David Baddiel to tell us about online abuse

[gilbertharding]

Jewish actors have difficulty getting cast...

Citation needed.

[pigamus]

Ehhhhhh

I'm not sure Jimmy Savile impressions are appropriate really

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David Baddiel has done nothing of comedic value since the Newman and Baddiel 'that's you, that is' sketch which must be 30 years old. Off the cuff bollocks about football or being a foil to Frank Skinner's superior wit doesn't count.

Very much the straight man to Skinner, with some comedy value stemming from his hubristic notion that he is a funny man as well.  Although I did like the episode where he went off stage to have a piss and Skinner did some of the show without him.

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In a nutshell: he hangs on to the coat tails of gifted performers, declares himself to be a supreme intellectual and makes disingenuous smears to try and prove points.  All that said, I don't hate him.  There's something reassuringly British about the guy.  Like a pretentious Jeremy Clarkson.

Why would anyone be reassured by a pretentious Jeremy Clarkson.

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His 1992 interview with The Independent where he discusses the 'school spanner' has been doing the rounds on Twitter since the doc aired:

It is not just the gags that they have retained from their school days. Baddiel uses the real names of his teachers and school chums.

'I got a very big complaint about that once,' he remembered. 'We did a sketch on the telly show about the school spanner, you know, the guy who was such a plonker he deserved to be bullied. Rob changed the name of his, but I couldn't. You see his name was part of the reason why he was a spanner.

'Anyway, I got a letter from his sister saying she was absolutely disgusted to hear his name used like that, thank goodness he was out of the country, what would his employer have thought, etc. What you don't realise, she added, was that when he was at school he was having a lot of problems at home: his mother was dying. Well, the funny thing was we all knew his mother was dying, but the cruelty of schoolkids was such that we didn't care.'

Justifying his ongoing, unchanged perspective on this subject with the completely fabricated notion that children are immutably like that.

The fact that the person's real name - something they couldn't choose or change - was crucial to Baddiel's later jokes around their emotional difficulties indicates that this isn't a childhood viewpoint at all and cannot be brushed off as such. 

Even though I enjoyed the Mary Whitehouse Experience I always got the vibe off him that he was a bully, and could never quite shake it.  Sometimes you can just tell these things; maybe it's a self-defence mechanism.

Has he ever acknowledged or apologised for any of this?

[KennyMonster]

Justifying his ongoing, unchanged perspective on this subject with the completely fabricated notion that children are immutably like that.

The fact that the person's real name - something they couldn't choose or change - was crucial to Baddiel's later jokes around their emotional difficulties indicates that this isn't a childhood viewpoint at all and cannot be brushed off as such. 

It's funny; even though I enjoyed the Mary Whitehouse Experience I did get the vibe off him that he was a bully, and could never quite shake it.

Has he ever acknowledged or apologised for any of this?

You have to understand though, that this was how comedy was in the early 90s as lad culture was being born.

One of his fellow Mary Whitehouse Experience chums also named and shamed their 'school spanner' too.

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He a good quiet sidekick to laugh at his funnier partners.

Seems quite unnecessary to budget for both Baddiel and a live studio audience.

Which would be more expensive?

[KennyMonster]

I

You have to understand though, that this was how comedy was in the early 90s as lad culture was being born.

One of his fellow Mary Whitehouse Experience chums also named and shamed their 'school spanner' too.

I should probably point out that the other name put forward as the school spanner was put forward following Baddiel was like this:

"...... yeah and at my school he was called Robert Newman"

which I think speaks volumes about how Baddiel views comedy and who he targets.

[Poirots BigGarlickyCorpse]

Citation needed.

Dude I said if Jewish actors have trouble getting cast. If. I don't know if they do so I'm not going to make a blanket statement one way or the other.

[gilbertharding]

Fair enough. Sorry.

[KennyMonster]

Fair enough. Sorry.

Here is your punishment for getting Poirots BigGarlickyCorpse wrong.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgWp5Ee8JGg

[gilbertharding]

See? Unavoidable. In 2022.

[Zetetic]

Interested to know what the criteria would be determining "Jewish" would be for British actors in 2022, and how closely it would cleave to the Nuremberg '33 definitions.

