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The BBC clearly sees the value of television series That Mitchell and Webb Look. Marking the 20th anniversary of its original screening, the Beeb has re-released the series on iPlayer. But – and there is very often a “but” with these things – they’ve removed around 11 sketches from the BAFTA award-winning show. The official word is that these sketches don’t “work today”, which is polite speak for “they may cause offence”. The episodes singled out include scenes featuring a battle reenactment with characters in blackface, a contestant on a show wearing a burka and a lost tribe” in a garden centre. These sketches set out to challenge stereotypes, not to reinforce them; but 20 years on, this distinction seems to have been lost along the way. I’m a bit uncomfortable about this. I find it infantilising, to say the least. Can’t we trust audiences to make up their own minds, to switch off if they find the sketches in question unpalatable? Does the BBC think that we are just passive consumers, unable to disaggregate the mocking of racism from racism itself? These sketches set out to challenge stereotypes, not to reinforce them This act of censorship is distorting – of the shows, whose narratives and rhythms were built to include these sketches, and more broadly too. Conversations we were having 20 years ago have been erased, as if to suggest that they never happened. But they did! And with this erasure, the opportunity for thoughtful engagement and learning from our past is gone. “Let’s just pretend we were all lovely 20 years ago. It’s better that way” seems to be the message. Speaking as a minority myself, I find that knowing the nasty stuff that people said before – and indeed, still say today – is much more useful than pretending it never happened. This approach, I think, is also inconsistent. What it reveals is a cherry-picking (intended or not) of the groups that we can mock, and those that we can’t. Let’s face it, gender stereotypes are rarely deemed to have aged beyond the pale – if that were the case, we would have to wave goodbye to half the television made before the mid-2010s. Suppression like this sends a bad message to artists, namely that what they’re creating today may hold less value tomorrow. Or, even worse, that future audiences may deem them bigots – that Sword of Damocles hovering over the heads of any creative paying attention to the discourse of the moment. Suppression like this sends a bad message to artists The BBC’s decision reaffirms a broader trend. In 2020, Little Britain was removed from the iPlayer platform for similar reasons. It has since been reinstated – minus some sketches. Meanwhile, the UK’s arts space more broadly is seeing a retreat to the land of “safe”, as Index recently revealed in a year-long investigation into self-censorship in UK theatre. The BBC, it must be said, does remarkable stuff. The ongoing podcast investigation into the disappearance of US journalist Austin Tice is just one example. But this does not mean, however, that they don’t sometimes get it wrong. Chopping at That Mitchell and Webb Look is one example. Sure, the removal of the material isn’t the life-or-death story that Index often works on. Sure, Mitchell and Webb aren’t the faces of persecuted artists – they have huge platforms and agreed to the changes themselves. Still, one can’t help but think that the decision came from a place of conservatism, perhaps even fear. This is weak and dispiriting, indeed the very opposite of what enables creativity in the arts. We shouldn’t be encouraging this cultural timidity. Rather, we should harness culture and creativity as the starting points of a conversation about our here and now. That’s what the arts are for, after all. READ MORE

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Friday, September 25
Media & Culture

Hinojosa Hates the Culture War

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Hinojosa Hates the Culture War

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“You can shove it with your culture wars,” said Texas Democratic gubernatorial candidate Gina Hinojosa, describing her mindset toward Gov. Greg Abbott when interviewed by Politico. Hinojosa has been making the case that her challenge against three-termer Abbott will be successful because she’s gone “back to basics” and reflected voters’ concerns about the economy instead of growing distracted by the culture warring that has for so long co-opted much of her party.

“We’re not doing the culture wars. We are talking about how we’re gonna deliver for Texans, how we’re gonna make life easier for working families,” Hinojosa told Politico. “And so in that sense, I think that has to be the way forward for Democrats, to focus on the economic issues and not take the bait when it comes to the culture wars.”

Hinojosa very lightly mocked the pronouns issue—long a fixation of her fellow Democrats—in a recent ad, declaring her pronouns are “mom, Texan and soon-to-be governor.”

Hinojosa is kind of an interesting candidate: She found her way into politics not because she wanted to be a politician exactly (at least in her own telling), but because her son’s elementary school in Austin was in danger of closing due to budget cuts. She worked to rally other parents around the cause, and they successfully kept the school open. She ran for school board and won. Then she ran for a seat in the Texas House of Representatives and won, again, making education funding her primary focus. Kitchen table issues are in her DNA. But she’s also handled abortion messaging in a very interesting way, drawing on her own experience with getting a life-limiting diagnosis for her first and choosing to carry the baby to term—yet also saying that her experiencing choosing life galvanized a belief that every woman should do what’s right for them individually.

“That issue, what happened to me and the issue, really, of pregnancy and abortion and all of that is first and foremost a human issue,” Hinojosa told Politico. “We have so politicized it, but it is the struggle of so many women, so many families, women who have had their hearts broken because of a pregnancy gone wrong.”

I don’t know if there’s anything to extrapolate from all this. She hasn’t defeated Abbott yet. But I’m intrigued by this campaign and the shift away from culture warring toward economic issues and nuance on divisive social ones. Especially as our Massachusetts lesbian bar COVID-19 story continues to dominate X (and The Boston Globe‘s article leaderboard), making us all dumber by the day. Which way, Democratic Party? Which way, lefties?

Scenes from New York: Mayor Zohran Mamdani seems to believe the thing New Yorkers really need is not safe streets or for crazy people to be expelled from the subway cars, but rather…free opera tickets. Classic Mamdani: Just give people free stuff and hope it results in high approval ratings.

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  • Very true:

 

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