Tom Slater

In this woke age, we seem to have incredibly short memories. We feel the need to damn people today for holding views that were completely acceptable yesterday. But the memory of Russell T. Davies, the acclaimed British screenwriter, seems to be particularly short. In an interview for the Radio Times — promoting his new Channel 4 series, It’s A Sin, about young gay men in 1980s London — Davies has criticised the practice of giving gay roles to straight actors. ‘I’m not being woke about this’, he said. ‘It’s about authenticity, the taste of 2020. You wouldn’t cast someone able-bodied and put them in a wheelchair, you wouldn’t black someone up.

Frankie Boyle is complaining about offensive comedy. In a year of firsts and unprecedented moments, I’m not sure anyone could have seen this one coming. The Glaswegian comic had a pop at Ricky Gervais in a podcast interview with Louis Theroux recently. Boyle said Gervais’s recent routines about transgenderism were ‘lazy’, and claimed he wasn’t even a real stand-up. ‘I would like him to have the same respect for trans people as he seems to have for animals’, Boyle intoned, nodding to Gervais’s passion for animal rights. ‘I don’t think that’s a lot to ask.

There was a time when publishers had to battle with external forces for their right to publish controversial authors. It was censorious politicians and moralistic campaigners who marshalled state power and boycotts to try to ensure that allegedly subversive or risqué material never saw the light of day. No longer. Today, it seems, it is often those within the publishing industry itself who seem intent on making sure that this or that ‘filth’ be banned. We’ve gone from the blue-rinse brigade to the blue-hair brigade, but the effect is still the same deadening intolerance.

Another day, another Zoom missive from the Duke and Duchess of Woke. Hot on the heels of their thinly-veiled intervention in the US election, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have called for an ‘end to structural racism’ in the UK, via a new initiative they’ve launched in collaboration with the Evening Standard. To mark the beginning of Black History Month in the UK, Harry and Meghan have unveiled a list of ‘BHM Next Gen Trailblazers’ – that is, black Brits who are making a difference in arts, politics and culture, chosen in turn by some of the Sussexes’ favourite black British artists, politicians and cultural figures.

Cancel culture has hit the world of tennis – again. Top British player Andy Murray has reignited a torturous debate about Australian tennis legend Margaret Court, and the court named in her honour at Melbourne Park, home of the Australian Open. The now 78-year-old Court, you see, is not just one of the greatest tennis players ever (she won more grand slams than anyone else), she is also now a hardline Christian minister who has made various anti-gay comments, and even had some warm words for Apartheid South Africa back in the day. Andy Murray, talking to Pride Life magazine this week, once again lent support to the years-long campaign to rename the Margaret Court Arena. ‘When you get to the Australian Open you want to concentrate on the tennis.

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s late-Eighties to early-Nineties comedies have not gone down in history as great triumphs. Films like Junior and Twins – in which he played a pregnant man and Danny DeVito’s unidentical twin respectively – are movies only arch nostalgists could love. But now we learn that Kindergarten Cop, another product of that strange period, is not just a bit crap, but basically white supremacist, too. This is the news that Northwest Film Center (NWFC) in Portland, Oregon, has pulled the 1990 action comedy from its summer drive-in series after woke complaints. In it, Schwarzenegger plays a cop who goes undercover as a kindergarten teacher to apprehend a drug dealer.

Is Mock the Week sexist? It’s a question that has haunted the BBC’s topical comedy panel show for much of its 15 years. And one of its most prominent female former panellists has just reignited the debate by claiming the show practises a kind of ‘pedestal feminism’, giving a few female comics a go to deflect criticism of its otherwise manifest sexism. ‘I had to stop doing it’, said Canadian comic Katherine Ryan, who has clocked up seven MtW appearances, on her podcast recently. ‘I knew that every time I was booked I was taking a job away from one of my female peers... I couldn't do it anymore because of that fact alone – 'No, Mock the Week doesn't have a problem with women, look, Katherine Ryan's on the show'.

The mini cultural revolution unleashed by the Black Lives Matter movement, this campaign of cleansing society of any reminder of a more racist past, has been remarkable in its speed and scope. Statues have been toppled. Sitcom episodes have been memory-holed. Actors have been forced into grovelling apologies for once playing a non-white character. Now, perhaps inevitably, they’ve come for the rice products. This is the news that beloved rice brand Uncle Ben’s is set to scrap its brand character – the eponymous fictional rice farmer – for some reason or other to do with Black Lives Matter. The reasoning behind this will be curious to most. After all, Uncle Ben is not a racist caricature, mocking black people. He’s just black.

