Dinosaurs

Monday, 9th February 2009

I don't suppose it's any surprise that Theo Hobson's reasonable item about the golly issue has provoked such a dim-witted response. Pitiful, just pitiful. The comments on James's earlier post are a collector's item too. But then, as one one non-Speccie fellow-blogger said to me, some of these people might once have been running outposts of the empire. Now they have to be content to make fools of themselves in comment threads. (I'm assuming they're not entirely representative of the modern Tory party. Please, please, tell me they're not typical...)

The whole unsavoury dispute set me thinking about my days in the Beeb's radio newsroom twenty-odd years ago, when the ex-Fleet Street contingent was much larger. One senior editor - a classic overgrown prep school type - thought nothing of shouting out jokey references to "nig-nogs". Another, while giving me instructions on a running order, told me to do a few lines on "Kaffirs" (ie South Africa). I was so startled, I couldn't even think of a response. Besides, he was quite a nice guy, and I didn't want to start an argument. As for his more colleague, I eventually asked senior managment not to put me on the same desk with him. They complied, but I felt uneasy about being taken for a whinger. The climate has changed an awful lot since then. But the prospective members of the Golliwog Club just don't seem to have noticed.