The Latest BBC Controversy

[David L]

Apparently John Torode was sacked after singing along to Kanye West's Gold Digga at an after work gathering several years ago (it has an obvious rhyming couplet).

Context and nuance is everything and it seems the BBC hasn't realised this for a long time.

Here's a personal anecdote: a number of years ago a big, black, muscular ex-professional rugby league player was the landlord of a pub local to me.  On karaoke one night he got up to "sing" that very same song, its lyrics unexpurgated on the screen as far as I remember (and yes it's more "rapped" than "sung").

He invited me up to join him, and while I was of course naturally hesitant to say the word, especially into a microphone for all to hear, he performed it as the song intended and didn't seem the slightest bit perturbed when I did the same.

So Torode's sacking strikes me as absurd.

If that is the reason, it is indeed, absurd. Problem is the BBC are running scared of the woke mob. It only takes one person to express offence over something like this and corporations cave. Who brought it to the Beeb's attention? I wouldn't be surprised if it was Greg Wallace!

[David L]

......and if that was the reason for the BBC 'sacking' Torode, I'd have thougt that by appointing a good lawyer he could end up ensuring they end up with an egg-based delicacy on their face. A taxpayer-funded clown show.

[Slim]

So: I've been watching the last few episodes of Destination X, a reality show / contest presented by Rob Brydon. An American import, actually. Decent idea, I quite like it.

But on the final show I couldn't help noticing that the final three contestants, once the other contestants had been eliminated, were all black or asian. I had a nagging feeling that the BBC was up to its culture warfare tricks again. Pushing its notion of "diversity" down our throats. So I got an AI to help me with the sums.

12.5% of the UK adult population, from whom the contestants were drawn, are black or asian. So with 13 contestants, a representative number of black or asian contestants would be 2 (even that is rounding up, the maths says 1.625).

However as it happens, the BBC included 5 black or asian contestants.

The probability that 5 or more black or asian contestants would be included in a sample of 13 if drawn at random, without consideration to their ethnicity, is 0.018 or 1.8%.

And the probability that, all else being equal, the final three contestants would all be black or asian, is 0.00195, or less than one-fifth of 1%.

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In other words if the BBC competition was fair, honest and representative: then 99.8% of the time, you'd have at least one white contestant in the final three.

So how's the BBC done this? Well the first part is easy, just pick five black or asian contestants to take part, fairness and statistics be damned.

How about the hard part, doing their best to make sure that a white person doesn't win? Well, the ethnic minority candidates taking part were conspicuously brighter than their white counterparts. The last three contestants were a pilot, a marketing executive and a nuclear engineer (the winner). The last two white contestants I saw go out were a semi-literate cabbie and an ex police sergeant. I would not put it past the BBC to give the black and asian contestants a bit of secretive behind-the-scenes help, either.

If that all sounds a bit far-fetched, have a think about that number on the bottom line.

0.195%.

The BBC is racist to its core.

[Nickslikk2112]

The BBC is racist to its core.

I'm not 100% sure on that. I think it's more of a box-ticking exercise.

The issue is that the BBC is terrified of offending minority groups, it is most terrified of upsetting from an Ethnic minority, more especially those of a sub-saharan background.

It might be worthwhile seeing if Scottish/Welsh/Irish appear in BBC programming at a higher level of their proportion of the population. Rob Brydon certainly pops up too much

[Matt2112]

There does appear to be some kind of overcompensation going on; it's almost as if there's a lower expectation of what ethnic minorities have the potential to achieve - and there's a word for that...

[David L]

The bosses at the Beeb are determined to present the world they wish to see IMHO.

[Slim]

The bosses at the Beeb are determined to present the world they wish to see IMHO.

I think this is exactly right, it's not just box-ticking. It's a sort of unending lecture: this is the world you're supposed to live in now, your own culture and identity be damned.

[David L]

[Slim]

I think there must be a cabal of senior ethnic minority managers at the BBC who simply loathe white people, and their colleagues are too frightened - perhaps understandably in the current climate where you can be confronted by armed police officers for expressing the wrong sort of thoughts - of having the race card deployed against them.

The BBC has become a filthy stain on our national life.

[Slim]

Two grammatical errors in the same short piece. Three if you count NATO not being capitalised. The BBC was better than this once.

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[Matt2112]

Radio 4 had Shami Chakrabarti and some lawyer on this morning discussing the Linehan tweets and arrest.

The latter mentioned Lucy Connelly, saying she crossed the line because, he said, she tweeted that hotels accommodating immigrants "should be burnt down"; but she didn't state that at all and it was disappointing that the BBC host interviewing didn't correct him on that, strongly suggesting she was as uninformed on that particular case as he was.

[Slim]

I'm going to conduct an experiment. My impression is that most times there's a thumbnail story on the front of the BBC news site with a random model, it's an ethnic minority. Yesterday - a piece about going back to school, indian girl. Today, this:

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Of course (just so we're clear) there's nothing wrong with using a model from the ethnic minority community for this. I just want to see how many times, as a proportion, they do it.

There are as I type three other thumbnail pieces on the site with ethnic minority thumbnails but they are presenters so I'm not counting them. We'll just see what they do when they're free to choose any ethnicity for the model. I'll do this for a week. I will sample honestly.

[Nickslikk2112]

To be fair to the BBC, just watch the adverts on Commercial TV. I'm surprised the advert for the Cotswold Company hasn't been banned as it's the only one with an all white cast.

[pxr5]

^ True that, very, very few TV adverts don't have an ethnic minority in it.

[The Picnic Wasp]

Unlike certain scummy newspapers which will eventually shrink and disappear, the BBC is underwritten by us all, is pretty secure, and yet we have little or no say in its operation.