Choice Blog

Monty Python would never be commissioned today?

The controller of BBC comedy says that Monty Python would never be commissioned today. Shane Allen said six white Oxbridge blokes would have no chance of getting on the TV.

Tell us something we can't work out for ourselves Mr Allen.

He speaks, of course, in the name of diversity but Times arts writer James Marriott piles in further by saying that the genre of comedy spawned at the Cambridge footlights society was never funny in the first place and today's under 30s, of whom he is one, would never sit through it.

I think the both miss the point that our individual funny bone is tickled by very different things no matter our age, ethnicity, gender etc. 

I can't fathom much of the new stuff Mr Allen is currently putting on screen but I accept why it does make others laugh. I can always retreat to my box sets or one of the "gold" channels but I shouldn't have to all the time. After all I am a license-payer and  would have thought an equal customer.

In these days of diversity many of the people like Messrs. Allen and Marriott who pour scorn on our generation and our tastes seem to forget that it isn't just minorities that should be included but majorities, too. even white Oxbridge blokes and people over thirty.

The irony is that many of those adopting a lofty disdain of us Baby Boomers are actually Oxbridge blokes and have just the sort of fixed attitudes that Monty Python was sending up all those years ago.

It's really all a bit of a joke. 

What do you think to all this? Do you like modern comedy shows? 

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