First, notice that while Dick Bear and Mumble literally never stopped re-stating that Jason Arjay is the youngest black academic ever to be appointed professor at Cambridge; that he is autistic; that he was non-verbal until the age of whatever, and so on, they carefully avoided mentioning -- for hours at a time! -- what his actual fucking discipline is. Youngest black professor of what? Chemistry? English? History?
As always with the BBC, obtrusive omissions reveal their purposes -- especially when, as here, the long-preserved gap is ultimately filled with something not quite correct: Arjay is not some impressively plural 'Professor of Sociology and Education', but -- oh, dear! --'Professor of Sociology of Education'.
See what they did there, for hour after hour? They did all they could to minimise the damage -- to hide from their middle-class audience of pampered, small-state Tory shits the fact that the day's 'guest editor' was someone whose discipline, output and assumed political orientation would, on any other day, get him battered by every kind of readymade right-wing calumny right out of the gate. Instead, Dick Bear and Mumble talked to him -- endlessly and for the most part pointlessly -- as if he was a ten-year-old, and no elite boats of any kind were rocked on the way to or from a puke-making cameo by Moggin the Mogg.
Which brings me to the second point. Through most of my adult life, the Tories under seven prime ministers have waged war on education in all settings besides those in which the richest demographics can buy their own. For this stinking programme to put out an extended segment on adult illiteracy that completely de-politicised the topic was quite outrageous: the reality of educational deprivation engineered by a psychopathic ruling class vanished behind feelgood tropes of plucky, self-improving provincials now finally able to read to their grandchildren.
Professor Arjay, sad to say, was a total and utter pushover.
Mark D.
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