In Defence of Danny Baker

Long ago, I used to read a magazine called Word, which was a brilliant music mag, run by David Hepworth and Mark Ellen. I even got a letter published in it once. It was about the infamous oxygen thief Rod Liddle, and though edited in the letters page it appeared on, Ellen wrote back to me in an email that it received a standing ovation when read out in the magazine’s office. I am quite irrationally proud of this small thing.

It also had another, perhaps more far-sighted part, which was an online user forum. Some of the user contributions on there were almost as good as the mag itself; occasionally they could be even better. That’s because many of the journos would post in there, and indeed many of the forum’s members were professional writers themselves. One of the posters went by the handle Bodhisattva. Bodhi was a playful soul and always ready with an opinion and a quip.

One of the games he used to play was to get people to suggest a group of three “circus chimps dressed as famous people”, which would then be played in to circus music, with the mental image of them being trooped out through a door to this accompaniment. The idea was that that it would act as one of those 5 minute telly filler programmes that often used to turn up on BBC1 at around 8.50 after some drama, and before the 9 o’clock news, on a weekday evening. I recall making a couple of suggestions for this game once, which included Winston Churchill dressed in his boiler suit, chomping on a cigar, and Brian Blessed, dressed as Vultan from Flash Gordon.

One evening, Bodhisattva showed up and said he was going have to take a bit of a break as he’d had a cancer diagnosis and would be busy for a while in treatment. And that’s when I found out that Bodhisattva was in fact Danny Baker (though in hindsight, the fact he’d name himself after a Steely Dan number should have been a clue).

That chimp thing appeared on his radio show, and I heard my suggestions without warning on 5live one Saturday morning once, walking into my parents’ living room with a cup of just-made tea. It was a pleasant little surprise. Thing is, that little running thread appeared on and off over the years on his show and never raised an eyebrow, because it was a silly, mildly old-fashioned curiosity, with hints of the PG Tips ads and funfair huckstering about it. And that’s all it was.

So, cut to Thursday morning, and the announcement that 5Live had fired Danny Baker following the tweet he’d posted. I first saw the post the previous evening, and it honestly didn’t ring any race bells with me until someone else said, “not cool mate, because it could be read as …”.

When I first looked, I just saw the running chimp gag I knew so well, with an added royal subtext of, “Welcome to the circus son, you’re going to be gawped at like a freak forever now, because you’re a prince, and the press will never leave you alone”. The other, racial, angle hadn’t even crossed my mind. Maybe it’s because I haven’t really paid attention to all the royal wedding and baby hoohah that everyone is supposed to be (but aren’t really) obsessed by. In retrospect, it was a pretty tin-eared gag, but I don’t think the racist intent was there. And of course, the tweet was deleted when that reading was pointed out to him, so one supposes he may have thought so too. Deleting it was clearly the right thing to do, because it was easy to be misintepreted.

It’s hard to know what’s really in someone’s head, but in 30 years of listening to him (and, trust me, at first I really wasn’t a fan), watching him and reading his writing, I’ve never once thought, “Shit, he’s such a racist.” One ham-fisted and tin-eared tweet hasn’t changed my mind on that one. His initial apology probably didn’t help (though this later one is much fuller), but I don’t think it was what he intended, and I think he’s truly mortified that he thinks it has been.

For those two reasons I think firing him is disproportionate. A suspension, yes. But actually firing him? No. Perhaps we’re also too quick these days to demand grovelling apologies and tearful mea culpas. Perhaps we should be less quick to dance to the opinions of those we barely know and have usually never even met, but who seem to think they have some terrific insight into the innermost workings of our thoughts that gives them the right to tell us how, and even what, we should think. Why should we bother to seek approval from the mob? What’s so great about their approval anyway?

I think less of the BBC for crumpling in the way they did and ditching him with quite alarming alacrity. Of course you might reasonably ask: what’s my opinion worth?. No more than any other’s to be honest, which is why you’re under no obligation to take me at all seriously and move on if you disagree. It’s especially galling though, considering they’ll quite happily parade a piece of trash like Nigel Farage for his 33rd (yes, you heard right: THIRTY THIRD) appearance on Question Time on the same evening with not even the slightest sense of dissonance.

Danny Baker made a mistake. We all do. But this is just another example of the increasingly febrile and idiotic horde mentality that social media is fostering, and it’s really starting to make me angry. Wisdom of crowds? Bollocks.

