PC 449 Sexual and Racist Thoughtlessness
If you are of a certain age, you will remember the saucy postcards picturing, oh! I don’t know, a dog tugging at the knickers of a large breasted woman, or this:
Or these ……
Was there anything harmful in these, produced in an era before television, a genre of comedy that appealed to all but the frigid? Barrack-room humour, pub male banter, it seemed part of the social fabric; just as comedians like Ken Dodd and Frankie Howard hammered the sexual jokes and innuendo to the point they became, to a degree, their trademark. I always pitied the mother-in-law! Sexual bluntness but at arm’s length; nothing personal. If we didn’t laugh out loud, we maybe sniggered silently, not wanting to be seen as outwardly coarse, but appreciating the creator’s skill.
Page 3’s Jakki Degg
The Sun, a British tabloid newspaper and part of the stable of Rupert Murdoch, from 1970 featured ‘topless glamour models’ on its third page. The Sun’s Page 3 became a defining aspect of the paper and a cultural phenomenon, with models like Katie Price aka Jordan gaining fame through it. ‘Page 3’ was discontinued in 2015 after criticism about how it was portraying women.
Whilst I am not a fan of some of the reality television shows that grace our screens, such as Love Island or Celebrity Big Brother, I do like creative programmes, such as MasterChef (Presented by Greg Wallace and John Torode), The Great British Bake Off (Presented by Alison Hammond and Noel Fielding, with judging by Paul Hollywood and Prue Leith) and Bake Off The Professionals (Presented by Liam Charles and Ellie Taylor, and judged by Benoit Blin and Cherish Finden), although you can identify a bit of a theme in these! I could add ‘The Great Pottery Throw Down’ (Presented by Siobhán McSweeney and judges Keith Brymer Jones and Rich Miller) all about using clay.
I mention these four because in some episodes, sometimes, someone will make what used to be called a smutty joke, some comment with sexual undertones. And everyone laughs, presenters and participants, and the comment is never challenged; presumably if it was it would be edited out. Challenging would have been viewed as prudish; no one wants to be called a prude. So the inference is that the programme makers believe these titillations add colour to the conversations, to the banter. “It’s what we do, its harmless fun …..” until it isn’t. How do you know when you might offend someone? I love sex, love reading about sex, watching its portray in films and am no prude for sure, but I have always failed to understand why there is this incessant underlying sexual inuendo present in programmes that have nothing to do with sex. I watch and cringe, think ‘is that comment really necessary?’ In baking, ‘buns’, ‘cream’ and ‘rising’ are good examples of cross-over words not leaving much to the imagination.
Greg Wallace and John Torode
Both presenters of Master Chef, Greg Wallace and John Torode, have had their contracts terminated in the last few weeks, the former as a result of a BBC investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct. Greg is now considered old school, the dinosaur who doesn’t understand that what was considered fun and OK, is now not OK; certainly not fun if you are the victim.
Interestingly Wallace has apparently claimed that he often does not wear underpants as his autism manifests itself in extremely sensitive skin. This obviously explained why he was wearing a sock on his cock when someone opened the door of his dressing room during the making of a MasterChef programme. Another female member of the production crew recalled that Wallace, in his dressing room, said he needed to change his trousers and simple dropped them in front of the woman. ‘Oh! Sorry, I never wear underwear!’
A great example of a reality television show that seemed to be squeaky clean was Handmade: Britain’s Best Woodworker, which was first broadcast in 2021. Talented woodworkers were set a ‘big project’ challenge, like making a bed, as well as skills tests, designed to demonstrate a particular expertise. Sadly it only ran for three series and there’s no news of it coming back. Perhaps too squeaky clean?
I must obviously question whether the audience love and laugh at the sexual inuendo, just part of the relaxing point of television – not paid to think! Whilst sexual jokes and suggestive scripts may be, some might argue, harmless, they are not if you are the victim or target.
As Wallace was being shown the door, there was an unsubstantiated allegation that John Torode, his co-presenter, had used ‘an extremely racist offensive term.’ Despite insisting he had no recollection of any of it, he too was gone.
Racism is a nasty and insidious aspect of human interaction. We have come a long way from the popular views of our grandparents or even great grandparents, where foreigners began at Dover, the British Empire was possible because of the superiority of the white race, and certain races had a bad reputation. We still have further to go.
At the weekend news came that one of England’s Lionesses football team, Jess Carter, has been the target of racist abuse during the current Euro 2025 football competition. I thought ‘monkey chants’ from the football terraces were becoming, thankfully, rarer, but in this case the perpetrators are using social media to broadcast their unwelcome and unwarranted bile.
Maro Itoje
Interestingly the England Rugby Union international Maro Itoje believes that rugby suffers less from racist than football does because “rugby fans, and people in rugby, are a little bit more educated than those in football. The strength of tribalism between football clubs is partly to blame; when an oppositional player who’s a person of colour does damage to their team, the fans want to throw abuse at them. Rugby is nowhere near as tribal.” Even today I sadly find some of my generation use what in the C21st are rightly considered racially offensive words. The further out in the sticks you live, the more likely to hear such things. It will take years for everyone, whatever their race, their skin colour and their religion to just accept that others may be different but that they have a right to exist….. in their own way.
Richard 25th July 2025
Estoril, Portugal
postcards 