I may have mentioned this in public before, but if not here goes. In order to listen to random radio stations and get a gist of what they do, I have a bath.
I tune the radio to something, place it completely out of reach and get in the bath and soak and listen. When I’m tempted to smash the radio receiver or tune to something else, I can’t because I don’t want to get out of the nice hot comfortable water and so just keep on listening whilst getting more angry or suicidal at what radio station and programme I’ve punished myself with.
On Saturday night it was the turn of BBC Radio Merseyside. I caught the end of a programme which after a few minutes of listening I’d twigged was for black people, and then the beginning of the programme that was obviously for generic Scouse people over 80.
So, first to the black people’s programme. It’s apparently called “Up Front” and is hosted by Mandy Smith, a black person. Musically they appeared to be playing random hip-hop songs from black people that they fade up or down without regard of the start or the finish of the song. Most of these songs had mainly had all the lyrics (and accompanying music) reversed so that the constant references to ‘nigga’ and ‘ma biatch’ wouldn’t offend should anybody be stupid enough or sad enough to actually bother to listen to this programme. Well, any easily offended black person, of course, ‘cos the programme should not have been listened to by some white bloke in a hot bath.
Anyway, one of the features in “Up Front” was a bit of ‘meaningful discussion’ about the guy who had explosives in his pants and wanted to blow up the aircraft on Christmas Day. Well, it was two female voices stumbling over each other and sounding generally extremely uninformed about the facts behind their highly important topic of conversation. The reason of course that they were talking about the potential bomber was because he is black, and the programme is a programme about black people presented by black people (with Scouse accents).
So, one of the women said it was very important to underline that all the things the bomber had done were not proven just “alleged”. She then went on to say that she too was Nigerian and she was worried about the backlash on Nigerians that these probably false allegations would cause. (‘Probably’ false? WTF!?!) She wasn’t interested in discussing the actual facts of the case, but how the blame for this young black fellow’s actions lay quite firmly in the hands of the (white?) authorities that let him travel (So, nothing to do with the non-white people that had radicalised him and supplied him with the explosive pants then?).
The most hilarious statement from this black woman on this black people’s programme was how she thought one of the contributing problems had been racism. Her words were that when the young Nigerian’s father had called the US embassy (presumably in Nigeria) to warn of the radicalisation of his son, that embassy staff heard his Nigerian voice and thought that he must be a black man and so therefore they ignored him because they were (white) racists who ignore black people.
It hadn’t entered her stupid bigoted little mind that a US embassy in Nigeria would be regularly talking to Nigerians, as well as partially staffed by Nigerians. Silly silly terrible woman.
She was incensed that a poor Nigerian black boy had been accused of attempting to blow up an aircraft, and had decided that he was not guilty and the US embassy in Nigeria was racist.
Anyway, soon the meandering ill informed debate finished and we were back to fading up the already playing hip-hop.
It is very sad that ethnic minority programming brings with it an agenda to spread mis-information and even foster hatred and mistrust of white people where there really is no need for it in this modern day and age. I guess we have to thank the liberal BBC for that. Jeez.
Eventually it was 10pm and time for the late night show with Billy Maher and friends. This appeared to be a collection of three very old and very Scouse sounding gentlemen with lots of in jokes chatting away to each other and rolling around with laughter for no readily apparent reason.
They sounded like a pack of drunks sitting having ‘afters’ in a local British Legion club.
Their unstructured discussion meandered all over the place, peppered with an obscure collection of obscure songs “from me home collection” that ranged from songs from 1930s shows to more serious works from the famous tenors.
Contact details were garbled, with the website only being referred to as “www” and not “www.something.something” and the phone number being read out in some obscure order with the area code coming last. Not unsurprisingly nobody made contact. I assume nobody was listening apart from an angry despairing guy in a now cold bath.
One of the trio started to talk about how he remembered a horse that used to pull the bin cart back in the good old days, and this suddenly gave way to some mood music with him tearfully reading out a poem he’d written which appeared to be all about how, as a boy, he’d watched this bin cart horse drop dead in the street.
It was at this point that I couldn’t take it any longer, and in fear of being mentally scared for life, I heaved my frame out of the bath and crushed the off button under my foot.
Anyway, I think there’s a reason why the RAJAR audience research figures for BBC Radio Merseyside are so appalling, and I think I’ve just shared it with you!
England's England 