We’ve done it. We’ve solved racism. And who’d have thought that all it would take was a few judicious edits to a much-loved British sitcom? This is the news that UKTV, a BBC-owned streaming service, has removed and is reviewing an episode of Fawlty Towers because it contains racial slurs. 'We regularly review older content to ensure it meets audience expectations and are particularly aware of the impact of outdated language', UKTV said in a statement last night. Of course, no one sane thinks this will do anything to help anyone. But the fact that it happened at all shows the consequences of allowing woke intolerance to run riot, as we have done in recent weeks. ‘The Germans’ is the most famous episode of the John Cleese-fronted series.

Time was that toys would be recalled, removed from sale or quietly had their advertising pulled if they were covered in lead paint, defective, or in the case of Disney’s hilariously misjudged 1999 ‘Rad Repeatin’ Tarzan’ doll, appeared to be masturbating. Today all it takes is for them to be potentially perceived by someone, somewhere, as insensitive. The Culture War has so seeped into every corner of modern life that Lego has actually pulled marketing of its police and White House toys – presumably in an effort not to stoke more civil unrest – in the wake of George Floyd’s death.

When this chapter in America’s history of its struggle against racism is written, two names will stand out among all the others: Ben and Jerry. Or at least that seems to be what the ice-cream company hopes, given the somewhat bizarre statement that it issued this week.  In response to the brutal killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis, and the protests and riots that continue to roil the United States, this peddler of sickly sweet desserts proclaimed: ‘We must dismantle white supremacy. Silence is NOT an option.’ It says that nothing will change ‘until white America is willing to collectively acknowledge its privilege, take responsibility for its past and the impact it has on the present’.

So we’re now three weeks into our coronavirus lockdown and we’ve had a glimpse of what a very British police state might look like. The picture that has emerged is one as comical as it is terrifying. From the off, it seemed many police officers had not bothered to read or even tried to get the gist of the new laws and regulations they were supposed to be enforcing, under both the Coronavirus Act and the Health Protection Regulations – later brought in to empower police to enforce the lockdown. Instead, police across the country have confused government guidance with actual law. People buying so-called ‘non-essential items’ seems to be a particular obsession.

Do you know who hasn’t had a good corona war so far? Celebrities. Throughout this crisis, many of them seem to have gone out of their way to prove our worst prejudices about them right: namely that they are narcissistic, entitled people, completely cut off from the concerns of ordinary people and yet possessed by a desire to lecture to and coo over us. First there was Hollywood actress Gal Gadot, who thought that what we all needed amidst this pandemic was for her and her celebrity mates to sing a profoundly cringey cover of ‘Imagine’. She teed it up by saying ‘it doesn’t matter who you are, where you’re from, we’re all in this together’.

Not for the first time since the coronavirus crisis began, controversy has hit Derbyshire. While the other week it was the county’s finest sending up drones to spy on and shame people walking in the Peak District, this week it's a Labour councillor who has had the whip withdrawn and lost her job at a law firm for saying something nasty about Boris Johnson on the internet. Sheila Oakes, who is also the mayor of the Derbyshire town of Heanor, made a fool of herself the other day on Facebook. In response to another post, encouraging people to pray for the PM, she said that Johnson, who has just come out of intensive care with coronavirus, ‘completely deserves’ to be laid up because he is ‘one of the worst PMs we’ve ever had’.

I’m old enough to remember when the people who students wanted to shut down on campus were real pieces of work: Nick Griffin, Anjem Choudary, fascists or Islamists who, given half the chance, would turn Britain into a bigoted, authoritarian backwater. How quaint that feels now. So low has the bar for censorship on campus sunk, that not only are trans-sceptic feminists as likely to be shut down as the fash these days, but centrist Tories can also find themselves in the crosshairs. This is the news that Amber Rudd has been no-platformed by a student group at Oxford University. Rudd was due to speak at a UNWomen Oxford UK Society event last night, discussing her time working as women and equalities minister and her experiences as a woman in politics.