Hot Bacon lolz and lukewarm Rajan apologies: Coke, 'cancel culture' and The Sun's convenient amnesia...
Richard Bacon collaborates with the company that 'cancelled' him and Amol Rajan capitulates to the tabloids.
There’s an ironically rather old line — attributed to William Gibson and at least partly his creation — that suggests “the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” In a similar vein, ‘cancel culture’1 — the great British media obsession — is far from evenly applied.
Those who shout loudest that they have been cancelled, often from the pages of national newspapers and the sofas of major TV shows, tend not to be anything but while people who stumble over tabloid media tripwires can easily have their lives destroyed pour encourager les autres.
Richard Bacon was interviewed in today’s Sun to promote a documentary he has made about “being cancelled”2 and it inevitably begins with the story of his 1998 sacking from Blue Peter after being ‘exposed’ by a tabloid newspaper for taking cocaine during a night out. Sun feature writer Alison Maloney writes:
Look up Richard Bacon on Wikipedia and it will tell you he is “best known” for losing his job on Blue Peter after a cocaine binge, in 1998.
Even though he went on to have a successful presenting career and is now creating game shows in Hollywood, the dramatic fall from grace was an early example of what we now call “cancel culture”.
So no one is better qualified to front Cancelled, a Channel 4 documentary on how social media has become an arena for public shaming and toxic abuse, which airs tonight.
Only social media as we know it didn’t exist in 1998 and the “arena for public shaming” that Richard Bacon found himself in was the British tabloids.
You’ll notice that Maloney doesn’t mention the newspapers at all, let alone the specific paper — The News of the World — which published the exposé (headlined Blue Peter goody-goody is a cocaine snorting sneak), after being tipped off by one of Bacon’s ‘friends’. That’s mainly because the NOTW was cancelled by Rupert Murdoch in July 2011 as he attempted to bury the phone hacking scandal in a shallow grave.
Of course, The Sun followed up on the NotW story with its own piece the following day (How do BBC tell kids that a Blue Peter presenter took cocaine?). The answer was opening the next episode of the show with the BBC’s Head of Children’s Programmes, Lorraine Heggessey, doing a piece to camera about what the papers insisted in dubbing his “drugs shame”.
Heggessey, wearing the kind of boxy jacket that blighted corporate womenswear in the late-90s, came over like a primary school headteacher delivering one of those very serious assemblies that were usually about someone blocking the boy’s toilets with those blue paper towels:
… one of the Sunday newspapers reported that Richard Bacon, a Blue Peter presenter, had taken an illegal drug. Richard admits that he has done this and that he very much regrets it.
However, I believe that Richard has not only let himself and the team on Blue Peter down but he’s also let all of you down badly. So we have decided that Richard cannot continue to present Blue Peter and he agrees that is the right decision. We are all very sorry and upset about this.
Cue parents around the country having to explain to their tweens what cocaine is and why it’s definitely only wayward children’s presenters that take it. Bacon was made to hand in his Blue Peter badge and, presumably, his (glue) gun.
I’ve been advised by my legal team to note at this point that I do not wish to imply that anyone who has worked, is working, or will work at The Sun has ever taken so much cocaine that they resembled a demonically-possessed Henry vaccuum cleaner going wild in a snow drift. I am pleased to clarify this.
That said, the phrase “even though” is doing a hell of a lot of work in Maloney’s piece when she writes: “Even though he went on to have a successful presenting career… the dramatic fall from grace was an early example of what we now call “cancel culture.”
The day after the NotW story broke, Bacon was quoted saying, quite sensibly, that he knew his “name [was] not mud at the BBC” and that he would “probably [have] to go somewhere else to start with… [but] with the passage of time might be able to go back to the BBC in an adult capacity.”
The ‘scandal’ — used here its most common tabloid sense: “a sensational and hypocritical monstering of someone for getting caught” — broke in October ‘98. By March ‘99, Bacon was back on TV screens as presenting The Big Breakfast. He returned to the BBC to present Top of the Pops and eventually became a fixture at BBC 5Live until 2014 when he left for the US where he develops gameshow formats.
If Channel 4 had really wanted someone who was cancelled, perhaps they could have given John Alford (real name John Shannon), the former Grange Hill and London’s Burning star, the presenting job. Alford was the subject of a sting by the NotW’s ‘fake sheikh’ Mazher Mahmood, which resulted in him being jailed.
