Thursday 9 May 2019

It’s all down to how we interpret stuff.

As I prepared our evening meal last night I half-listened to the news on the radio. You can’t really do more than half-listen because of the noise of kettles and pans and the like. So I sort of heard an announcement that the Sussex baby was to be called Archie Harrison Outback Windsor.

That was a bit of a surprise.

“Archie”- well, Harry and Meghan are clearly a modern young couple, down there with the trendy people who give their offspring names that are already diminutives. Babies are registered as “Freddie”, “Bobby”, “Tilly”, “Maddie” and “Daisy”, all diminutives! What these children will do when they grow up and want a grown up version of their name remains to be seen.

“Harrison” is also very on trend. There are quite a lot of little “Harrisons” around and not all of the, can claim, as this one can, to be a true “Son of Harry”. Mind you, I still think of it as a surname!

But “Outback”? Where did that come from? And then the announcer repeated it and I realised I had misheard “Mountbatten”, which by the way is an anglicised version of the German “Battenberg”. His surname is Mountbatten-Windsor.

(Hmmm, I wonder if the Duke of Edinburg has had to apply for settled status. Does he have the relevant proof of residence and working here?)

We must be careful what we say, and especially what we put out there in social media. The comedian Danny Baker has lost his job with the BBC because he tweeted a joke about the new little Windsor which involved a photo of a couple with a baby chimp. A joke in very poor taste even if he meant no racist comment, which he maintains:-

“Once again. Sincere apologies for the stupid unthinking gag pic earlier. Was supposed to be joke about royals vs circus animals in posh clothes but interpreted as about monkeys & race, so rightly deleted. Royal watching not my forte. Also, guessing it was my turn in the barrel.”

Not totally repentant however, he later more or less accused the BBC of overreacting, calling his sacking “a masterclass of pompous faux-gravity”.

He added on Twitter: “[They] took a tone that said I actually meant that ridiculous tweet and the BBC must uphold blah blah blah. Literally threw me under the bus. Could hear the suits knees knocking.”

I can almost sympathise.

There is an awful lot of political correctness about and a lot of fuss about who says what and has the right to say it. Some people just accept things as they are though.

There is a musical version of Andre Levy’s book “Small Island”. The book tells the story of her parents coming to England from the Caribbean and the culture shock, not to mention the racism, they went through. It’s a good book. I am a little surprised at their turning it into a musical but then they managed to do so with Les Miserables and Oliver Twist, both stories of rather upsetting content. At least Small Island does have a lot of humour in it.

But I digress.

Lots of people expressed their opinion of the production in this article. Among the comments about the shock people felt that West Indians had had to undergo such treatment, and the confirmation of that treatment by many who had experience of it, one person made this comment about the adaptation itself:

 “It doesn’t bother me that Andrea Levy’s novel was directed by a white man and adapted by a white woman, if they are truthful about what they’re putting out.”

There you go.  A bit of common sense.

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