I wasn’t going to run this as a story but I have been inundated all day with messages asking for my support, to join a Facebook Group, or just help arrange a lynching for Rod Liddle – Ed.
Rod Liddle, the former editor of the Today Programme from 1998 to 2002 and now an assistant editor of The Spectator has set the cat among the pigeons by describing some of the supporters of the beleaguered Welsh television channel S4C as:
“some of those miserable, seaweed munching, sheep-bothering pinch-faced hill tribes who are perpetually bitter about having England as a next door neighbor”.
Writing on his Spectator blog Liddle continued:
“S4C has become a state funded sinecure for the utterly talentless, the dregs who cannot even get a job at HTV (Cymru); a corrupt political sop of not the scantest interest to even Welsh people. Bin it, Johnny Bach. Bin it.”
So what’s my take on it? Well apart from the fact that HTV Wales has not been around since 1996, I found it a vaguely amusing piece of satire, though I have seen better material from a sixth form common room.
Was I offended? Certainly not.
What did offend me was being added to a Facebook Group “Sack Liddle for racism against the Welsh” without my permission.
If Liddle had been Welsh would anyone have taken offense?
In fact, Liddle who was was born in Abbey Wood, south London, and brought up in Nunthorpe, Teesside was a journalist on the South Wales Echo in Cardiff where he was a general news reporter and, for a time, their rock and pop writer.
In the past few weeks we have run a number of satirical article on various Welsh themes and yesterday I allowed one of our writers to say:
“Added to that is the fact that Dylan Thomas spurned the Welsh language which violates their mandate for promoting Welsh whenever possible, even if means employing Welsh speaking half-wits over better qualified non-Welsh speaking candidates. And let’s be honest, who reads poetry anymore anyway?! It’s for bed-wetters, poofs and old maids.”
No offense was intended and so far, none has been taken.
Sometimes satire can be taken too far, and when in November 2009, on The Spectator website, Liddle offered “a quick update on what the Muslim savages are up to,” a brief article about the stoning to death of a 20-year-old woman in Somalia after she was accused of adultery, I thought that the article was in very poor taste.
Come on people of Wales, where’s your sense of humor?
Confession: I used to subscribe to The Spectator but gave up after being deluged with letters from the former editor Boris Johnson after letting my subscription lapse.
