Where's the line?

I suspect that the 6.30 comedy slot on Radio 4 is unknown territory for a lot of you, those who actually have more important things to do for instance, but on Tuesdays there’s a programme called Safety Catch about Simon McGrath a man who “likes to think of himself as a good person. He donates blood (although not bone marrow because he’s heard that hurts), he recycles and he's adopted two tigers. But he has to pay his mortgage just like everyone else and that's why he currently works as an arms dealer.”

So far, so situational-comedy.

In the car on Friday afternoon I found myself listening to the writer and the producer having to defend the content of the show essentially because Outraged of Tunbridge Wells (probably) has reached for the Basildon Bond notepaper and written in demanding that it be taken off the air. Not because it isn’t very good (although it isn’t great), but because people are offended at the idea of turning a gun-runner into a likable buffoon.

There’s probably plenty scope for a hard-hitting, biting satire about the arms industry, legal or otherwise, but this isn’t it. Nor did the writers intend it to be. And Radio 4, probably, wouldn’t be the place to broadcast it, either. Safety Catch is more like 2.4 Children or My Family. Replace the “hilarious” plot routines of the husband’s burning his child GCSE project because he wants to have sex with his wife with someone mislaying a cache of Kalashnikovs because they’ve forgotten their Mum’s birthday and you get towards the right kind of thing. It’s gentle, mildly amusing and a little surreal in places.

It’s not offensive.

Or rather, it is if you refuse comedy the opportunity to handle subjects such as gender, religion, sexuality, race, violence, politics, oppression, natural disasters, in fact anything other than someone being mistaken for a doctor when they are, in fact (ha-ha!), a builder.

(Which isn’t, obviously, to say that it’s funny to be bigoted or ill-informed, but that virtually every facet of human existence has some scope for humour. There is absolutely nothing funny about child-abuse, but Brass Eye proved that there was a satirical point worth making about people’s paranoid, mob-mentality to it.)

Rather than just being outraged at Outraged, I’d already been thinking about this sort of thing.

A few years ago there was an article in one of the weekend supplements about how the wide-spread availability of porn, primarily through the internet, is affecting men’s, mainly young men’s, attitude towards sex. The article interviewed couples where the women felt obliged to shave their vaginas, to gasp enthusiastically with every thrust, to have sex in public places, to have anal sex every time, to engage in three-or-more-somes, to have their boyfriend ejaculate into their face every single time. All of these (I guess) are fun, occasionally, as part of a varied, healthy sex life, but it was the expectation of the men that making love to their girlfriend would be like starring in a porn film every time that seemed very odd.

All of this is leading to a character who’s lurking around in the dark corners of my brain. A sexist, porn obsessed dirty old man. I want to write his story as a first person narrator, because I think it’ll make him nastier. He wouldn’t be a sympathetic character, but someone deeply unpleasant. I want the reader to finish thinking “what a shit.” However, because it’s the central character and because it’d be first person narrator quite a lot of people would dislike the story because he’s so horrible. They might even think that his opinions were mine. I can think of at least one person I know who would definitely be deeply offended by it.

Outraged of Tunbridge Wells would be, well, outraged.

Okay, so all of this is purely hypothetical because I haven’t even written it yet much less placed it in the public domain, but it’s a reaction I’m worried about, one that’s stopping me writing the story.

If it’s done well enough should we be allowed to say anything? If my character says “all women are sluttish inferior beings to men” but is clearly a horrible imbecile whom bad things happen to, is that okay? Or by trying to discuss sexist perverts, without overtly saying “and he was an evil man” in an ominous voice-over style, am I in some way encouraging such people?

Where’s the line?

I listened to Safety Catch again. I fail to see how it could possible be offensive, unless you’re a nice-but-dim arms dealer who feels he’s being stereotyped, which means that Outraged of Tunbridge Wells just didn’t like it.

And that’s not a good enough reason to ask for it to be withdrawn.