In a Daily Telegraph article I cannot read because it’s behind a paywall and no way am I paying good money to the gutter press, which these days unquestionably forms part of the gutter press, the legendary cricket commentator Jonathan Agnew appears to be very worried. “I do worry about getting cancelled,” he says. “People seem to want to be offended”. Do they? Really? In which case, who are these people who want to be offended and what power do they have to cancel people like Aggers?
I’ve heard about the so-called ‘Cancel Culture’ for donkey’s years and still don’t really understand how it is supposed to work. I know what it is supposed to mean and the best definition I can find is by, of all people, former UK prime minister Rishi Sunak who says that cancel culture (is) where one group is “trying to impose their views on the rest of us”. But it’s still meaningless.
How can I cancel anyone in my role as a lone blogger? I can state my views to my loyal reader but I can’t cancel anyone. I have no influence the media, which is owned and controlled largely by billionaires, most of whom live overseas. None of us has any influence. It’s a free press only for those who can afford it. I can only imagine someone like Agnew being “cancelled” in very specific circumstances.
If he started telling racist, sexist or homophobic jokes, perhaps during Test Match Special? It’s one thing being an alleged comedian like Jim Davidson, who makes a living out of being a cunt, but during a cricket commentary, it’s fair to say that there are areas one should not visit. If Agnew fears being cancelled, perhaps he should volunteer to attend some kind of diversity training? Some things, even in a free country, which I am not sure this is at the best of times, there are certain things you perhaps shouldn’t say.
I don’t wish to assume the man’s politics. They are of no concern to me. I recall that he was against Brexit, which was mainly a hard right driven project (I am not saying everyone who voted to leave Europe is of the hard right, okay?), and he comes across as a reasonable kind of guy, so why this sudden fear?
Because banging on about the so-called cancel culture is unquestionably a right wing thing, just like reinventing the term woke and pretending it’s a bad thing when actually it’s a very good thing to be, and using terms like snowflake and referring to political correctness, something that exists only in the minds of the hard of thinking.
One point worth making is that everything changes. What we used to laugh at – well, some of us anyway – isn’t quite so funny today. The language we use has changed. The N word, which was thrown around endlessly as recently as the 1970s, has mostly become unacceptable to all bar those who have racist tendencies. It’s the same with the P word, used towards people of Pakistani heritage (and other Asian people who are assumed to be from Pakistani heritage, even when they aren’t). No one told us not to use the words. Most of us worked it out for ourselves.
There’s still room for the double entendre (the French have a term for it), as we know from watching TV and listening to the radio. It’s an old tradition, like saucy seaside postcards, and it’s not going away because – and whisper it, quietly – we like a bit of a laugh. Aggers and Johnners legover incident on the radio would not be cancelled if it went out today. There’s a big difference between being threatening and abusive and corpsing.
I honestly do not believe there is any kind of formal cancelling going on, but where the cancel culture exists is actually from those with power. Even this little blog has been threatened with closure by a national newspaper, you can probably work out which one, the shower of hate-filled shit that it is, and by a former employee of a national TV station. I’ve literally been cancelled into pulling a couple of blogs over the years with what I believed were spurious threats of legal action, but could not gamble that they weren’t. In other words, the main people who cry about the cancel culture are those with the real power. These are the hirers and firers, no one else.
Agnew describes himself as “a bridge between old days and now” and there I agree with him. The sports commentator in general and the cricket commentator in particular is more bland and generic than he or she used to be. The great personality commentators, like David Coleman, Dan Maskell, Bill McLaren, Richie Benaud and Brian Johnston are no more, possibly because there is so much more televised sport than ever before. The big sports are big businesses these days, increasingly faceless and driven by profit, as are the people who are paid to talk about it. But he hasn’t been cancelled because he’s just signed a new long term contract to lead Test Match Special. Unless he does or says something unimaginably rash and stupid, he’s not going to be cancelled.
There will always be a few people who are desperate to be offended. It was always thus. It’s perhaps the things that weren’t offensive 50 years ago are today, that bigotry isn’t a good thing and that it needs to be called out. That’s not the cancel culture as some would have it. If I see someone being abused for their colour, their race, their religion, their sex and sexuality or whatever, I won’t ignore it. It’s just wrong and nothing to do with anyone being cancelled. That’s what people Jonathan Agnew should remember. If he’s not behaving like a racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic twat, then he’s got nothing to worry about.
