[mr angry manchester]

Watching a Sweeney re-run the other day it was noticeable how dysfunctional and shambolic Regan and Carter were around women (Carter gets the elbow from a WPC in this episode). More like David Brent than ladies man Terry in Minder who was the exact opposite so it wasn't just a portrayal of typical men of their day. Sweeney is more nuanced than Littlejohn will ever realise.

Drag Act, series 4. Good one this I thought.

[Andy McDandy]

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/arti ... style.html

Littlejohn reimagines the nativity. You can probably guess the rest.

[Scarlet emperor]

Joseph's significant other, Mary, travelled with him on his pilgrimage unto Nazareth, for she was with child, after a serious breach of Co-Vid self-isolation rules which forbade sexual congress between men and women from different households during lockdown.

Dodgy ground there Dickie. Sounds like you're doubting the virgin birth.

What an absolute load of drivel. Looking at the comments though, you'd think it was Monty Python.

[Andy McDandy]

It's the sort of thing that Spike Milligan could get away with, but in anyone else's hands comes across as just clumsy.

See also "comic" novelists who all take Tom Sharpe as a template (normal bloke just wants a quiet life, harassed by overzealous monstrous caricatures from all sides, eventually plot resolved by some random deus ex machina).

Talking of which - still funny: https://5cc.blogspot.com/2010/07/to-hel ... art-i.html

[Andy McDandy]

Double dose today.

First, a review of the year.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/arti ... 20-up.html

Dickie doesn't do predictions. Instead he bangs on about how he thought the year was going to be great then turned all to shit. All the fault of the lefties, who now seem to include everyone.

Then a bunch of James Bond puns as he catches up on the fact that the government love macho-sounding acronyms.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/arti ... movie.html

The penny's hanging there, but not dropping.

[davidjay]

I wonder how Dickie will react to his mater Bozza's deal, that he was so against?

[Andy McDandy]

He stuck it to the libs. Everything else is boring detail.

[Andy McDandy]

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/arti ... -over.html

Missed this load of triumphalist shit over Christmas.

[davidjay]

Any point in saying he was against any sort of deal?

[Andy McDandy]

Is it a win over the Libs? That's all that matters to them now. Shitty wins.

[Andy McDandy]

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/arti ... worse.html

He 'does' Shakespeare. As in "aaah, what would the PC lobby make of this?". Never mind that this is a discussion that's been going on for years, if not decades or centuries. And that his inclusion of A Midsummer Night's Dream amounts to little more than "ha ha, bums!" (as opposed to, say, date rape).

Really, it's like abstract art. If you're going to deconstruct something, you really need to understand it first.

Just to put things into context, the author Michael Morpurgo has decided of his own free will not to include a retelling of the Merchant of Venice in a book of Shakespeare stories he's doing, because he feels the subject matter of antisemitism as presented in the play* is not suitable for a young audience. From that - the omission of one play from a canon of however many, not a rewrite or a softening of content - Littlejohn runs and "imagine if..." skit where the RSC (Luvvies! Aintchasickovem! Pooftahs and do-gooders all!) debates similarly censoring other Shakespeare works on the grounds of their wokeness or whatever. There is no connection between Morpurgo and the RSC at all, as far as I can see.

*Littlejohn quotes the "If you prick us do we not bleed" speech as evidence that the play is not anti-Semitic. True, it's a great bit of writing which has been used by among others Jack Benny and Mel Brooks to illustrate the stupidity of racism. However the play still ends will Shylock being forcibly converted on pain of death, and his estrangement from his daughter Jessica both viewed as a good thing by the heroes because he had it coming and she's got tits. And I imagine that if they omitted Shylock and just concentrated on the marriage plot, he'd complain about that too.

[satnav]

His Shakespeare stuff is total twaddle. When the plays were originally nearly all the performers were men. There have been hundreds of different versions made of nearly every Shakespeare plays including many modern adaptations.

When studying Shakespeare at school lots of teenage boys accuse Romeo of being a paedophile when they learn that Juliet is so young but the reality is that Romeo himself was only 15 and in the times that the play was set teenage girls did often have babies because life expectancy was so low and women had more chances of surviving childbirth when they were relatively young.

[Andy McDandy]

And how many girls in year 9 are eyeing up the lads in year 11? And how many of those lads are complaining about that?

One other thing about the Morpurgo story. Over the years, 'Shylock' has become an offensive term for Jews, in a way that Othello hasn't for men of African descent. Maybe that has something to do with it.

[youngian]

Littlejohn missed an interesting populist angle to explore there: Why is there no age categorisation or censorship for the kids of poncey metropolitan elite theatre goers that the plebs face if they go and see Death Wish? I mention that particular film as it was always a point Michael Winner made about Shakespeare plays when the BBFC cut his schlock fests. Are there any other examples of Mr Winner airing forthright views in an interview?

[Andy McDandy]

Ho ho.

Shakespeare is a bit of a sacred cow to them, similar to the last night of the Proms. They don't watch it, but know how they think it should be, and don't want anyone messing with it.

I remember Katie (ugh!) Hopkins moaning in 2016 about (I think) Sophie Okonedo playing a major role in the BBC's latest versioning of the history plays. Usual "What's a n****r doing up on stage?" crap. She seemed to think that it all had to be ruffs and tights and RP accents.

For most Mailites, they did Shakespeare at school, and probably hated it. But they've been brought up to see him as a) proof that "we're best at plays", and b) worthy*. So, similar to them seeing trips to stately homes as something to be done in hushed reverence at the glory of the past (see battles with the National Trust passim), they cannot deal with anything messing with that view. They endured it as kids, and so will theirs if they know what's good for them**.

*Stephen Fry uses the example of (I think) one of James Joyce's protagonists (could be Leo Bloom) muttering "Iago" after some idiot quotes Shakespeare as some argument-winning move. Fry points out that anyone going "Shakespeare said never a borrower nor a lender be!" should have it thrown back at them as the words of a fictional character, not as the author's personal opinion.

**If you've not read it already, James O'Brien's latest book has a nice deconstruction of the "Never did me any harm" argument.