender’ and ‘poof’ could be responsible for playground bullying”.
All very embarrassing for BBC chairman Sir Michael Lyons, who praised the show and said it contained “some of the best one-liners I could hope for”.
The paper helpfully lists a few of Hunt’s bon mots, but sadly there’s no room to repeat them here.
We want to see them, you understandably wail.
Yes, indeed. But as DCI Hunt would say, “I want to hump Britt Ekland. What are we gonna do?”
Posted: 27th, August 2007 | In: Back pages Comments (2) | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed: RSS 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink
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September 1st, 2007 at 6:54 pm
Being quite cynical about pc etc, bullying has always gone on, its not tv progs , its life. It cannot be outlawed, ok it can be addressed and monitored in schools, but life thereafter? Probably better if people are aware that bullying happens, and teach them how to sort the thugs would be more to the point. OK , its nasty,but????
August 27th, 2007 at 3:43 pm
I wonder how teachers’ unions would explain the fact of my having been bullied in the primary school playground in the 1950s, long before the words “poof” and “bender” came into currency. I was, in fact, neither. I was a fat kid with glasses and ginger hair who wasn’t any good at sport. I have yet to see society’s opinion formers standing up and being counted against the humorous use of the denigratory epithet “ginge” on television. Little Britain frequently uses the word “fat” and “fattie” to comic effect. Where are the howls of anguish about the bullying this results in? Are there no other kinds of bullying than homophobic? Once again, the hand-wringing politically correct brigade miss the point. Outlawing language and suppressing words - including insults - will do nothing to eradicate ignorance and fecklessness.