Mahmood — now discredited after his 2016 conviction for perverting the course of justice — posed as a character called His Royal Highness Mohammed Al-Kareen and promised the actor, who was just 22, that he could help him make international contacts and secure movie deals. One night, the ‘sheikh’ asked Alford — who had been drinking — to procure cocaine for him and his entourage.
Alford — who is currently suing News UK for unlawful intrustion — admitted that he took drugs, just as Bacon did, but was no more a dealer than the BBC presenter. He had a successful career in showbusiness as both an actor and pop singer. But pressured by his seemingly well-connected new friends, he acquired two grams of cocaine and passed it on.
Mahmood — nicknamed ‘Sheikh Uve Bin Ad’ by NotW News Editor Greg Miskiw, who was later convicted of phone hacking — got a front-page splash headlined London’s Burning Star is a Cocaine Dealer and a double-page spread that screamed Blue Watch Hero Caught Red Handed out of the “revelations”. And Alford got nine months in jail after being found guilty of suppling 2.036 grams of cocaine and 11.9 grams of cannabis resin.
Aside from a handful of minor roles3 since, Alford’s acting career was done. The tabloids continued to pursue him for years. He doesn’t appear in Bacon’s documentary but Jimmy Carr — presenter of one of Bacon’s forthcoming gameshows I Literally Just Told You, which will also appear on Channel 4 — does, in a handy piece of what wanker TV execs call “synergy”.
One of the hooks of Cancelled is that while Bacon was not cancelled after the News of the World story, he thinks he could be now due to his past tweets. The programme includes a 21-year-old called Naomi going through his old posts and discovering two — one from 2009, the other from 2015 that she questions.
In the one, he wrote: “That sounds gay. I’m calling the police.” Naomi says that makes him look homophobic. She said the second, in which he wrote, “Good Morning. Awake and on my way to lend my voice to the police attempts to clear London streets of idiots and slaaaaaags,” sounded misognistic. Bacon says he was actually referencing Gaving & Stacey.
Speaking to The Sun — and seemingly putting his past encounters with the paper to the back of his mind — Bacon said:
It was an amazing exercise. It’s interesting going through your old tweets, because it makes 2014 look like a century ago. Everything has changed so fast and feels so different. Those two tweets in the show were about nothing. The one Naomi said was a gay slur was me deconstructing a news story and, when they’re in context, it’s obvious I’m messing around. But that’s the problem with Twitter conversations — if someone just takes one bit of it out of context, it can make you look really bad.”
It’s worth noting that in the interviews he’s done to promote the documentary, Bacon has been relatively measured. He told The Daily Telegraph of all places that he’s “seen plenty of examples where those who have said something stupid or offensive in public turn up on [TV] claiming to have been cancelled. But they are talking on a national television channel. How does that count as being cancelled?”
In the same interview, he describes The Daily Telegraph’s usual modus operandi right back to it: “By constantly describing things as part of cancel culture when they aren’t we are making it seem bigger than it is.”
But, despite saying he thinks he might have got support from parts of social media if the cocaine story had broken now, Bacon is buying into the general line taken by the British press that it is Twitter doing the ‘cancelling’ rather than The Sun, The Daily Telegraph, The Daily Mail et al.
Here’s two examples — one small, one large — from today’s papers:
The Duchess of Sussex won the latest stage of her court battle with Associated Newspapers over the Mail on Sunday publishing a letter she sent to her father. Associated says it is considering a further appeal to the Supreme Court and, of course, the usual suspects have written responses to the news.
The most pertinent one to the topic of today’s edition is Camilla Tominey’s piece for The Daily Telegraph — headlined ‘Victory’ is not vindication of Harry and Meghan’s repeated attacks on the entire press — and this particular paragraph:
On the contrary, what Meghan has proven is that when newspapers get it wrong, there is a legal recourse (provided you have got Netflix levels of cash to pay for a 25-month legal wrangle). If only the same could be said of social media, which continues to publish with impunity.
Social media, or rather social media users, are the big enemy for royal reporters because they can consistently critique, debunk, and demystify tactics that were once largely unchallenged.
