David Starkey has a lot to learn from Rastamouse. We’ve all got a lot to learn from Rastamouse, but Starkey in particular. After his comments on Newsnight last week about white people having become black, and his horror at the sound of patois, he might learn something at the Thames Festival, when he’s due to share a boat with the rasta rodent’s creators Genevieve Webster and Michael De Souza.
It’s probably too much to hope that Starkey greets the pair with a cheery “wa’gwan?” and pleads to be made an honorary member of Da Easy Crew as penance for his shameful statements. He should: he’d probably get an insight into the things he’s spoken about from the tales of Rastamouse and Da Easy Crew, a community-spirited bunch who always want “to make a bad ting good”. Perhaps in the case of Starkey’s numbskull views, that might be an assignment too far even for Rastamouse. President Wensley Dale might regard Starkey as a lost cause, but we can always hope.
What Starkey said last week was wrong, insulting, crude and disingenuous. You don’t even have to use the R-bomb, and it’s probably best that those who disagree with him choose not to use it. No — perhaps words like pathetic, ill-judged, crude, daft, idiotic, embarrassing, disgraceful and witless are better than the R-bomb. It’s true, I suppose, that people do occasionally wheel out terms like racist (and misogynist, and so on) when they aren’t merited, as a way of going nuclear in an argument. But there are equally many times when people do say and write things which are offensive, and need to be called out.
I know there are many who have leapt to his defence. “Oh no no, it wasn’t racist because it wasn’t racist, therefore it wasn’t,” goes the argument, and who am I to argue against that? How can you? There’s no point. It’s one of those odd things about the way we argue things nowadays that if you say someone’s said something racist for saying something racist, it gives them an immediate “out”. Aha, they turn around and say, you’re calling me a racist, it’s the Politically Correct Stasi gone mad, it’s the new McCarthyism, you’re not even allowed to be racist anymore without someone going and calling you racist. And that opens up a huge, distracting and tedious debate which deflects you from what people actually said.
What Starkey actually said was wrong. He got it hopelessly, ridiculously wrong. But these things happen when you wheel on entertaining experts like Starkey, controversialists who “make good TV” rather than necessarily provide the most accurate answers to the questions at hand. Television is forever in fear of the remote control, and aims to keep us interested; it knows we’re not too keen on dry debates, so it aims to stir the pot a little.
Starkey is, after all, not put on television because of his skill as a historian. He’s put on television as an entertainer, a controversialist, a pompous-sounding gasbag who comes out with stuff that makes you sit up and take notice. There should be a caption on screen whenever he starts his Professor Yaffle needling: “This historian is for entertainment purposes only.”
In the meantime, Starkey could do worse than read a few Rastamouse books to gen up on his new friends. He might even learn some of the patois that scares him so much, so he can sound culturally aware for his next TV appearance. Irie.
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