[peanutbutter]

Catching up on this, but why did they kill off Vine?

Was more just they neglected it and then wrote it off. It's a fairly typical thing some of the major tech companies (most notably Google) do.

1. Buy hot new piece of tech before it becomes too big to acquire
2. Get distracted by all the other things you're working on, effectively leaving them in a holding pattern
3. All key staff either quit or get pulled into different roles in the organisation
4. After 18 months of neglect and slowing growth, decide it's not worth even keeping on the backlog of things to prioritise and kill it


I imagine in Twitter's case they couldn't figure out a way to integrate it into the core platform and were massively prioritising ways of getting advertising to work on twitter over all else so it fell by the wayside. Vine wasn't quite advanced enough to thrive on its own (e.g. iirc the Android app was fairly shaky compared to the iPhone one) without extra investment.

[poodlefaker]

[...] except (speaking #asajew) Jews are not marginalised any more! Take any of the metrics you can think of.. access to housing, education, jobs, etc and Jews do not suffer from any form of inequality in ANY of them, so I really don't know what he's looking for here.

I wouldn't be surprised if Orthodox Jews in the UK suffer some or all of these things, but I've never heard Baddiel mention them.

[dissolute ocelot]

I wouldn't be surprised if Orthodox Jews in the UK suffer some or all of these things, but I've never heard Baddiel mention them.

Haredi (ultra-orthodox) Jews who have strange rules about clothing, secular media, relations between the sexes, etc, may be discriminated against: they're discriminated against in Israel, and regarded as a bit of a joke by many less observant or less extremist Jews. Non-Jews probably regard them with similar bemusement. Orthodox, principally United Synagogue, is the largest body of practising Jews in the UK.

[king_tubby]

Are they the ones who are incredibly anti-Zionist too?

[jobotic]

That's Neturei Karta.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neturei_Karta

[Armin Meiwes]

I wouldn't be surprised if Orthodox Jews in the UK suffer some or all of these things, but I've never heard Baddiel mention them.

They do in a sense yeah (well the ultra orthodox rather than orthodox), although it's quite hard to measure because they are not, for the most part, looking to access the institutions of society as their traditions and beliefs make it more or less impossible.

[Armin Meiwes]

There are a few different haredi sects that are anti zionist (the one above is particularly fringe), although I assume all for specifically religious reasons.

[Dr Rock]

Ultra-Orthodox women face discrimination if they want higher education, but who is to blame for that?

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/ultraorthodox-rabbis-ban-women-from-going-to-university-in-case-they-get-dangerous-secular-knowledge-a7204171.html

[king_tubby]

Thanks both.

[jobotic]

There are a few different haredi sects that are anti zionist (the one above is particularly fringe), although I assume all for specifically religious reasons.

Oops. I didn't know that, had only heard of the one I mentioned (probably because they are particularly fringe).

[gilbertharding]

David Baddiel was the answer to a general knowledge question on Mastermind last night. The clues were that he had been a member of the Mary Whitehouse Experience, Fantasy Football, and the titles of two of his recent standup shows. The guy got it wrong. I laughed.

[Ray Travez]

He was also the answer to a question in a quiz in the NME years ago- 'who is the most irritating member of the Mary Whitehouse Experience?'

[Twit 2]

Has he genuinely forgotten he did blackface or is he so un-self aware that he can't see the hypocrisy?

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/jan/12/helen-mirren-golda-meir-maureen-lipman-david-baddiel-row-jews-bojack-horseman

It's all just an opportunity to make it about him and his book, isn't it? What a shit writer, too.

[imitationleather]

Has he genuinely forgotten he did blackface

Doubtful considering pretty much every time he tweets someone replies with a picture of him doing it.

Surely nearly everyone who saw that article must have reacted with "But didn't you do blackface to bully a footballer?!" I know I did.

[olliebean]

He addressed it in the programme that this thread was originally about, didn't he?

[Armin Meiwes]

Um he addresses it here actually

"This is not the kind of exhaustive apology that some performers, including myself, have given for the historic transgression of playing minorities when they are not a member of that minority."

[king_tubby]

I look forward to Eddie Marsan's cancellation for his performance in Ridley Road then.