Panorama used to be a grown up serious programme. In the olden days. Now it’s more of a pantomime. They set out to prove something to the halfwits they assume are watching. Last night they decided to prove that Asians suffer racial abuse. They set about recruiting two Asians to hang out with hidden cameras, as a kind of undercover honey-trap. Well, they weren’t undercover, they were actual Asians, with religious headdress. That confused some of the target racists into shouting “Paki” or, once, “Jew!” Some of the taunts were undeniably racist. But that’s not what real racism is.
The disgraceful hostility emanating from the lazy goodfornothing lumps of pointlessness we were shown was less an example of Islamophobia than of societal meltdown. I suspect that anyone loitering there would cop it, doubly so if they were wearing identifying apparatus of any kind, be it religious – or any other random sign of weakness, infirmity, or purse carrying. It was a kind of no-go area. So what was Panorama trying to prove?
That they were incompetent documentary makers who had little regard for the intelligence of the audience? They tried to manipulate one of this country’s worst social abominations into a matter of Islamophobic /Asian victimhood, but what they succeeded in showing was their own agenda.