Earlier this week, David Cameron, the British Conservative Party leader and probable next prime minister, was “cleared” of “breaching” “the broadcasting code” by the country’s TV and radio regulatory authority, Ofcom. Back in July, Mr. Cameron had been appearing on the morning show at Absolute Radio, a national rock station, and had, apropos the political class in general, observed that “the public are rightly, I think, pissed off.” To a question about why he was not using Twitter, the Tory leader replied, “Too many twits might make a twat.”
“That seemed to go okay,” reckoned Cameron as he left the studio. “Apart from the language,” responded his press secretary, Gabby Bertin.
“Oh, yeah, ‘pissed,’ sorry about that.”
“No, it was the ‘twat,’ ” said Ms. Bertin.
“That’s not a swear word,” insisted the heir to Thatcher, Churchill, Lord Salisbury and Disraeli. My dictionary says:
“noun [origin unknown] (1656): VULVA—usually considered vulgar.”
On the other hand, an Ofcom report from 2005, Language And Sexual Imagery In Broadcasting: A Contextual Investigation, is more ambivalent, concluding only that “twat” is “very polarizing . . . offensive especially to British Asian females and some women from other groups, but many especially men think it is an everyday word.”
Nevertheless, Ofcom felt obliged to spend two months investigating David Cameron, prompting lefties to advance the theory that the Tory honcho deliberately said “piss” and “twat” on the radio in order to appear “cool” and not your usual uptight conservative like . . . um, well, names no longer spring easily to mind in the British Tory party. But imagine Mitt Romney going on the radio and saying “muthafucker” to look cool, or Stephen Harper revealing he has nipple piercings.
If it wasn’t a focus-group-generated coolness op, Mr. Cameron might reasonably wonder why in the United Kingdom of 2009 his on-air effusions should merit a two-month investigation. I am a wee sensitive soul and so, when in Britain, try to avoid turning on the TV. A couple of years ago, I forgot myself and switched on to find in progress a game show in which the male contestants were required to remove the female contestants’ brassieres without using their hands. This was on the BBC. Which is funded by a poll tax: if you own a television set in the United Kingdom, you are obliged to pay a licence fee of £142.50—or about 250 bucks Canadian—which goes to fund the BBC. This is necessary, so it is claimed, to prevent the airwaves being clogged with hideous down-market trash of the kind that infects American telly by enabling the BBC to produce quality programming the market would not support. Like televised bra-removal competitions. Although, if that’s not commercially viable, it’s no wonder capitalism is dead.
Anyway, speaking of “everyday words,” and indeed of vulvas, last year I forgot myself again and switched on for my annual 15 minutes of BBC quality programming. This time I caught an episode of Mock the Week. This is one of those shows in which comedians say funny things about the news. If you’re thinking, “Ah, you mean like Air Farce or 22 Minutes?”—not exactly. If you’re faintly irked by those shows’ cozy relationship with the political establishment they’re meant to be afflicting and the party leaders showing what good sports they are by appearing in toothless sketches, that doesn’t seem to be a problem at Mock the Week. The host, Dara Ó Briain, asked the panel to suggest things Her Majesty the Queen would be unlikely to say during her Christmas message.
The show’s star, Frankie Boyle, replied: “I’m now so old my pussy is haunted.”
What larks!
