I hear you’re an antisemite now, father

RTÉ to show ‘Father Ted’ instead of Eurovision in Israel protest, Graham Linehan calls it “antisemitic harrassment”

Irish broadcaster RTÉ has confirmed plans to show Father Ted rather than Eurovision in protest against Israel’s involvement in the ceremony.
Ireland is one of several countries to have withdrawn from competing in Eurovision in 2026 due to Israel’s participation, alongside Spain, Iceland, the Netherlands and Slovenia.
Now, Ireland’s national broadcaster RTÉ has gone a step further by confirming it will air the Eurovision special of the beloved sitcom Father Ted on RTÉ 2 rather than showcasing the singing competition, which is due to take place on May 16th in Vienna, Austria.
Similarly, the Slovenian national broadcaster will also not be showing Eurovision amid the boycott. Instead, they will be airing Voices of Palestine, a series of documentaries on the Middle East.
However, Father Ted creator Graham Linehan, who has become a vocal supporter of Israel in recent years, has aired his anger on social media with RTÉ for their decision to air his show instead of the 70th edition of Eurovision.
Taking to X, Linehan shared a link to a petition, which he created, calling for RTÉ’s director general, Kevin Bakhurst, to resign, writing, “Please join me in demanding the resignation of RTE’s Director General for using Father Ted as a tool of antisemitic harassment.”

As a serial hater and harrasser of trans folks, I suspect that Glinner is… not the best person to be making a statement like this. Also, can we not just boycott (which I initially wrote as “goycott”… Freudian slip or just struggling with a new laptop keyboard? You decide)—I say, can we not just boycott Eurovision on aesthetic grounds? Sometimes you don’t need to drag politics into a thing…

That was quick

Reform councillor quits days after election

Oh dear. I was unhappy about Reform’s successes in the recent UK elections. despite the efforts of one commentator on social media to pretemd the outcome wasn’t that bad cos more than 70 percent of voters didn’t vote for them… meaning that nearly 30 percent did, of course, which is far too many. Still, there’s already one down…

A Reform UK councillor who was elected last week has resigned and been expelled from the party.
Stuart Prior was one of 53 Reform members who were elected to Essex County Council and earned a majority on the authority for Nigel Farage’s party. Prior also gained a seat on Rochford District Council.
But he was accused the week before the elections of creating racist and Islamophobic posts on social media by Hope Not Hate.
The BBC attempted to contact Prior. He denied being a racist when approached by the Daily Mirror newspaper. […]
Stuart Prior is alleged to have described white people as “the master race” who have “larger brains”.
Hope Not Hate also claimed Prior deleted an X account named @essexpriory earlier this year which had tweeted in November “Muslims are dirt” and “Muslims are awful, globally”. He was accused of posting that genocide could not be committed against them. […]
Farage was asked by BBC Essex last month if all of Reform’s candidates had been vetted in the county.
“I know that our candidates will be held to a higher standard than any of the other parties,” said the Clacton MP.
“That’s because we are the challengers. We are the ones taking on the establishment. Yet we have done a good, thorough professional job”.

A professional job of what, though? Apparently the party had been advised before the election that this Prior individual was a liability, so why did they let him through only to dump him almost immediately after the election? I don’t understand the thinking on Reform’s part, but then again there probably wasn’t any thinking in the first place…

Oh my god I think I’ve got a hard-on

Oh YEAH. All those fuckin’ cunts are DOOMED. I mean, OBVIOUSLY so am I but it’s so good to be reminded that all of these pieces of shit are just as mortal. Obviously there’s still a ton of havoc they can perpetrate until mortality catches up them, and whatever comes after them probably won’t be any better, but it’s still a cheering thought with which to go to bed.

Attenhundred

He made it!

David Attenborough has made it to his century. I’ve always believed that if you manage to make it to your 90s then you kind of deserve to make it to your 100s as well, but obviously once you do make it to 90s the chances of you then making to 100 become a lot narrower. So I think a lot of us have worried about Sir Dave in recent times not making it, with the world being what it is that would’ve been hard to take. But here we are, he’s racked up his century, and though the world is still what it is, that’s a point of light worth being happy about.

