the times | Wednesday December 22 2021 15
News
In three decades pushing the bounda-
ries of comedy, Armando Iannucci has
not been afraid to risk upsetting his au-
dience. Now, as comics face censoring
their gags or being cancelled, he asks:
“What is wrong with being offended?”
Iannucci, 58, argues that people need
to have their beliefs tested and should
just switch off instead of campaigning
for shows to be axed.
He began his career in radio with the
spoof news show On The Hour, which
featured the debut of Alan Partridge,
before going on to create Malcolm
Tucker, the foul-mouthed spin doctor
in The Thick of It.
Iannucci said he does not rewatch his
old shows but changing tastes mean
they contain material that he would not
write today. But he warned against can-
cel culture. He said: “I spent most of my
career trying to work out where the line
keep asking how I got it. I haven’t
changed any habits or part of my diet
but as every golfer will say, you just aim
for the same place, the flag, and hope it
goes where you want it to go.”
Watts, of Kingswood, Bristol, who
runs a social club with his wife Sam, said
he started playing golf with his father at
the age of five and joined Tracy Park as
a junior member aged eight.
By the age of 14 he was playing off a
ten handicap. Work commitments
meant he had to take a break but he
started playing again seven years ago.
Watts said he honoured the tradition
of buying every other golfer a drink.
“The first two holes in one were very
costly for me,” he said.
The world record for holes in one is
recognised as belonging to Mancil
Davis of Texas, USA, who has sunk 51.Golfer’s 11 holes in one
in a matter of months
George SandemanThick of It creator backs right to offend
is, where do you feel you’re stepping
over the mark and every now and then
do it anyway, just to see what happens.”
Iannucci said that he does not set out to
offend but simply to write what is funny.
He has a reputation for, in his words,
comedy that “tends to circulate around
embarrassment, or awkwardness or
challenging people’s perceptions”.
He added: “What’s wrong with being
offended? It’s good to be offended,
because it tests your own beliefs.
“If you’ve got a certain set of beliefs,
and you can’t take a joke, then I sort of
feel those beliefs aren’t as strongly held
as you might think.”
It is perhaps a sign of the shifting
global power balance that the creator of
The Thick of It, which satirised the New
Labour obsession with spin, and Ve e p,
which lampooned America’s second in
command, is now targeting the un-
elected bosses of firms such as Face-
book and Twitter. He first floated theidea of a TV series sending up social
media almost a decade ago. But the
success of his films including In The
Loop, The Death of Stalin and The Per-
sonal History of David Copperfield
means that the project is now heading
for the big screen.
In an interview, to be broadcast on
Times Radio today, Iannucci said he
was looking at doing a film next year set
in the world of social media. But Ian-
nucci is not opposed to all technology
that emanates from Californian tech gi-
ants. He had to say goodbye to his dying
95-year-old mother via FaceTime
because she was in a care home during
lockdown. Reflecting on what lock-
down would have been like in the 1980s
or 1990s, he said: “I’m glad that there
were things like FaceTime, and Zoom
to allow at least some semblance of
contact to happen.”
Listen to the full interview with Matt
Chorley on Times Radio from 11am todayMatt Chorley
An amateur golfer hopes to break the
world record for most holes in one in a
lifetime after sinking 11 in six months
having never managed one before.
Neil Watts began his streak in June
and his most recent was last week,
caught on film by a local news channel
who had come to interview him.
While hitting a few shots with the re-
porter from ITV West Country, before
recording the segment, the 40-year-old
sank a hole in one on the 14th at Tracy
Park in Gloucestershire. He has hit five
others on the same par three hole.
“The captain at the club was looking
at the online percentages of getting a
hole in one after I hit the first. It was
12,500 to one. Then progressing to 11 it
is in the billions to one,” he said. “PeopleBonnie Prince Charlie received
financial backing and a ship to
Scotland from a plantation owner
Bonnie Prince Charlie had links to the
slave trade, according to the National
Trust for Scotland.
The site of his final defeat, the battle-
field at Culloden, where he was deci-
sively defeated by the Duke of Cumber-
land in 1746, is now accordingly catego-
rised by the trust as having an indirect
link to slavery.
A report commissioned after the
Black Lives Matter protests last year
says that “the lad born to be king” re-
ceived financial backing and a ship to
Scotland from Antoine Walsh, a
French-Irish plantation owner, and that
many of the Jacobite survivors of Cul-
loden went on to become involved in
the trade.
“Prince Charles Edward Stuart sailed
from Nantes — a busy port in the
transatlantic slave trade — to
the Hebrides in summer 1745
on a French slave ship,” the
report reads.
