Members MsGuy Posted June 19, 2014 Members Posted June 19, 2014 I'm pretty sure I missed out on a couple of wonderful opportunities in high school from a fear of exactly this happening. (sigh) AdamSmith 1 Quote
AdamSmith Posted June 22, 2014 Posted June 22, 2014 Why innuendo is the best of British humour Samantha and her 38 bees are safe, after the BBC backs away from censoring 'I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue’. We look at the glory of a very British sense of humour Masters of the art: The Two Ronnies Photo: BBC By David Thomas 7:30PM BST 21 Jun 2014 The Telegraph The 2.5 million regular listeners to the long‑running Radio 4 panel show I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue will be familiar with the travails of the programme’s imaginary scorer and researcher, the lovely Samantha. She often goes down into the depths of the BBC record library, searching for music for the show. On one occasion, Samantha heard that the nice old archivists were a bit worried about their early vinyl collection getting scratched, so she ordered them a new mat for the turntable. She said that they were very excited at the thought of getting felt under their old seven inchers. Samantha also has an active life outside the show. She’s a qualified croupier and often works at an exclusive Soho club where gamblers pay top money to play roulette all day and poker all night. Poor old Samantha’s been beset by double entendres since she was first introduced by Humphrey Lyttleton in 1985. But she was in worse trouble recently, after the BBC received four complaints from listeners who think the Samantha jokes are smutty, sexist and should be stopped immediately. You might think the miseryguts would be told, “Get a life”, or, if that is a tad abrupt, “Has Sir or Madam considered turning his or her radio off?” Finally, it might be helpful to ask: “Are you aware that Samantha does not, in fact, exist?” That was pretty much how the BBC did respond, back in the Eighties, when listeners complained, or in one case wrote to the Radio Times, protesting at this poor young woman’s appalling humiliation. The complaints were ignored. But the Corporation was made of sterner stuff back then. In today’s PC world, the I’m Sorry… team were, allegedly, told to cut out the smut. According to Tim Brooke-Taylor, a panellist for 40 or so years: “We’ve had terrible trouble with the BBC about the show. Someone complained about Samantha – that it was being rude to women – and told us we had to be careful about this and to not do that. “The writer who does [compère] Jack Dee’s links said, 'Well, in that case I’m leaving’, and Jack said, 'Well, I’m leaving, too’. It’s just so pathetic.” This assault on the Great British double entendre was wildly inconsistent. After all, the BBC has allowed far dirtier and more spiteful jokes to be made by comedians on its TV panel shows. In 2007, for example, Mock the Week’s Frankie Boyle imitated the Queen, saying: “I’m now so old, my p---y is haunted.” That’s a nasty, mean-spirited way to mock any elderly woman, let alone the monarch. It’s also very obviously sexist, not to say misogynist. Yet the BBC’s editorial standards committee decided that while it was “near the knuckle”, it was “well after the watershed, well signposted and within audience expectations for the show”. There is, however, another, better way of treating a very similar subject. Back in the Seventies, Jeremy Lloyd and David Croft, writers of Are You Being Served?, made a running joke out of another mature lady’s furry friend. Mrs Slocombe, of Grace Brothers department store, was obsessed by her cat Tiddles. As she used to say: “On the mantelpiece in my parlour I’ve got a whole row of silver cups. They’re for my pussy. Do you know, it wins a prize every time I show it!” Jokes like that maintain a centuries-old tradition of sexual innuendo in British humour. Shakespeare’s plays are, er, stiff with it. In Twelfth Night, Malvolio receives a letter he imagines is from his mistress Olivia. As he reads it, he declares: “By my life, this is my lady’s hand, these be her very Cs, her Us, and her Ts, and thus makes she her great Ps.” It may be pure coincidence that of all the 26 letters in the alphabet and all the limitless ways they can be combined, the Bard chooses C, U and (or “n”) T, and that he then mentions his lady’s “great Ps”. Or it may be that he knew that nothing would get his audience laughing more effectively than smut. By the 20th century, absolutely nothing had changed. From Donald McGill’s seaside postcards to George Formby singing about all the scrapes he got into with My Little Stick of Blackpool Rock, the laughs lay in everything the audience knew was being implied, but never actually said. The very fact that British culture was so puritanical created the need to find another way of making jokes about sex, excrement and body parts. The whole skill of the double entendre lay in seeing how close one could go to the boundaries of what was allowed, without quite tipping over the edge. The audience shared a subversive complicity with the comedian. They were both getting away with it. Even the prudish, Reithian BBC was happy to play along. Kenneth Williams, a regular performer in radio shows such as Hancock’s Half Hour, Round the Horne and Just a Minute, based an entire career on his ability to make even the most innocent line sound smutty. And, of course, the Carry On films became a national institution on the basis of endless terrible puns and gentle innuendo. The Two Ronnies were masters of the art, invariably delivered straightfaced, such as this: “The search for the man who terrorises nudist camps with a bacon slicer goes on. Inspector Jones had a tip‑off this morning, but hopes to be back on duty tomorrow.” Between the late Sixties and early Eighties, all the apparent constraints on sexual expression were torn down and the need for innuendo disappeared. Comics could simply talk dirty instead. So‑called “alternative comedians”, such as the Not the Nine O’Clock News team, took huge pleasure in mocking their fuddy-duddy predecessors, subjecting the Two Ronnies to savage parody. Few people noticed that one kind of puritan censorship had simply been replaced by another: political correctness. Woe betide anything that was sexist, racist, discriminatory or – that great catch-all term of mealy-mouthed disapproval – inappropriate. Hence the knicker-twisting confusion that gripped the BBC. As an institution, it wants to be modern. It doesn’t want its metropolitan “liberal” (but actually deeply illiberal) chums to dislike it. And so, gripped by PC frenzy, it found itself in the position of allowing jokes that the majority of people would find genuinely offensive, while banning those that most people would enjoy. Luckily, the BBC is also petrified of media mockery. And so, as news of Samantha’s peril was greeted by scorn for the killjoys and support for the comics, a swift U-turn was performed. BBC spokespeople insisted that I’m Sorry… would be returning to the radio on June 30, with its humour untouched and Samantha still filling her box with the archivists’ seven inchers. It seems that the censors just can’t keep a good innuendo down. In the words of Kenneth Horne, “I’m all for censorship. If I ever see a double entendre, I whip it out.” http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/10916560/Why-innuendo-is-the-best-of-British-humour.html lookin 1 Quote
Members lookin Posted June 22, 2014 Members Posted June 22, 2014 . . . Donald McGill’s seaside postcards AdamSmith and MsGuy 2 Quote
