As a number of commenters pointed out over the weekend, the first in the new series of The Now Show (Friday 27 November) chose to deal with Climategate by circling the wagons around the poor put-upon scientists and mocking the sceptics. The best that the collected comedy geniuses could come up with was a crap James Bond evil villain conspiracy sketch, the set-up for which was an absurd straw-man quote that Steve Punt claimed to have seen somewhere. The underlying message was, “Nothing to see here, move along.”
In contrast to this predictable response from Radio 4’s group-thinking leftie establishment comedians, the Daily Show’s Jon Stewart set aside his own ideological leanings and took aim:
(There’s more but this was the first Youtube clip I could find. Newsbusters has the full transcript in which Stewart goes on to mock climate sceptic Senator Inhofe, and to express despair at the contempt for the scientific method revealed by the emails.)
American viewers get a challenging take on the subject. UK licence payers get a pathetic wet fart of an effort from Radio 4’s tired old comedy echo chamber.
Isn’t it time for a shake-up, Ms Raphael?
Update. Full clip can be viewed courtesy of none other than Senator Inhofe.
In all fairness I have praise the BBC for The Moral Maze tonight, it was excellent, Portillo was particularily effective in skewering the Greenpeace scientist, the point that scientists should stick to science and leave the politics to the politicians came over very forcefully.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qk11
I’m in shock. I’ve just listened to The Moral Maze talking about partiality of scientists. Quite a few (well a couple) of swipes at the BBC’s stance of “the science is settled”.
One guy laid into the Greenpeace’s “Chief Scientist”.
– so how many scientists does Greenpeace have?
– (prevaricates) Don’t know of the top of my head.
– You’re the Chief Scientist and you don’t know how many scientists you have??
– Um, three or four.
– Well, we have number at last. And are they all PhD’s on subject they speak so authoritatively about?
Have the cracks in the AGW dogma become too hard ignore at last? Normal service will probably be resumed at 10.00 tonight, when they interview Michael Mann.
Did anyone else listen to the Now Show – the section in which a Muslim woman ‘comic’ made a crack about marrying a Jew?
Even now, I’m trying to suppress the thought that this was breakthrough moment – the moment when the BBC decided it was OK to broadcast pure and un-mediated anti-Semitic jokes.
I’d be grateful if anyone else who heard it, could explain to me how I have misinterpreted what was going on.
Disdain
I heard that unfunny woman too. Striving to be “edgy” – which usually means unpleasant.
I think you have the right take on what she said. But I took it as just part of the total rubbish she was spounting. With the sycophantic audience that always turns up for the Now Show.