Mind you, standing that close to an erupting volcano doesn’t necessarily help your chances… I mean, I watched that clip and he said they weren’t in any danger, but still. I got that picture from this Guardian piece, which offers a useful reminder that, on top of his own productions, Attenborough was controller of BBC2 (and later director of programmes for both BBC TV channels), in which capacity he introduced colour TV to the UK and commissioned shows like Monty Python’s Flying Circus; it also offers the interesting trivia that his first actual on-screen appearance was a game show in 1953. But the ABC article linked at the top offers an even better story of how he initially tried to get into radio but failed:

Then, someone else from the BBC called and asked if he was interested in a television role:
“I had to confess that I hadn’t actually seen much television. I had once watched a television play in my wife’s parents’ house, but they were the only people I knew with a set, and I certainly had not got one myself.”
Sir David took a chance, quit his job and underwent a three-month BBC traineeship with no guarantee of employment at the end.

Clearly he did something right. Happy hundredth, Sir David.

Bullshitfront?

Australian director Phillip Noyce shoots feature film for Saudi Arabia celebrating ‘heroism of security men in combating drugs’

The acclaimed Australian film-maker Phillip Noyce is being paid by the Saudi regime to make a feature film portraying the repressive state’s narcotics officers as heroes.
The Watchful Eyes, based on a real Saudi ministry of interior narcotics case, is billed as a dramatic depiction of the “heroism of security men in combating drugs”.
Saudi authorities executed 356 people last year, including 243 for drug-related cases, and analysts say an increase in the kingdom’s execution rate is largely due to its “war on drugs”.
Noyce has enjoyed a decades-long career with directing credits including the 1970s classic Newsfront, Dead Calm, Rabbit-Proof Fence, Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger and The Bone Collector. […]
Noyce said he had accepted the job “for the challenge of working outside my comfort zone” and for the opportunity “to investigate a previously closed society” but did not address specific questions about the ethics of making a film paid for by the Saudi regime.
Joey Shea, a Saudi Arabia senior researcher for Human Rights Watch, said the Saudi government used its huge investments in sport and entertainment as part of a strategy to whitewash its human rights record.
“Given the subject matter of this film from what’s publicly available, combined with the reality of the rights abuses that have been so inextricably linked with this new war on drugs by the Saudi government, it’s really, really disturbing the role that these narratives may play in covering up the reality of these executions that have just been served the last few years,” Shea said.

Yeah, this looks like the same sort of bullshit as the Riyadh Comedy Festival, and I’m as disappointed in Noyce as I was in some of the people who did thar. Noyce himself doesn’t seem overly hyped about his own work:

Noyce described The Watchful Eyes as “a low-budget kidnapping thriller”.
“Gritty and raw and shot entirely in Arabic, I don’t think the movie will attract any tourists to Saudi Arabia,” he said.
Asked about the country’s human rights record and executions for drug offences, Noyce said: “I guess the story could be edited to send an anti-drug message, but the story I shot was told from the highly emotional point of view of the lead detective in the hunt for a missing child.
“Surprisingly, Sela never once interfered from a creative point of view.”

Probably not, cos I imagine they wouldn’t have needed to; they would’ve made sure they had all the creative control right from the beginning. And if Sela weren’t doing that, someone in government/the royal family would’ve been. I know that in real terms there’s been any number of Hollywood films over the decades that have performed the same function, but they don’t seem as bad as this does…

Good advice, I presume

Friend posted this on Facebook. It is, remarkably, quite real. I further presume that one of those top 5 guns is not the one you shot the faithless bitch with, which I presume you did (and then got rid of the gun) after she dumped you and now you’re building up an arsenal in case she comes back from the dead for revenge, cos I can’t see why else she appears as a zombie in the video thumbnail…

Scum and villainy

As a not exactly mega fan of Star Wars, I have always found Star Wars Day kind of irritating…

I made this a few years ago in “protest”

…but tonight I have discovered something interesting:

Oh?

OH.

Apparently this is something that’s always been known about, in that there was a making of book about Empire Strikes Back and this was recorded in that (albeit with slightly incorrect details), but, because I am me, I am only finding out about it now forty-seven years later. I wonder how much this influenced the later popularity of the phrase. Either way, though, I now have an actually good reason to be irritated by May the Fourth…

Abe Lincoln would like a word, too

OK. According to the story that I presume this Cody Simpson believes, Jesus was judicially killed by the Romans. Trump is still alive, even if only just, and his rotten physical health will almost certainly do him in before the courts ever will. I think that’s a slight difference between him and that Christ character (we will, of course, leave aside the theological question of whether the latter still “lives” or not)…