Beware of Terry and June
Britbox has applied a “trigger warning” to the most inoffensive of sitcoms.
The preservation of a sane society surely depends upon the lunatics remaining in the minority. But what happens when the maniacs are in power and able to set the rules for the rest of us? If you want to know the answer, just take a look around.
I have just learned (courtesy of a tweet by the author Gareth Roberts) that the streaming service Britbox has applied a “trigger warning” to the 80s sitcom Terry and June. And although a more mild and inoffensive television show could barely be imagined, Terry and June, we are ominously informed, “contains discriminatory language of the period”.
Who is this warning for? Has any human creature yet been conceived who is capable of outrage at the jovial antics of Terry Scott and June Whitfield? Such a fragile being would surely have to be engineered in a laboratory by some rogue geneticist. And what would be the purpose of such an experiment? To drive the world even madder than it already seems?
I would also be curious to know what precisely is meant by the “discriminatory language of the period”? What other language might we expect from a middle-class couple living in Croydon in the 1980s? Sanskrit, perhaps? The creole patois of the Chitty community of Singapore? Is it simply that English is now considered an inherently colonial language and therefore offensive to the enlightened ear?
This is how they will defeat us. It’s these little assaults on the sane that will make us the minority and ensure that the lunatics stay in charge. Why else would Brandeis University in Massachusetts have produced a list of “oppressive language” that students and staff must avoid at all costs? This was in the summer of 2021, but such measures are now so common that they’ve almost become unremarkable.
Some of Brandeis’s prohibited phrases included “long time no see” which was seen as mocking the broken English of non-native people. “Sold down the river” apparently had connotations of slavery. And “female-bodied” and “male-bodied” dangerously implied that men and women have bodies.
One can only imagine what kind of bizarre council of gremlins drew up this list, and the dribbling glee with which they did so. Other entries included “powwow” which was deemed cultural appropriation from North American indigenous peoples. The phrase “you’re killing it” was identified as potentially being misconstrued as an allegation of homicidal intent. And even the term “homeless person” was singled out as oppressive; they suggested the alternative “person experiencing housing insecurity”. It must have been quite the brainstorming session.
(And if you’re going to accuse me of causing offence for my use of the term “brainstorming”, think again. The National Society for Epilepsy conducted a survey of people suffering from the condition, their carers and medical professionals, to determine whether or not the phrase was triggering, and they decided against a ban. Mind you, that was back in 2008, before Terry and June was added to the Index Librorum Prohibitorum.)
And by the way, the salivating elders of Brandeis also claimed that the term “trigger warning” has violent connotations because it invokes guns. This reminds me of when the Geek Feminism Wiki website added a trigger warning to their definition of the phrase “trigger warning”. And surely if you’re the sort of person you can be triggered by trigger warnings, you shouldn’t be on the internet at all. You should be confined to a care home where all the cutlery is blunted and the walls are made of sponge.
One might argue that trigger warnings are harmless, and that perhaps I oughtn’t be clutching my pearls over a little reminder that Terry and June doesn’t entirely align with the values of twenty-first century intersectional activists. But permit me to clutch a little harder. The point isn’t the warning itself, but rather the broader problem that it represents. It’s a symptom of a darker trend, and perhaps the silliness of it all is a clever tactic.
Authoritarianism works by stealth. These little gestures make us wary of words, encourage us to conflate language with physical harm. Once we grow accustomed to the oppressive potential of certain words, the next obvious step is censorship. It was precisely this “trigger warning” mentality that was behind the decision of the Waterloo Region District School Board in Canada to remove books from library shelves that were considered “harmful to staff and students”. And let’s not forget that in 2021 the body in charge of elementary and secondary schools in southwestern Ontario authorised the ritualistic burning of books that were considered offensive and outdated. They called it a “flame purification” ceremony.
So yes, by all means let’s laugh at Britbox for slapping Terry and June with a trigger warning. Let’s mock Aberdeen University for warning students of literature that Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar has a plot that “centres on a murder”, or the University of the Highlands and Islands that warned its students that Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea contains scenes of “graphic fishing”.
But let’s also remember that such warnings are intended to lock us in a permanent state of infancy. I’d rather be the adult in the room, and retain my personal dignity. Just let me watch Terry and June in peace, you bastards.
We have many issues at Aberdeen! Unsurprisingly, the academic famous for his trigger warnings, looks like you think he might look - a Warhammer weirdo. I used to quite like the weirdos at work until they started to hold sway. No offence to Warhammerers or weirdos, I just don't think they should have the strongest voice on campus. Needless to say, progress flags are fawned over and pronouns on email signatures are ubiquitous amongst admin staff in particular - no trigger warnings for advocating dangerous gender ideology. I managed to persuade our Head of School to invite Simon Fanshawe to present a Webinar on how we facilitate different opinions and voices - the irony is of course lost on the TRAs (staff and students) who 'mercilessly bullied' our HoS and senior admin person such that Simon's webinar was cancelled. The TRAs would feel 'unsafe' of course - the webinar was voluntary and Simon wouldn't even have been in Aberdeen! Unsafe my hole! Currently considering a pic of JK on my office door. She holds an honorary doctorate from the uni - surely no-one could object?!
The more they try and police language, the more I want to use the ‘offending’ phrases. Maybe it’s time for a Dissidents Dictionary so that we’ve all got a handy guide to the phrases we should all be using in order to stop the glorious variety of the English language being reduced to so much bland background musak.