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Journalist stands firm in Davidson 'racism' row

A regional journalist who wrote a review of a Jim Davidson stand-up comedy night in which he accused the comic of racism has refused to re-word the piece despite pressure from his PR company.

Nick Turner, web editor with the CN Group, reviewed a recent performance by Davidson at the Sands Centre, Carlisle, which was subsequently published on the website Cumbria Live.

In it he described the comedian as “appallingly abusive and racist,” leading to a request from his publicists Neil Reading PR to amend the piece.

However after taking legal advice on the issue, the CN Group declined to make any changes.

Nick, a self-confessed Guardian reader, joked that he had taken “an evening off from knitting my own yoghurt” to attend the gig.

He wrote: “To be fair he told some good jokes. One or two. His retelling of his nightmare year caught up in Operation Yewtree was genuinely fascinating and he told the yarn well. I could have listened to more of that. Davidson was eloquent too about how we treat our servicemen – a cause that he obviously cares deeply about.

“But once you’ve searched around for the plus points you can’t get away from the conclusion that Jim Davidson is an appallingly abusive and racist comedian.

“The audience probably didn’t care, but we had references to pikeys, darkies, black bastards and endless jokes about black men having big penises….I have never felt so alone.”

On 5 November, Nick received an email from Amy Whittrow at Neil Reading PR asking him to change the wording.

She wrote: “Your reference to Mr Davidson being racist is libellous and I kindly ask you to remove this from the review immediately please.”

However the original review was allowed to stand after legal advice was taken.

Nick told HTFP: “The review was my honest opinion of the offensive comments I heard and obviously it is an important principle of free speech that journalists should be able to give their honest opinion.”

Neil Reading PR has not so far responded to requests for a comment.

30 comments

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  • November 13, 2014 at 9:50 am
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    Did the PR really not think that through, or not have any idea about fair comment?

    Like Jim Davidson’s going to stand up in court and deny he’s racist. That I’d love to see.

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  • November 13, 2014 at 9:57 am
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    Freedom of expression. The review represents an honestly held belief. That’ it.

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  • November 13, 2014 at 10:03 am
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    I am no racist, says Jim Davidson. What a joke. Well done, Nick.

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  • November 13, 2014 at 10:04 am
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    Well hooray for everyone.

    Although this is a little like sending Richard Littlejohn to review Russell Brand…

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  • November 13, 2014 at 10:24 am
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    Is a silly email from a PR firm “bullying” though? Just another piece of fluff. Toughen up, mate.

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  • November 13, 2014 at 10:29 am
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    This country is now more racist that it has ever been in my lifetime. Why ? Political correctness and fee chasing lawyers have killed off the inter-racial banter that acted like a valve on a pressure cooker. I interviewed the late Bernard Manning for a national newspaper once and, after he found out I was a Catholic, he made some unprintable but hilarious jokes about the Pope. My wife would have been appalled but his humour was not aimed at people like her…a black, devout Christian. Same goes for Jim Davidson. He knows his audience and is not a real racist in my view, no matter what Guardian-reading Nick says.

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  • November 13, 2014 at 10:32 am
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    I’d love to hear the routine: “I’m no racist, BUT….”

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  • November 13, 2014 at 10:34 am
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    The really sad thing is the amount of support Davidson got in the comments on the website after the review was published. I was once asked to write an article saying Carlisle was not a racist city. It was impossible.

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  • November 13, 2014 at 11:37 am
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    I once did a review of Bernard Manning (whose discourse was undoubtedly racist) for my local paper probably roughly in the same terms as the reviewer above, ie an honestly held view (although to be fair I’m no Guardian knitter and any sane person who was there would have concluded the act was racist) and the local newspaper decided not to run the review despite having commissioned me to do it.

    That’s even worse isn’t it?

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  • November 13, 2014 at 11:53 am
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    Biter: Are you sure it wasn’t printed because it was not a very good piece and they didn’t want to hurt your feelings by telling you so?

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  • November 13, 2014 at 1:03 pm
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    Davidson has always told racist jokes but that does not necessarily make him a racist. There is a difference. My complaint with him has always been that he is a bore, relying on old jokes and silly impersonations of black people – it’s time he retired.

