Norton: "Gay as a lord and Irish with it..."
Presenters such as Graham Norton, Dale Winton, and Stephen Fry were among those singled out in a study as being gay and prominently on television, pretty much all of the time. The report also found "low-level homosexuality" was institutionalised throughout factual and entertainment programming on the BBC, with many presenters such as Anne Robinson, Anthony Worral Thompson, Fiona Bruce, Huw Edwards and Matthew Kelly who were not actually gay but still behaved in a "highly arch, camp, homo-erotic-dominatrix, extrovert or, in the case of Edwards, Welsh fashion" in order to woo the "pink viewer". A monitoring exercise by researchers at the University of Leeds found that, during 168 hours of programming, 90.4 per cent of the output featured actors or actresses or presenters who were bent as a nine bob note.
Winton ties the knot - that's right, homosexuals can even get married to women now!! The bastards!!
Focus groups singled out the BBC as the worst broadcaster in terms of its reliance on gay men and women and issues surrounding them, such as the paucity of decent parking at Ikea and the state of Moira Stuart's hair. A spokesman for some organisation or other, said: "At a time when the BBC is seeking renewal of its charter, it is difficult to argue that 49.5 million straight households should be expected to continue making such a substantial contribution to channels on which their real lives are hardly reflected and which are often punctuated with derisive and demeaning depictions of them as people who are mocked purely because they choose not to stand around with their hands on their hips saying, "Ooh Everard" and "shut that door!""
Grayson looks at the muck in there...
The researchers watched 168 hours of programming on BBC1 and BBC2, broadcast between 7pm and 10pm over a period of eight weeks and found that Graham Norton and Michael Barrymore appeared in all but two of them. During that time, straight people, references to them, or related issues featured in just 38 minutes of coverage, of which 32 were deemed derogatory or offensive (but then, if they will watch Gardeners' World....) and just six minutes were deemed positive. Anne Robinson came in for special criticism, so it wasn't all bad news....
A completely gratuitous Cat Deeley poses for the first installment of Gilbert & George's "Rum, Sodomy and the Lash" tryptych....
The report said it was not unusual to hear the Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson favourably describing cars as handling "like a gaylord arsebandit bender after enough amyl nitrate to sink the Turpitz" - although a spokesman for the programme said that plans were afoot to to tone down his descriptions in the new series by giving him horribly slow and boring cars to review every week. Chris Moyles treated straight people "like zoo animals" - although as the survey pointed out, "in fairness, the man's a pointless prick who no one in their right mind should be paying attention to in the first place."
A couple of poverty-stricken old queens....
Focus groups of heterosexuals and bi-people said that when heterosexuality was portrayed in soap operas or dramas on the BBC, it was clichéd and centred on characters either in crisis about their sexual orientation or as promiscuous predators trying to seduce a gay person. Those straights who did feature were mostly played by gay actors who had never even so much as kissed a member of the opposite sex. Once their "coming out" or sexually orientated storylines were over, they were commonly written out. The report highlighted the case of Sonia, one of the few patently straight characters in Eastenders. Dowdy and completely devoid of charisma, she was not only forced into a brief and barely credible lesbian love scene with a gorgeous black woman despite having no back history of being interested in women sexually, but was also given the ridiculously stereotyped heterosexual hobby of playing along tunelessly to Miles Davis CDs on her trumpet.
Sonia: "That's right Martin, I kissed a bird. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to practice the solo from 'Freddie Freeloader'..."
Love on y'all,
Bob
© 2006 Swipe Enterprises
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