Enemies of Reason Poundshop potshots at the media moral maze.

Mr Whirlysplat

I think it's fair to say that I have had a fairly typical experience of Ben Elton. As a stand-up, I used to find him funny. As a sitcom writer, I used to find him funny. Now... well now, the days of Mr Whirlysplat have gone. I can't think of anything he's done in the past 15 years that I've enjoyed at all. Maybe he's grown up and I haven't. Or maybe he's just turned to shit. I don't know. Maybe a bit of both.

Anyway, let's not let his pisspoor musicals and Blessed - the worst sitcom in the history of the entire world, and yes I include Wyatt's Watchdogs in that assessment - cloud our view of Elton. The reason he's turned up here is because he's appeared in the Mail of all places - can you imagine the Ben Elton of Saturday Night Live turning up in the Mail? - saying something about how the BBC is too PC soclib loony left and how Muslims are bombing scum who should be smeared in menses and set on fire. Well not quite that exactly, to be honest, it's just a Hate re-hash of some interview he's done somewhere else, but they've concentrated on the hot buttons for their readers - Muslims and PC gone mad.

BBC is too scared to allow jokes about Islam, says Ben Elton

In Mailworld, Elton is still probably thought of as a bastion of the Hard Left, the kind of Red Wedge bogeyman that used to make their readers wake up in a cold sweat in the 1980s. So if this socialist scumbag bastard is saying that NuLab are a bunch of bastards who want to make us all Muslims and rape us in our beds with cactus-shaped dildos (again, that's not quite what Elton's actually saying, but it is, I imagine, what a Mailite might imagine he's saying, despite what the words say in English) then he must be telling the truth!

He accused the broadcasting company of allowing programmes to run jokes about Christianity and vicars.

Oh my god! Imagine that! Next he'll be telling us that Derek Nimmo's dressing up as a vicar! (Is this really 1974?)

However, he claimed bosses were too politically correct and worried about a negative backlash to do the same about imams.

'Too politically correct'. Ye gods. If Elton is really sicking up that kind of textbook Mail phrase, the well really has run dry. I almost pity him.

In an interview, Mr Elton, 48, who admits he has little religious faith, said: "I think it all starts with people nodding whenever anyone says, 'As a person of faith...

"I believe part of that is due to the genuine fear that the authorities and the community have about provoking the radical elements of Islam."

That's funny. I don't see the words 'too politically correct' there. They must be there somewhere, of course, mustn't they. No...? Oh well, the Mail knows what he's saying, even if he hasn't actually said what they've said he's said: they know best. Easier to put it into terms their readers will understand, rather than use the actual words he used.

And the comments?

The BBC should do those kind of jokes - if a bunch of freaks start hanging around outside television centre with all the beheading placards, send the riot police in for a few baton charges, and then arrest the lot of them afterwards.

Muslims are 'freaks'! What 'beheading placards' are these? Can I get them from a shop?

More double standards from the PC, left-biased BBC. If Christians and Christianity are fair game then so should Muslims and Islam be. If Muslims have an issue with that then that's their problem - get over yourselves.
- Julian Fraser, Taunton

PC, left-biased BBC. Heh. If only.

Then it is discriminating against other faiths and MUST be prosecuted.
- Phil Bailey, Shrewsbury

What?

Oh, Ben Ben Ben. Once you were so funny and you made me laugh. Now you appear in the Mail, saying some shit that they've twisted into their own anti-BBC, anti-Muslim agenda. How the times have changed...

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