(thanks @danhancox on Twitter)

I don’t think it would have eased the outrage. The joke was undeniably in terrible taste, if by bad taste one means things unpalatable to the majority – even if the point was a good one. It would have taken some effort to change the zeitgeist on that one, and I think anyone would duck that challenge. (I think Boris Johnson was next into that hot water, wasn’t he? He didn’t have the option of sitting it all out.)

Normally everyone does duck out, hence the insincere, meaningless apologies that clog up too much coverage – leading to more and more of the same tactics. This is why I was so pleased to see Jimmy Carr come out swinging, I wish people would do it more often (where they have a good case that is – it didn’t do Carol Thatcher much good!)

The stuff you say at #62 is an education in how the media works. Not just offendees but all sorts of pressure groups influence the way a story is reported. I’m not sure it’s the media pushing it all the time, I think the pressure groups are feeding these stories a lot of the time. I think you see this particularly with a scrupulous organ like the BBC which tries hard not to impose a narrative of its own, but ends up having its context set for it by whoever has the loudest mouth bellowing in its ear. I saw this myself when something I’d been working on hit the BBC website during the week – there was an accurate story with the unadorned facts for the first couple of hours after the story broke, but thereafter the context got filled up by interest groups getting their quotes in, until by the end of the day you can get something quite distorted. That didn’t actually happen too badly this time around because there were voices on both sides, but on a previous occasion only one side were interested in lobbying for coverage, with the result that the story did a full 180° during the course of the day – what had started as a victory for one side ended the day being reported as a victory for the other!

It’s a really risky line to go down and I totally understand why he got pilloried – I suspect principally because at least part of the public was equally strung along into getting its hopes up every time a new video appeared – but it wasn’t the malicious one that got reported. As things panned out, it was even arguably right on point.

I hear what you say about professional offendees too. It’s noticeable how when this sort of thing arises the media know exactly who to contact for an outraged response. Similar to the fuss the other week about £47m being paid in bonuses to MoD staff – it’s just part of the kind of pay package that thousands in the public sector are on, but it’s easy to contact bereaved families, spin it as outrageous and exploit their grief for the sake of a two-day story.

Can you not imagine a point, though, at which you yourself would say someone has gone too far? I enjoyed Billy Connolly for years, give or take a Lotto ad or two, but the Ken Bigley joke was hard to stomach.

Edit: I’m not getting at you, I know you were only noting the backlash – it’s just that the whole cheapening of debate and the elevation of ‘offence’ to the worst of crimes really gets to me. Comedy may not be a very important manifestation of it, but the same process threatens sensible treatment of other public issues and that is important. Such is fertile soil for ‘edgy’ humour in future, I guess, so maybe the rest of them will have to sharpen their acts up.

But there’s a definite backlash underway against “edgy” humour – Mock the Week v Rebecca Adlington, Jimmy Carr on injured soldiers and of course Sachsgate being cases where they’ve gone a step too far. And it’s curious to note how some of the arguments in defence of those cases could have been made for Bernard Manning in the 70s.

BTW Punctum #9 – “the majority of British people were about to want [Thatcherism] for the third time” – not quite. The Tories got, as I recall, some 60% of the seats in 1987 with 42% of the vote; and with a turnout around 70% that means that fewer than three people in ten who could have voted for them did so. Still more than any other party of course, but not a majority of us – it rarely if ever is.

* that said, I do remember reading that the ill-fated recent computer-animated revival deliberately cut out Jack Straw for fear that the audience wouldn’t know who he is. That’s a shocking lack of faith in the medium right there.

*This place pops up in my day job fairly often, as the craft of ceramics is a regular feature.

As I write this I’m thinking of the scene in “Educating Rita” – by Willy Russell, no middle-class type himself – where Rita’s family is singing along to a Black Lace-type song in the pub and her mother moans “there must be better songs to sing”. Not everybody buying the Chicken Song will have had aspirations to an Open University degree, granted, but what you’re saying still seems “classist” in itself.

Having been subjected to mass breakouts of dancing to Agadoo, the Birdie Song etc as I was preparing to leave the nest (ha!) I enjoyed the Chicken Song and still do from time to time. It’s the inventiveness of the “instructions” (e.g. form a string quartet and pretend your name is Keith) which makes it listenable more than a couple of times, and although I wouldn’t defend it as a great record, it’s better than the average comedy hit.

These were politically fraught times which brought about harsh responses in comedy, which is why Spitting Image was so vituperative during the high summer of Thatcherism. It was also around this time that “When Saturday Comes” and “Off The Ball” were launched, the harsh Private Eye-style response to the state of football at the time.

It became received wisdom that Spitting Image’s puppets were of a rather higher quality than their scripts, and a lot of the time this was true. Nevertheless the final series included some of its sharpest material: Major and Lamont as layabout workers who greet every enquiry as to when the recession will end with a dismissive “Dunno mate”; and the advent of New Labour.

If the ratings had been as high as in its heyday, the portrayal of the relationship between Blair and John Prescott would have entered the public consciousness as surely as that of Steel in Owen’s pocket. One sketch showed Prescott getting up every morning thinking THIS will be the day the traditional values of the Labour Party come to the fore. He spends the day being foiled at every step by Blair and goes to bed every night thinking TOMORROW will be the day… etc. Another was a parody of Supergrass’s “Alright” video showing Prescott, Blair and Margaret Beckett on those bikes, with Prezza singing “shut me gob… zip it tight… while ‘e talks shite…”

“We used to be on LSD!
Talkin’ ’bout our generation.
Now we’re in the SDP!
Talking about proportional representation.”

LUCKILY FOR ALL OF YOU I AM VERY LIKELY TO BE BUSY AT THE WEEKEND.

i think the b side lasted a bit longer in our affections and i remember trying but failing to cause an outrage by playing it in the ‘bring in a song’ bit of a school music lesson. actually, we all had to note down and give a score to whatever was played each lesson in our music books – i’d love to see this now as a bit of cultural history. the other record i remember taking in was queen’s ’stone cold crazy’. this received much awestruck praise for how fast freddie was singing iirc.

*(my views on zappa consist entirely of what i remember myself to have thought one night fifteen years ago when a z-loving mate played me some of his stuff, and so i admit they may be open to a degree of challenge)