When a twitter storm of this kind happens there is an almost inevitable cycle of events:

1. A famous person posts a tweet.
2. Someone points out the tweet may be interpreted in a way the poster had not intended.
3. The poster realises this interpretation might give offence to some, and deletes the tweet. Sometimes without explanation or apology, sometimes (as here) with one.
4. This is where the madness begins…
5. A bunch of people who’ve perhaps seen a screenshot of the tweet, or have heard second-hand what the tweet was, now loudly declaim how terrible the tweet was, and how despicable the poster was for posting it, sometimes without seeing the original tweet.
6. This second hand retelling is now shared widely with the networks the people who desperately want to share their opinion about something they have only heard about second-hand.
7. The people who now have only heard about what was posted third-hand now become absolutely OUTRAGED at what they have been told and demand that SOMETHING MUST BE DONE. And, in accordance with Metcalfe’s Law and Reed’s Law , the aggregation effect for networks, the pile-on continues.
8. If the poster is part of a cast or something broadcast-related the programme or network begins to get jumpy and the push towards damage limitation begins for them.
9. Any sensible discussion of the issue now becomes almost impossible, as the outraged voices have turned up the volume, assumed their positions, and will not budge.
10. If the furore continues long and loud enough, the poster is thrown under a bus and fired/let go/publicly ripped a new one in the hope this will satisfy the clamour.
11. The poster either deletes their twitter account, or lies low until a new target is found to swarm around. This usually doesn’t end up being too long a wait.
12. Repeat until all sensible public discourse is destroyed.

There is a fundamental tension here. In the now infamous words of Derrida, «il n’y a pas de hors-texte»(1), but frequently, social media is treated atomically, and posts are often decontextualised by readers who have not seen where it fits into the poster’s timeline, interactions, or even their (not always visible) offline life. Readers may not be aware of that context for a whole host of reasons (which include but are not limited to):

• geography
• culture
• time
• The poster has chosen not to reveal it
• simple misunderstanding

But will that stop them loudly declaiming an opinion about it? What do you think, dear reader?

Depressingly, and almost immediately, on Thursday morning there was a slew of things accusing Danny Baker of being a despicable racist, many of which were accompanied by fairly lazy stereotyping about his colour, gender, and background. All faintly ironic in the circumstances, really, but hardly a shock. Few of them will have read enough of his writing, or listened to enough of his broadcasting. to be able to contextualise that one misjudged tweet amongst everything else he’s said or done. But that doesn’t matter, because this is modern social media and the important thing is to have an opinion. NOW. This is the era of the hot take.

It doesn’t matter whether that opinion is screamingly hemipygic, or whether it’s founded on a lack of complete (or sometimes any) contextualising information, because having an opinion is the important thing. Being seen to be right is the necessary by-product of that. It’s a dangerously solipsistic direction for society to be being taken in, but we’re heading that way almost on autopilot, it seems.

We’re in a pernicious and precarious situation: the desire to solicit agreement tends to originate from those who need that reinforcement, and who collect together with others like themselves. They want their opinion confirmed, and validated. Humans are tribal; we like to stay with those who are “like” us, though of course what that version of “like” is very much depends on how you want to frame it. That’s what subcultures are all about, of course. And no one likes to be told they’re wrong, or even sometimes that they should consider another point of view. The big problem is now that is so much harder to do. The echo chamber effect means that you don’t hear that dissent as often, and it is also much more easily drowned out by the clamouring shouts of those who agree with you. The sad truth is that not all opinions are equal. Some are truly worth more than others if they are more considered, supported by more evidence and better framed. While everyone does indeed have the right to their opinion, it doesn’t entitle them to have that opinion taken seriously by right. Unfortunately, what seems to affect public discourse now is not the quality of opinion, but its volume and quanity, and that is not a healthy place for us to be.

This is what happened yesterday. Someone posted a tweet that, in hindsight, they would admit could be (and indeed was) misinterpreted. So they deleted it and tried to say sorry. But that wasn’t good enough for some, and so those people shouted until they got a trophy. As a result, someone who, on balance (and none of us is perfect, remember), is a decent person, has been flayed publicly. What good did it do? None at all. No one escaped with their dignity intact. Will it happen again? Probably, and more likely sooner than is healthy. Social media, and humanity, is just shitty sometimes.

(1) literally: “there is no outside-text”, though it is frequently interpreted as “there is nothing outside of context” — context is everything.

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