What a week. A Royal wedding watched by two billion people around the world – cheering crowds, smiling faces, excited children and adults, stunning theatre – and glorious unhappiness on the faces of Australia’s bourgeois progressives, who inhabit the sneering side of the nation’s media.
The first off the rank was the ABC. Like a bug hitting the windscreen of an Aston Martin, Aunty was miffed that their undergraduate comedy show, The Chaser, wouldn’t be allowed to use footage of the Royal Wedding for mockery and ridicule. Like the drunken uncle that most families fear will ruin a happy wedding day, the Chaser was rearing to go, but the BBC and the organisers of the Royal Wedding were onto the Chaser and their game. But more of the national broadcaster in a tick.
Without doubt the Wankley Award for the most obnoxious column on the happy event would have to go Crikey.com and the infantile spray from their sneering, ex-public schoolboy, London correspondent Guy Rundle. Wandering through the crowds of joyful Londoners, (or perhaps just slackly covering the event from a Lazyboy), Rundle could only manage:
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T-shirts ironically puked up. The occasional teenage boy hanger-on with them, hoping that some of the overflow of pagan fertility rite will slop his way.
A truck of portaloos parts the crowd. There’s hundreds of the things. They’re really gone over the top with poop coops—they run the whole length of the mall, like a phalanx of horse guards standing at attention.
They really are scared of public pooping—not unreasonable given the British tendency to let go anywhere…
Me, I think a river of effluent down the Mall gutters would give the whole thing a delightfully medieval turn.
A brief lowdown of how Rundle saw the participants:
The Queen: A grey-haired 80-something matron, who may well have another 15 years on the clock …
Prince William: Balding with the inbreeding showing …
Kate Middleton: Our Kate is no Diana, although the eating disorder appears to be coming along nicely.
So there is one approach to the Royal Wedding by a member of the looney-left which, in its own juvenile way, gave an inkling as to how the ABC’s Chaser might have handled the world’s largest TV event. Which gets us back to the faux outrage generated by the ABC and the bourgeois progressives in the media. Shock, horror and disdain that the parents should have the audacity to request that it be presented in a respectful manner and ensure their son and grandson’s wedding should not be mocked and ridiculed. The nerve of these people. Don’t they know that they are dealing with the "national broadcaster"?
Lost in the hyped up outrage was the fact that the restriction only applied to footage “within” Westminster Abby during the service. You would imagine that someone in ABC management would know that there would be no permission given for satire and comedy while such a ceremony was underway in the Abbey, any more that a ceremony in Australia such as a State Opening of Parliament or religious rites in a Christian Church would allow such conduct. Belittling the status and dignity of a parliament, state or federal, would most likely result in the perpetrators being dragged before the Bar of the House and punished.
Of course, the issue wouldn’t apply with a Chaser show on a Muslim religious service, or a two hour comedy special on pilgrims attending the holy week in Mecca. The Chaser wouldn’t have the guts to do that!
Kim Dalton, Director of ABC TV, said “We are surprised and disappointed at this late stage to be informed that any satirical comedic treatment of the marriage of Australia’s future Head of State has been banned.” The only surprise and disappointment is that the ABC Director of TV didn’t have the nous not to commission the program in the first place.
Another bourgeois progressive who got overheated was the Hobart based freedom-fighter Greg Barns, late director of the failed 1999 Republic Campaign. Again on that most fearless of digital media, Crikey.com, Barns saw the issue as a slight against freedom of speech. He breathlessly opened his article on the Chaser ban with:
… how would our politicians and the ABC react if say China imposed a similar ban on a coverage of [a] big event.
I’d say “not with much surprise”, Greg. Where have you been? Holidaying on Neptune? China and media bans! They go together like Tibet and Tiananmen Square.
All up it has been a great week for Conservatives and those who love and cherish the one great thing that Marxist, Leninists, Socialists and the latest manifestation of these left-wing ideologues, the bourgeois progressives, hate — tradition.
Traditions are what frustrate the Left. Traditions empower the people with memory, history and pride of who they are and where they have come from. In a world of uncertainty and danger nothing comforts a nation’s people like a reminder of their traditions. And worse than traditions, from a progressive’s perspective, is ceremony.
Stalin tried to destroy tradition by destroying both religion and the concept the Russian people had of individualism. Hitler tried to build an empire based on a distorted idea of German culture and tradition. Both were deadly.
Fortunately, in this country tradition and ceremony are alive and well, harms no one and drives the Republicans and progressives nuts. Monarchy, Anzac Day, religion (Christian) and parliaments. Oh! And traditional marriage.
What a week. A royal wedding, a chastised ABC, a ridiculed Chaser, nasty Marxists and progressives exposed for the control-freaks they are, and about 2 billion people around the world watching hours and hours of an ancient traditional ceremony, and loving it.
It’s about as good as it gets.
[ This piece was first published on Quadrant Online on 1 May 2011]