A majority of the 3,
Jacobite prisoners who
were captured during
the uprising were
transported to British
colonies. The report
says that many “be-
came involved in en-
slavement: working
enslaved crews to
clear trees in the West
Indies, managing plan-
tations as ‘attorneys’
and subsequently own-
ing enslaved people”.
The trust found that
more than a third of Scot-
land’s heritage sites had links
to the slave trade.
Many of the 48 properties inves-
tigated were bought and built with
Slave owner
funded Bonnie
Prince Charlie’s
bid for throne
Ali Mitib money brought back by wealthy Scot-
tish settlers from sugar plantations in
the West Indies or tobacco fields in the
US, which relied on slave labour in the
18th and 19th centuries.
The list of sites with links to slavery
includes the Glenfinnan monument,
which marks where Bonnie Prince
Charlie assembled Scotland’s clans in
1745, and the birthplace of JM Barrie,
the novelist who created Peter Pan. His
family’s weaver’s cottage in Kirriemuir,
Angus, had been added because the in-
dustry produced clothing for slaves.
The inclusion of the cottage was criti-
cised by the historian Sir Tom Devine:
“It seems to be a bit ludicrous that
there’s a reference to him simply
because he lived in a part of Scotland
where in the 18th and 19th centuries
they specialised in producing linen
slave cloth for the Caribbean.
“Every nook and cranny of
Scottish life in the 18th and
early 19th century was in-
fluenced by the slave
system,” he added.
Corinne Fowler, a
professor of postcoloni-
al literature at Leices-
ter University, said the
report showed the
“substantial slavery
dimensions of heri-
tage sites” and would
“deepen and broaden”
our understanding of
Britain’s past.
Michael Terwey,
head of heritage at the
National Trust for Scot-
land, said: “The trust’s pri-
mary responsibility is to of-
fer our members and visitors
as truthful a view of Scotland’s
complex past as we can.
“This is an interim report, and we
have more work to do and more to dis-
cover. We will in the meantime be ap-
plying our research to the interpreta-
tion of our properties.”
A
ge ratings have
been upgraded
for some of the
biggest films of
the past 50
years to reflect modern
sensitivity to sex, drugs
and violence (Peter
Stubley writes).
The British Board of
Film Classification
(BBFC) said it had
reclassified movies such
as Jaws, Raiders of The
Lost Ark and The Lord of
the Rings: The Fellowshipof the Ring to “keep in
step with the direction in
which society is moving”.
The Empire Strikes
Back is raised from U
(Universal), its rating
from 1980, to PG
(Parental Guidance), on
the basis that some of
its scenes may be
unsuitable for young
children.
The BBFC website
points to a lightsaber duel
in which Darth Vader
chops off Luke
Skywalker’s hand, as well
as “threatening scenes
including those in which
a man is kidnapped by a
snow creature, and a
sequence in which a man
is forced into a small
chamber and encased in
carbonate”.
A scene involving afor its rerelease last year
and The Lord of the
Rings: The Fellowship of
the Ring was upgraded
from its 2001 PG rating to
12A due to the “regular
scenes of fantasy battle
involving stabbing,
slashing and arrow
impacts”.
Ratings have been
lowered for some films.
The Fast and The Furious
(2001) was changed from
15 to 12A after the
distributor cut a bloody
scene showing a man’s
head being slammed into
a wall.
The BBFC said that its
classifications were based
on published guidelines
and were the product of
“extensive public
consultation” involving
about 10,000 people.Film ratings
upgraded
for sensitive
modern age
port in the
de — to
r 1745
the0
ohat
cot-
d linksertiesinves-
and built withslave cloth fo
“Every n
Scottish
early 1
fluen
syste
C
pro
al
te
re
“s
di
ta
“d
ou
Br
M
hhea
NNati
lllland, s
mmary r
ffffer our m
aaaas truthful
ccomplex past a
“ThisisaninteALAMYghost performing oral sex
on Dan Ackroyd’s
character has resulted in
the original Ghostbusters
(1984) being upgraded
from PG to 12A. “As the
man’s trousers and zip are
unfastened, the camera
moves to his face as he
sinks back on the bed
with his eyes crossed in
pleasure,” the BBFC
notes.
Jaws was originally
classified A, equivalent to
PG, on its release in 1975
but is now rated 12
because of its frightening
shark attack scenes, gory
images, mild bad
language and the brief
appearance of a cannabis
joint.
Raiders of the Lost Ark,
released in 1981, was
reclassified from A to PGJaws from 1975 is reclassified as a
12 rating while Raiders of the Lost
Ark is now a PG and The Lord of
the Rings: The Fellowship of the
Ring has been upgraded to a 12Af
Fil