Dogwash

Apparently that nice Mr Clarkson off the telly has put his foot in it again. According to the Mail, he made a racist allusion to that even nicer, if distinctly overweight, Mr Henry. Actually, the Mail reporter seems to have cribbed his story wholesale from the People, so let's have a quick dekko into the horse's mouth:

But there was a hail of criticism. Grenada-born war hero Johnson Beharry, 31, who won the Victoria Cross fighting for Britain in Iraq, said: “Remarks like this just aren’t funny. They ­legitimise racism. People think it’s acceptable to poke fun at people without thinking about the ­consequences. Clarkson needs to be stopped from saying things like this.”

Race campaigner Lee Jasper, said: “It starts off with Clarkson making stupid racist comments and it ends up as playground taunts and racist slurs on the street.

A hail of criticism, eh? Well, for small values of hail, I suppose. You can just imagine the editorial conference at the People, can't you?

"Clarkson's made another racist gaffe. Referred in public to the fact that Lenny Henry's a Black man. Should be worth half a column.

Right. Charlie, we'll need a couple of quotes from celebrity nignogs. No, not rappers or footballers this time; needs to be somebody who's still got a positive image. What about that coon that Blair pinned a VC on? He'll do nicely. And that half-caste crook that used to work for Red Ken; he should be worth a quote."

Mind you, that photo of L/Cpl Beharry the Mail's dug up. Incredibly bad tempered. Looks as if he's about to spit at somebody. Presumably it meets their requirements.

Rent-a-mouth MP Denis "Adenoids" MacShane (né Matyjaszek) fired up his bullshit generator and contributed,

“Clarkson’s full-on innuendo is unpleasant and offensive and out of tune with multi-cultural, multi-ethnic Britain.

“It’s like a blast from the south of the US when the Ku Klux Klan thought these jokes were funny.”

Really? I didn't know Lenny Henry was all that well-known in Dixie. You live and learn.


Yes, yes, but what exactly was the nature of Jezza's crime? What did he actually say?

He complained an energy-saving mode on his new TV made the screen so dim “every programme looks like it is being presented by Lenny Henry in a cave”.

That's it?

So not yer actual proper in-your-face racism then, but essentially a mild case of albedoism. Just as professional on-air lush and part-time amateur physicist Sarah Kennedy noticed that Black people's skin tends to reflect less of the available ambient light than that of White people, with the consequence that the former can be more difficult to see in poor light, so professional on-air boor Clarkson has noticed that underpowered television displays do not have sufficient energy to display the lighter skin tones of White people.

So it's official (© all newspapers). Physics is racist.


Be interesting to see how far this one goes. So what's Clarkson's record again? Sieg Heil salutes for German cars. No problem, the Krauts are fair game; they're family, and they lost the bleedin' war didn't they? Koreans eating dogs and Mexicans being lazy and with cuisine that looks "like refried sick". Well, a) all of that is true and b) Koreans and Mexicans are only token Darkies for the purpose of calculating parliamentary expenses, or something. So they don't really count either.

Mr Henry, however, is a proper paid-up Darkie. Which puts a different complexion on things. (Permission to groan granted.)

Even if Clarkson doesn't get the push, it should keep CiF going for, what, a dozen articles. 18? Any advance on 18?

While we're at it, I might as well take the opportunity to shop Chris Tarrant. In 1982 in an episode of O.T.T., following a particularly lubricious sketch, involving as best I recall the lovely Helen Atkinson-Wood and a bed, Tarrant made an off the cuff remark to the aforesaid Mr Henry, "You don't blush, you, do you?" The clear implication being that if Mr Henry had been sufficiently embarrassed by the sketch to actually blush, his dark skin tone would have effectively hidden it.

Albedoism of the most cunning and vile stripe!


Good game, eh? I suppose some of these wankers think they're promoting good race relations with this sort of shite.