Wednesday, April 27, 2011



Not so harmless after all

I haven't commented on the British royal wedding, because I do not give a shit about a pack of foreign inbreds, and even going to the effort of saying so is paying them more attention than they deserve. But I do have to comment on this: the British royal family have banned satirical coverage by Australian comedy team The Chaser:

Just two days before Prince William and Kate Middleton are due to tie the knot, ABC TV has been forced to cancel The Chaser's one-off live coverage of the event due to what it says are restrictions imposed by the royal family.

The Chaser's Royal Wedding Commentary was due to air on ABC2 from 7:00pm AEST on Friday, offering viewers a satirical take on the royal wedding.

But now the live special - promised to be "uninformed and unconstitutional" - has been reluctantly pulled due to restrictions imposed over the Easter break.

Firstly, there's the obvious point: if you don't want your wedding laughed at, hold it in fucking private. If you make a big public spectacle of it, then you have only yourself to blame when people point out the inherent absurdity of the whole exercise. Secondly, the Chaser's Julian Morrow puts it well when they say
"For a monarchy to be issuing decrees about how the media should cover them seems quite out of keeping with modern democratic times... but I suppose that's exactly what the monarchy is," he said.
About the only virtue the British royals can claim is that they're harmless - they don't actually do anything. They've just blown that out of the water, and revealed that under the skin, they're just a censoring hereditary dictatorship with no sense of humour, just like they were in the C18th. And if that's the case, if they're actually going to behave like monarchs, then its high time we freed ourselves from them and declared a republic.