BBC receives complaints about Rowan Atkinson sketch (1 Viewer)

[JohnS]

2,200 people complained to the BBC when Rowan Atkinson did a sketch on the British Charity Telethon.Sketch in question has Atkinson play a fictional version of the Archbishop of Canterbury who compared boy band, One Direction to Jesus's disciples and saying prayer doesn't work.Regulator Ofcom will be investigating and the sketch has been pulled from the iplayer.

 

[FoxyMulder]

The joke is that you can't do edgy humour anymore on the BBC, ( or so many other channels these days ) its so politically correct and i'm not laughing, they shouldn't give in to censorship and should keep it on the iplayer, these people complaining need to understand that not everyone has the same sense of humour and they should live and let live, less complaining and less narrow minded views would go a long way in this world.

 

[JohnS]

I love Rowan Atkinson, and I watched the sketch and found it funny.It's too bad that everything has to be nit picked these days.

 

[MatthewA]

It's a variation on the same censorious attitude Monty Python faced back in the day: offend absolutely no one, anywhere at any time.

 

[mattCR]

This needs a link. It has to be on Youtube or something somewhere..

 

[TravisR]

The joke is that you can't do edgy humour anymore on the BBC...

As an American, I'm not really familiar with the BBC's broadcasting standards but I thought they were alot cooler about their content than the U.S. networks. Don't they allow people to say "fuck" on TV in the UK? In America, the FCC is hypocritical enough that it only allows movies directed by Steven Spielberg or Boston baseball players to do that.

 

[FoxyMulder]

As an American, I'm not really familiar with the BBC's broadcasting standards but I thought they were alot cooler about their content than the U.S. networks. Don't they allow people to say "fuck" on TV in the UK? In America, the FCC is hypocritical enough that it only allows movies directed by Steven Spielberg or Boston baseball players to do that.

You can say it after 9pm which is considered the watershed, i have seen the word used on Graham Nortons chat show and obviously on feature films broadcast after 9pm but when it comes to comedy shows i do think there is a lot more political correctness on what gets commissioned and shown these days on BBC 1 and 2, you do get imports such as Family Guy on BBC 3 which is funny and not at all politically correct but it's not made by the BBC.

 

[Stan]

I love British humor. It's so much different from the US. Haven't seen the sketch, but should be able to find it somewhere.

So they got 2300 whiners out of several million who probably watched it. The 2300 should lighten up or fall back to that good old stand-by, change the channel. Don't dictate to the rest of us who enjoy things like this.

 

[mattCR]

I love British humor. It's so much different from the US. Haven't seen the sketch, but should be able to find it somewhere.

So they got 2300 whiners out of several million who probably watched it. The 2300 should lighten up or fall back to that good old stand-by, change the channel. Don't dictate to the rest of us who enjoy things like this.

I tend to think this is what will happen; I mean, after all, if Jeremy Clarkson can get away with a joke about Lorrie drivers killing prostitutes, how bad can this be, really?

 

[Ejanss]

2,200 people complained to the BBC when Rowan Atkinson did a sketch on the British Charity Telethon.

Sketch in question has Atkinson play a fictional version of the Archbishop of Canterbury who compared boy band, One Direction to Jesus's disciples and saying prayer doesn't work.

Atkinson tends to be brick-subtle when it comes to the standard British-comic trope of atheist jokes taking the wide sweep of poking easy Anglican targets. The Richard Curtis "Archbishop" episode of Black Adder 1 tends to be particularly disingenuous in its shock/anger-management.
(In the UK, there's little difference between Catholicism and Protestant Anglicanism, so UK comics tend to leap to smartypants conclusions.)
Earlier, there was a controversy over the UK reigning in tighter controls over jokes parodying religion, after the Muhammad-cartoon flap, and guess who was the first out there championing "first amendment" rights for the comic who might lose his big act?

(I'm starting to suspect the complete-bastard "Ron Anderson" comic Atkinson played in Curtis's script for "The Tall Guy" may not have been as fictional as we were led to believe...)

 

[JohnS]

Here is the sketch