A few words from Rob Mansfield

I finally caught up with Saturday’s latest instalment of the nadir of primetime TV, that is The X Factor last night. Something lodged in my brain and was then provoked further after reading Clair’s great piece on her Urban Woo blog.

Now, I know that Emma, the rather large girl who made the headlines of the desperate tabloids, couldn’t sing, but it always amazes me that black people who are ‘larger than the average bear’ are never treated to the same sort of ridicule on these auditions.

Is this because the X Factor producers are terrified that they’ll be had up for racism, or are black people allowed to be big, because they have ‘huge voices’?

I don’t know the answer, do you?

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Interesting article from Mark Lawson on the self-censorship that some of the BBC writers went through recently, specifically Ashley Pharoah, co-creator of hit series Life On Mars.

They knew that making Philip Glenister’s character DCI Gene Hunt likeable was the key to a successful show. This meant that racist comments, which let’s face it in 1973 would have been the norm, were removed, but homophobic and sexist comments were kept in.

This is a strange situation. No-one would deny that racist comments on a primetime BBC TV drama series would be seen with a very dim view, but is homophobia any better? Or the blatant sexism aimed at DC Annie Cartwright?

There has been a wave of nostalgia for the 70s recently, fuelled by the likes of Life On Mars, despite the decade being pretty grim for the most part: three-day week; strikes galore; prejudice, so why shouldn’t a series like Life On Mars reflect the true horror of the decade.

The irony is, if they’d had a black character who was equally racist, they’d have probably got away with it. Is that double standards?

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