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  • November 13, 2014 at 2:13 pm
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    Ian Manning makes a good point. Jim Davidson undoubtedly uses racist stereotypes in his humour, but whether that makes him, as a person, a racist is another matter. Bernard Manning was likewise considered an appalling racist, and seemed to prove that with every joke he told. The more complicated truth was that Manning was of a generation of working class stand-ups for whom it was second nature to use racial, sexist and cultural stereotypes as comic props. Forty years ago, for instance, the Irish joke was also ubiquitous in mainstream comedy. If you wanted to be very po-faced about it, you could say that Les Dawson’s mother-in-law jokes were sexist.
    Challenged on his apparent racism, Manning would say that ‘a joke is just a joke’ and was meant without malice. He would also argue that he told jokes about fat people too, despite being 20 stone himself.
    I don’t think either Jim Davidson or the late Bernard Manning were racists per se. They were and are, however, woefully out of kilter with cultural sensitivities to which most of now ascribe. But in the gulf of misunderstanding between the Guardianista condemning Jim Davidson as racist, and the punter laughing at Davidson’s jokes lies the reason that UKIP has made such surprising headway in this country.

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  • November 13, 2014 at 3:15 pm
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    True Ian. People have to realise they are jokes and may not reflect what he believes. I remember Ken Dodd telling a joke that included picking a horse up by the ears. I didn’t hear of anyone rushing to the RSPCA accusing him of animal cruelty

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  • November 13, 2014 at 5:18 pm
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    Same with Frank Skinner.

    Sells out a tour saying he has cleaned up his act.

    Says he doesn’t tell ‘knob’ or oral sex jokes. Then tells them to illustrate how he doesn’t tell them. Eh?

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  • November 13, 2014 at 5:25 pm
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    No doubt about it – some of Jim Davidson’s material is dodgy.
    Why can’t he just stick to mostly good comedy like Arthur Askey, Morcambe and Wise, Ken Dodd, Jimmy Tarbuck, Tommy Cooper, Ronnie Barker, Ronnie Corbett, Benny Hill, Eric Sykes, Bob Newhart, Shelley Berman, Frankie Howerd, Michael Macintyre, Bob Hope, Ben Elton, Tony Hancock, Robin Williams, Michael Palin – and quite a lot more. Good fun with good material and not making jokes about black people etc.

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  • November 13, 2014 at 6:22 pm
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    What’s wrong with racial jokes anyway? The ones about the Englishman, Scotsman and Irishman were once the staple fare of British comedy.
    I watched some hilarious sketches by the late Dick Emery on TV last week, and I was troubled to observe that much of his material would be outlawed nowadays. It was full of extremely funny stereotypes – the sex-obsessed spinster, the trouser-suited gay guy, the oily vicar, the vampish blonde and the thick yobbo in bovver boots. Comic treasures, every one.
    The pious PC brigade are eating away at our freedom week in, week out, and I salute Jim Davidson and others who are mounting a rearguard action against these bigoted twerps who buy into the twisted philosophy of the Guardianistas and their kind.
    I’d rather have Davidson and Emery than the tediously unfunny Russell Brand any day.

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  • November 14, 2014 at 4:13 am
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    Well out of it. You had the answer in there somewhere. Cultural sensitivities. Sadly you don’t identify that culture like the way we speak is entirely made up! Hence anyone using it to be offended is greatly mistaken. But congratulations on identifying why anyone who knits yogurt or thinks they arn’t racist are wrong and not simply having an opinion. And finally, dick emery is incredibly funny and always will be every single one of his characters are funny and always will be. Try showing him with the sound off to someone who has never seen him before they will laugh.

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  • November 14, 2014 at 9:29 am
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    @PC, don’t think so, never had a piece refused before, I was on the staff. It was because the paper didn’t want to upset a) the theatre worthies and b) racism was too controversial.

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  • November 15, 2014 at 2:29 pm
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    I think Nick’s review (read the whole thing, people) was perfectly balanced and fair to Davidson, leading up to personal comment that Nick believed he was in the presence of a racist comedian. Forget the Guardian link, and I’m sad that people on this forum have come out in support of Davidson but that’s the world we live in.
    An interesting point in terms of journalism is to ask whether reviews are, like so much of what newspapers do, old hat. The iTunes and Amazon generation can make up their minds by scrolling through tens. sometimes hundreds of opinions to get a balanced viewpoint.
    Newspapers and newspaper websites send one person to cover it and print it like its gospel. It’s not, it’s just one person’s opinion.
    Saying that, good on Nick because I personally agree with him about Jim Davidson. But everyone is entitled to their own opinion, and on the Cumbria Live website at least they’ve had the opportunity to give this.

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  • November 20, 2014 at 2:24 pm
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    ‘everyone is entitled to their own opinion’ yet you slag off people for supporting a non-racist angle on Davidson…. hmmm

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