This week's BBC MELTDOWN: Savile puppet haunts kids' TV
The BBC has apologised for airing an episode of kiddies show The Tweenies featuring a puppet "impersonating Jimmy Savile". Outraged parents choked on their cornflakes on Sunday morning as the offending programme, filmed back in 2001, exposed wide-eyed nippers to "Max" - a character "in a blonde wig, wearing Savile's trademark …
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Is this related to Panorama?
Caught something of it yesterday on BBC News. Seemed to be an investigation into the owners of The Telegraph which led to some fairly strongarm responses.
Time was when The Telegraph was serious if right-leaning paper: obviously against foreigners but appreciative of them especially if they could play cricket with excellent sports coverage. It now seems to have a bigger agenda than any of Murdoch's rags.
Who else is on the BBC's blacklist? Presumably any of the sherbet dippers and dope fiends: Frank Bough, Craig Charles, etc. (I'm afraid I'm not that familiar with the subject); adulterers (Brucey, well the list is probably endless…); petty criminals (Stephen Fry); wife-beaters (Geoffrey Boycott); blokes who have had sex with possibly underage women (all the bands since The Stones and most of the DJs of the 60s and 70s). We'll soon be back to the 1950s with the Light Programme featuring the charts from Chile and Percy Edwards bird impressions (I shit you not this was what was on offer in 1953, i.e. pre-satellite).
We need a catchy new slogan like: "do yourself a favour, stab a Tory today". Just waiting for that nice Mr Worstall to explain to us how this is not hysteria and all in our best interests.
Re: Is this related to Panorama?
'..We'll soon be back to the 1950s with the Light Programme featuring the charts from Chile and Percy Edwards '
Heh, what makes you think the '50's were so different and so innocent?.
Having had the (dubious) pleasure of knowing(non-biblical) a couple of people involved in TV/Radio from the 'Light Program' era, just be thankful that the 'class' of people that Auntie employed back them were a lot more discreet about their, umm, pecadillos. (Think: Happy Valley Set - but all over the South East).
Let's just say, as an example, the person behind the voice of a rather well known children's TV character from the 50's on has had a rather 'colourful' life, and was continuing to do so when I lost touch with these characters and their stories approximately a decade ago. (The East End adventures with the 'Princess Margaret Set', the drunk Comet pilot - it was the only way he'd fly the damn things, the nights spent drinking George Melly under the table, the orgies.. ye gods, when they got drunk, the stories they'd tell..their 'Light Program' image was an interesting 'nice' veneer).
A certain 'class' of 'media' people have always been amoral hedonists, Auntie was/is full of them, and, as the saying goes, like attracts like, but the beeb didn't have exclusivity apropos these characters.
To protect anyone's happy childhood memories , I also won't mention what I've been told people were getting up to using the Bungle costume at a party in London one weekend whilst Rainbow was still being filmed 'back in the day'.. (Ah feck it, screw your childhood, think: gfur..)
Re: Bungle costume at a party in London one weekend
That was ITV not BBC!
You should post what happened on one of those "furry fursuit sex websites" that I have heard of that a friend told me about.
This is just the beginning
Several other Beebheads are in the sights of the Saville cops. Are they going to be expunged from history as well? And what happened to Hughie Green and Jess Yates when their peccadilloes (not to mention other bits) were exposed?
BBC lefites
Privatise the BBC - it's just a Labour party propaganda machine, so clueless that it makes a puppet of this tw*t on a kids tv show.
Re: BBC lefites
come on the other channels aren't much better. Remember the Channel 4 show Kiddie Stare?
Re: BBC lefites
Spectacular non-sequitur - congratulations!
Re: BBC lefites
Also you may like to know that "the BBC" doesn't produce all its programs in house. The Tweenies was produced by Tell-Tale Productions now owned by Entertainment Rights which five seconds of Googling/Binging/DuckDuckGoing could tell you.
So you'll have to take up with Iain Lauchlan and Will Brenton whether they had a secret agenda to push with a Jimmy Saville Tweenied puppet.
Re: BBC lefites
The BBC may outsource production, but the producers will aim to please their socialist customer.
That the BBC is left wing is incontrovertible. Have you ever heard them say anything bad about the EU? Or anything bad about Labour and the Unions for that matter? Compare that to their sniffy attitudes to the tories or the UKIP party.
I've not watched TV for ten years but I read the media so have a fairly good impression of their bias from reliable sources, who question why tax payers money is going towards a pro-labour propaganda machine.
Re: BBC lefites
Privatise the BBC - it's just a Labour party propaganda machine, so clueless that it makes a puppet of this tw*t on a kids tv show.
They used a puppet resembling a well respected entertainer with a strong track record for charitable works, the programme was made ten years ago.
Have you ever heard them say anything bad about the EU? Or anything bad about Labour and the Unions for that matter?
Yes; many times.
...I've not watched TV for ten years but I read the media so have a fairly good impression of their bias from reliable sources,...
So unlike most people you don't tend to favour media that tends towards your own political leanings?
If you've not watched it for ten years why get so upset about it? I hope you don't listen to any if their radio output too. (I'm assuming you don't pay the licence fee after all).
