A columnist at a Scottish daily has leapt to the defence of a writer from a rival newspaper who was taken off the airwaves for a “sexist” column.
HTFP reported last week that Daily Record columnist Tam Cowan was dropped from his Off the Ball radio show on BBC Scotland after making controversial remarks about women’s football in his column earlier that day.
He has remained off the air again for a second weekend and the BBC said it was reviewing his position.
But Herald columnist Graham Spiers has come to the defence of Tam, saying that his column was “wickedly funny, a bit off-colour, a bit daft, and definitely aimed at ‘the PC brigade’, of which I am one.”
Graham wrote in his Spiers on Sport column: “I hope this Tam Cowan ‘controversy’ passes at BBC Scotland, that his apology for being disparaging about women’s football is accepted, and life can move on.
“I have my doubts, though. The Beeb, it seems to me, are stalling a bit, and hanging Tam out to dry. That’s two weeks now he has been off-air for his ‘crime’.
“I use inverted commas for ‘crime’ because, in my book, he committed no such thing. And I write this as someone who values political correctness, who has been teased regularly for being PC, and who is very glad we have all moved on from the Alf Garnett age of years past.”
In Tam’s controversial column, he wrote that Fir Park should have been “torched on Thursday in order to cleanse the stadium” after it hosted the women’s match between Scotland and Bosnia, which he described as a “turgid spectacle”.
He also described two female footballers as “two of the nicest blokes I’ve ever met”, but has since apologised for the piece and admitted he had scored a “huge own-goal” with his comments.
Added Graham: “For me, the most important point of all here is context. Context is everything in terms of Cowan’s ongoing right to play his humour as it is.
“BBC Scotland, like the Daily Record, have bought into Cowan’s style for years: his bawdy Lanarkshire humour, his edginess, his sometimes old-fashioned, behind-the-times daftness. All of these, plus his acute mind, have made him extremely popular.
“Both the Record and the Beeb have enjoyed all this and encouraged it. In doing so, moreover, they have made Tam a major hit in our media. Suddenly, though, here he is deemed to have over-stepped the mark by inches, and his career is in jeopardy. I genuinely cannot believe it.”
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I wholeheartedly agree with Graham Speirs about the OTT reaction of the BBC in Scotland to Tam Cowan’s personal column in the Daily Record.
The fact is that the BBC are scared of their own shadows these days and one wonders how many females were involved in the knee-jerk reaction (less than 24 hours) to his satirical take on women’s football.
What the BBC is stipulating is that no-one must ever criticise the standard or watchability of women’s football at any time.
I had to laugh also at the response of the commercial radio station Radio Clyde to the BBC action. They, then, were falling over themselves to laud women’s football with features and interviews on it.
Neither got the balance of political correctness right in my view.
Thank God it’s not down to the BBC editorial ‘chiefs’ to defend freedom of expression.
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It’s odd how the BBC and The Guardian react negatively to anything disparaging said about women, homosexuals or ethnic minorities, but have no problem with vile comments made about old people or the working class.
Feminism, homosexuality and ethnic minorities are the ‘designer’ causes of the metropolitan liberal left, but these people are more than happy to trash those who don’t conform to their weird perspective on life.
Tam Cowan is entitled to his opinion, no matter how prejudiced. That’s the nature of a free society. If you don’t like what he writes, don’t read him.
Personally, I detest the sanctimonious, bogus compassion of the liberal left, but I would never challenge their right to peddle their warped ideas through the pages of crackpot publications like The Guardian, which appears to be written nowadays by a bunch of spotty-faced graduates straight out of Oxbridge.
The BBC is, however, somewhat different in that it is funded entirely by licence fees. Therefore it has a duty to its ‘stakeholders’ to be responsible in its approach to national and international affairs.
It has no obligation to bow to the dictates of militant feminists, aka the London Society of Lesbians.
For the record, women’s football is inferior to men’s and women’s tennis is massively inferior to men’s. Men are stronger, quicker and more skilful than women when it comes to sport. Their talents are more watchable and therefore more marketable.
Sorry to give you the unvarnished truth. Now move on and get a life.
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