The second example is also connected to royal stories: The pitiful apology made by Amol Rajan for tweets and opinion pieces from his time at The Independent which were critical of the monarchy and specific members of it. At 4am — not such an unusual time for him to be up since he presents Radio 4’s early morning news programme Today — Rajan tweeted:
In reference to very reasonable questions about some foolish commentary from a former life, I want to say I deeply regret it. I wrote things that were rude and immature and I look back on them now with real embarrassment, and ask myself what I was thinking, frankly I would like to say sorry for any offence they caused then or now. I’m completely committed to impartiality and hope our recent programmes can be judged on their merits
The “former life” that he’s talking about was in the dim and distant world of.. 2012 when he wrote two comment pieces in which he called the Duke of Edinburgh “a racist buffoon” (factual) and plant-jabbering, homeopathy fan Prince Charles “scientifically illiterate” (fair comment though I guess someone who believes in “royal blood” probably has to think magic can be diluted), described the Queen’s diamond jubilee as “the indutrialisation of mediocrity” (VAR says: no lies) and criticised William and Harry as “the sort of posh nice-but-dims our democracy has struggled for centuries to remove from authority” (harsh but hardly unfair).
He also called William and Kate “a total fraud” (we’re still in the realms of fair comment there) and argued that they should “renounce the luxuries of royal patronage and aristocracy” (ditto).
The op-eds were dredged up from The Independent’s archives by The Daily Mail (or rather Mail+), which also reheated an old story about Rajan’s period as the editor of The Independent earlier this week.
It also featured pictures of him standing next to Misha Nonoo, one of the Duchess of Sussex’s friends, at a party in 2015 held by his then-boss Evgeny Lebedev. Focusing on who someone stood next to at a party is an odd line for the Mail taken given the much more ‘close’ pictures of its previous editor Geordie Greig cosied up with Ghislaine Maxwell and similar shots of Piers Morgan, still a MailOnline columnist, with her.
There are also critical tweets about the royals by Rajan — since deleted and mostly from 2010, 2011 and 2012 — which are bouncing around social media and have inevitably made their way into The Daily Mail.
They include one from 23 September 2012 which clearly refers to frustration with TV coverage featuring William and Kate (“Is that on Freeview? I’m about to throw a brick at Kate and Wills and would love a good cat santuary right now.”) but which ‘outraged’ people are pretending shows Rajan really wanted to lob masonry at them.
It’s highly unlikely that Rajan, who seems to present approximately 50% of all BBC output, will be ‘cancelled’ by the efforts of the Mail and other papers to concentrate their fire on him after The Princes and the Press documentary focused a little too much on tabloid tricks for their liking. But the campaign against him illustrates just how unevenly distributed the media’s ‘cancel culture’ games actually are.
Royal commentator, Richard Fitzwilliams — one of the charlatans tricked by YouTubers Josh Pieters and Archie Manners into criticising Harry and Meghan’s Oprah interview before it aired — tweeted
…Amol Rajan was a bad choice as presenter as he is a known republican.
How deliciously McCarthyite: Are you now or have you ever been a “known republican”? Royal reporting in the UK would be a lot better if there were a few more “known republicans” on the beat, people willing to present the reality of the Windsors — Kardashians without the work ethic — rather than living off tidbits fed to them by the Palace.
Alford was too working class to get the protection that firmly middle class Bacon was afforded and Rajan, who has ascended by dint of his Cambridge education and preternatural arse-kissing abilities, is being taught a lesson: Don’t step out of line. His pitiful apology means anyone else who joins the BBC from the papers can face incoming fire for opinions expressed before they joined the corporation. It’s the same tactic the press tried to use to stop Jess Brammar from being rehired. Next time, it’ll work.
On the whole, I think “cancel culture” is a right-wing construction designed to allow the powerful to pretend they’re victims.
It’s called, with incredible creativity, Cancelled.
A part in Mike Bassett: England Manager, uncomfortably on-the-nose casting as a drug-dealing flight attendant in Mile High, a stint in the reality TV show Trust Me… I’m a Beauty Therapist, two guest roles in Casualty and as a prison guard in the 2017 film The Hatton Garden Job.
Hot Bacon lolz and lukewarm Rajan apologies: Coke, 'cancel culture' and The Sun's convenient amnesia...
Great piece. As incisive as ever.