Suzanne Harrington: The real Bafta shocker is how the BBC handled it

You'd be forgiven for questioning their judgement on removing 'free Palestine' but retaining that slur

The BBC has apologised that the slur was not edited out before the broadcast. File picture: Ian West/PA

In a world of manufactured outrage, where people go ballistic about whether oat milk should be called oat milk or not, it’s too easy to get outrage fatigue. 

Click, sigh, shrug, carry on with your day. It’s like psychic hailstones — you turn up your collar against it, face away from it to protect yourself. You distance yourself so that your central nervous system doesn’t blow a fuse. 

The endless barrage of online outrage is a genius device for numbing us, wearing us out. We end up shrugging at everything: oat milk, paedophiles, genocide, whatever.

Even worse is whataboutery, that social media tic which sees random idiots interjecting with an unrelated issue, as a response to the issue being discussed. 

You know the one: somebody will be raising funds for Gaza, and someone who has never in their lives raised anything more than their thumb to a phone screen will butt in to demand what about local homelessness — as though you can’t be equally concerned about the two unrelated issues simultaneously.

But sometimes, something complex happens which cannot be addressed either by clickbait outrage or whataboutery — like the Bafta debacle. 

'The absolute shocker here — the unfathomable, incomprehensible jaw-dropping shocker — is how the BBC handled it.'

The white man with a neurological disability involuntarily shouting the worst racial slur of them all at two Black men. A slur weighted by centuries of violent oppression and enslavement. 

The worst word, shouted at the worst time. The man who shouted it is a campaigner for awareness around the condition that makes him shout terrible words.

Should this man have been placed inside a soundproofed box? Gagged? Excluded? These were some of the ableist responses to John Davidson’s coprolalia.

Should the Black men on the receiving end of this appalling slur — and Black audiences everywhere — have swallowed their hurt and outrage? Got over themselves?

These were some of the racist responses to actors Michael B Jordan and Deloy Lindo’s visible shock and hurt, even as they carried on with consummate dignity and professionalism. 

There’s no neat answer, no tidy response, just ongoing conversations about racism and ableism, awareness and education. And a lot of people saying sorry.

BBC shocker

The absolute shocker here — the unfathomable, incomprehensible jaw-dropping shocker — is how the BBC handled it. As we all now know, the Baftas are not a live broadcast — there’s a two-hour lag. 

Davidson has since stated that he shouted around 10 involuntary tics during the event, including homophobic slurs at presenter Alan Cumming. They were all edited out. 

As was a call from actor Akinola Davies Jr to “free Palestine” — which is as far from a slur as you can get, yet the BBC took great care to remove it. Their original excuse as to why Davidson’s racial slur stayed in was that whoever was meant to be editing it was “in a truck” and didn’t hear it.

What a lot of bollocks. This is the BBC, not some backroom budget operation. Nor is Google comprised of a lone racist with a laptop in their mum’s basement, yet this global mega-corporation still managed to put out an alert urging people to ‘See More On (the racist slur)’ — like a particularly bleak episode of Black Mirror.

What's your view on this issue?

You can tell us here

While the distress of Davidson, Jordan, and Lindo is wholly genuine, you’d be forgiven for questioning the sincerity of the BBC’s apology. 

For questioning their judgement on removing “free Palestine” but retaining that slur. For questioning their pathetic initial apology: “If anyone was offended.” 

You’d be forgiven for wondering who or what is driving such policy — because that’s what it is: Policy.

And it’s not a good one.