Re: BBC lefites
Is that "reliable sources" such as the The Telegraph?
Re: BBC lefites
Awesome posting! "not watched TV for ten years". That is priceless stuff! You're not selling satellite tv are you?
Re: BBC lefites
Oh fuck off, Eadon! Seeing as you're constantly spouting (ill-informed) evangelism of Free Software what do you think it makes you?
Re: BBC lefites
"The BBC may outsource production, but the producers will aim to please their socialist customer."
I would *love* to hear the Marxist doctrine behind The Tweenies.
Optional
isn't it something to do with the licence fee that means if only one person is offended the BBC has to say sorry ?
Parid cos she hasn't apologised for everything she has ever done
I hate hypocrites
The kiddies watching the tweenies would not have a clue what all the fuss daddy was making was about.
Too many "think of the children" around.
Shame they don't take that stance when it comes to protecting them from drunken and violent daddies.
Re: I hate hypocrites
but to be fair, they don't do domestic violence parodies on the tweenies.
Just a reminder
The people complaining weren't offended - they were people who thought that other people might be offended, and that something must be done to redress the potential offense. Sort of a defense, if you will. Pass me the strong drugs, please.
Link Warning!
You might be offended!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWPrVbtYHb0
Outraged public
Working as a telecoms Engineer for a major international media corp and working a lot with their switchboard - Yes, I can confirm there are large (2 walls floor to ceiling white board large) numbers of nuts with nothing better to do that go looking for something to be outraged about then calling the papers.
They call it the nut wall here and it's a list of known nuisance nuts who get offended by the sun rising in the morning and feel it should be a page 1 headline denouncing that sort of thing.
Don't wear your seat belt!
That would be an obvious reference to Jimmy Savile's "Clunk-Click" campaign.
And as for travelling by train ... well sadly we don't have Inter-City any more so it's OK.
Re: Don't wear your seat belt!
Now BBC 3 and 4 are going to have to stop showing the programmes about the Inter-City modernisation in the 1970s which includes lots of Savile and the advertising campaign.
Whatever are all these digital channels going to show now that their stocks of old programmes and series are being contaminated by the unwanted?
that's an own goal
LOL. surely they knew it might touch a few nerves.
Maybe next time they can have a character called Mr Rapiscan or something.
But yet....
I actually know a parent who complained about this to me later that evening... His seven year old was sat playing Grand Theft Auto at the time... Which is worse?
sat playing Grand Theft Auto
That's terrible! Grand Theft Auto is such an old and shit game - I think he should upgrade to one of the more recent ones with 3D graphics!
Newspeak/history
Personally I'm amazed by all the people who seem to be saying that no-one had ever heard of paedophilia or whatever in the 70s... I mean, excuse me. I still remember the suprise we 15 year old boys at my school felt when we were informed that the teacher who we felt was, shall we say, excessively tactile, was getting married... And about three years later at college I remember a comedy sketch at a college concert which featured a choirmaster and a scout master sodomising their charges... Of course we knew this stuff went on.
And in those days when one hitchiked everywhere we always stayed on the alert for drivers who might want more than a bit of company on the road...
Time for the BBC to get some balls
What idiot got offended, can you stick your hand up ?
Cultural value?
I like my Retrogames.
I don't care if some of them might offend some people, if they have Michael Jackson* prancing around rescuing llttle boys, the Twin Towers being blown to smithereens or anything else potentially 'offensive'. They're a part of our heritage and changing anything about them would be wrong.
I'm not for one second going to say Tweenies has any value at all on the same level, but it's not as if it's some horrific footage of Jimmy Saville abusing anybody.
If the BBC are out to cut, re-edit or erase from history each and every reference to the man isn't that more likely to do greater damage than is solves, culling entire episodes from libraries, trying to rewrite history? Isn't that what we need protections against, not some 'offensive' scene.
* I am aware that he wasn't convinced of anything, but people had serious doubts at one point.
keep him off air
Generally speaking, I think the outrage about paedophillia says more about the complainer than it does about the victim or the offender -- but that doesn't mean I want to see old images of an alleged offender poncing about on the box.
What's next?
Claiming that Fizz looks too much like Muffy Crosswire from Arthur, except with the wrong color palette, once you have a few hits of illicit/pharmacutical drugs? (yes, it's true. I actually once thought Fizz looked a lot like Muffy after taking a little too many puffs of my asthma inhaler in quick succession).
This world needs to get ahold of itself. Times change. Tweenies was created back when that Savile guy (which I've never heard of) still wasn't fingered as a nonce.
Until I read the Daily Mail...
...I thought that the 'Saville Row' was where clothes were made.
I once wwnt into WHSmiths...
...and bought a copy of the Daily Mail and a copy of Viz.
I was a bit embarrassed to be seen with such a childish rag, so I hid it inside the copy of Viz.
Saville
Perhaps the Saville estate would like to take the police to court for defamation. nothing has been proven and it seems as if the police have decided on a verdict without the benefit of a trial. Too tall terror photographer anyone.
Re: Saville
After Hillsborough et all I'm inclined to believe that Saville may be being stitched up.
Though the evidence seems to suggest he needed a bit of carving.
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