Cancelled

One man's call for accountability means another woman's career...

Ah words. Here you come again. From pronouns to kids books, podcasts to hate speech, you’re doing your thing and being interpreted by different people as, at times, a shield, a mirror or a sword.

The matter at hand is Roald Dahl and the rewriting of parts of his books for sensitivity, a decision which, ironically, has been sensitively reviewed now and found to be insensitive to many.

Sense and sensitivity if you will…

Whose sensitivity of course varies but apparently this can now be decided by committee and very like the design of a horse by this methodology, we now have a camel trotting around the literary community, spitting and knocking over feelings, left right and centre.

I would urge you if you don’t already know to read up on the situation at hand and to make sure you include the writing of David Baddiel on this as he’s always excellent, but in lieu of that I’m going to address a related experience and one that I was directly involved in, cancel culture.

A long time ago when youtubers were still at school and being read Harry Potter at school at home and to themselves, the book series wasn’t a “known known”, bad, bad.

It was a simpler time of having a social conscience with fixed, quaint ideas like feminism being good and misogyny being bad and in the midst of this, Ricky Gervais decided to give Twitter another go.

He’d tried it previously and didn’t get it but was trying again as at that time, 2010/2011 it was the emerging go to tool for anyone who was serious about the power of social media.

He joined and he pootled along quite nicely. I think he enjoyed the direct interaction with his fans, the back and forth and for a man in his profession, the humour.

It was all going along swimmingly until one day he decided to reclaim the word mong.

Now reclamation is a thorny topic, usually best left to the groups most targeted by the pejorative use of any word and amongst whom you will often find a range of views.

You only have to look at the “conversations” happening around the reclamation of the word queer, to notice that this is not a runaway success but young people have decided it’s fine and they make all the linguistic rules now, so there we are.

Anyway, Ricky pushed ahead.

I’m not sure if you know much about the disability community but when it comes to inclusion and experience of learning-disabled people, the majority of non-disabled people probably have more experience of people with Downs Syndrome in their lives, than any other form of learning disability.

The same stereotypes around DS which can often be restrictive and infantilising also offers a benign & positive attitude. Again, reality always strays from perception because nothing is everything, but for the purposes of this blog I’m talking about public consciousness and that public perception is, in the main, benign and protective.

So as Ricky tweeted away in this fun and entertaining new medium he was unaware that he was tapping directly into a major outrage artery and that he was creating a rage thrombosis which was about to explode all over him.

I saw this unfolding in real time because I followed Ricky as I was a huge fan of his writing and a fan of his skewering of popular culture. I’d been online campaigning on the inclusion of disabled people in entertainment for a couple of years before Ricky joined Twitter. In those days there were very few disabled comics with stellar careers let alone huge numbers of social media followers.

The Paralympics was yet to spark TV comedy careers for disabled men and latterly some young disabled women. Disabled people were still the go to derisory comedy targets for left and right wing comedians. In the HoC politicians were routinely accused by colleagues of “being autistic” or “having tourettes”.

It was just a thing, it was just ok and the real problem was anyone questioning this.

Like misogyny, antisemitism & ageism is treated today, it was viewed then as an acceptable topic for jokes & for politicians keen to identify and leap into the zeitgeist and wallow in it’s warm embrace. Back in the day politicians would tell you the majority of their surgeries featured constituent concerns around pot holes and dog fouling but that all changed with social media engagement.

I’d been pretty vocal about the notion of acceptable targets. It’s not an attempt to censor, it’s about not building stigma through choice. It’s nuanced thing in my view. But I don’t tend to benefit from nuance. I was the walking embodiment of political correctness gone mad (sensitivity readers edit – “Political correctness now experiencing some mental health difficulties (and or issues) and that can make them understandably, feel a bit sad. We all feel sad sometimes don’t we and that’s ok”)

My approach then and now is to try to resolve issues around these things privately and directly. I’d already been in touch with Ricky’s team to thank him for a fantastic bit in one of his shows about autism and he’d replied via them with his thanks.

I thought it a brilliant deconstruction of the myths and stereotypes of autistic people. But hey that’s just me.

You might watch it and see only mocking cruel humour because people vary in their objectivity and these things are completely subjective, but this autistic woman, the mother of autistic children loved it because it punctured so much of the bullshit.

That said, I’d also already defended Ricky on the platform before he joined Twitter. His podcast with Karl Pilkington & Stephen Merchant which was hugely popular and another indication of his savvy handling of new media. He was the leader in this field gaining himself in the process the nickname The Podfather.

On that show lots of people were roasted, it’s what they did.

Vicky Wright who has cherubism, had been in Karl Pilkington’s joke frame and she wasn’t having it. Her right of course. I’d tweeted something totally unrelated and complimentary about Ricky and she wasn’t having that either and explained the podcast episode featuring her. As my tweet wasn’t about that, it was about something else entirely, I hadn’t heard that episode and I pointed that out.

She got cross, we disagreed, others got involved, so far so typically twitter

My point is when Ricky started doing his mong thing I tried to resolve this privately because I didn’t have an axe to grind, quite the contrary in fact.

But Ricky was, I think, shocked at the online reaction he got. I believe he honestly thought this was just a misunderstanding. He’s a man who sails close to the line in his comedy but never really crosses it. I thought he was being optimistic and that this wasn’t going to end the way he hoped.

It wasn’t his live show with his thought walks, which were sometimes dovetailing his own views, sometimes playing devil’s advocate for comic effect - to an audience keen to hear him.

It wasn’t his scripts which lay out step by step his stories & characters at times flawed, at times kind but ultimately human. It was an unwinnable argument ironically around how words change but for some reason he chose to play with a word which hasn’t really changed in its pejorative use at all.

All I know about that time in my life, is that I was trying to flag to Ricky that social media then (which wasn’t his playground in the way that it is today) isn’t a nuanced place and that whatever his intentions, whatever his true feelings; this thing was gathering speed and anger along the way. He had picked the wrong hill.

It was far easier in my view to just delete it and let it go because this was going to be a time and numbers game and at that time he had about 400,000 followers.

To my mind this wasn’t nearly enough.

My emails to his team went unanswered by him. I was getting asked by my own followers on twitter what I thought. The tweets continued.

As days went by Ricky dug in further. The further he dug in the more he inadvertently publicised it, because whilst tweets are cited in news stories now, it is nothing compared to how they shaped and wrote the news in 2011.

When it was clear he wasn’t going to stop, I tweeted him. I can’t know if it was related but after this he began to criticise his critics. We were uptight, we were humourless, we were the problem.

The more he inadvertently publicised it, the closer he got to taking it to the next level, the boss fight stage of any Twitter fight “Celebrity involvement”.

There were several who stepped up and asked what he was doing. Comedians, writers, feminist journalists, opinion writers. All clear about free speech and censorship and all saying basically the same thing, “What are you doing?”

Eventually and here my memory does falter, I think he quote tweeted me.

What I know is that his fans turned me into the problem. This meant that I was called all of the things that women are called when fans get involved but particularly mong as trolls are very original & inventive that way. It went on for 2 weeks.

I was invited onto the Jeremy Vine show to discuss this with Martin Mor a comic who in line with many, was defending the right to make comedy on any subject but that it is entirely dependent on what the joke is. To me it wasn’t about his writing, this felt totally out of step with all of Ricky’s other work and usually (with a couple of exceptions on stage) what I see as his very considered comedy.

Embarrassingly during the interview I started crying. I was at the height of my caring responsibilities, and I lived then with very little sleep and in the middle of the storm of Emily’s behaviours of distress. Also I don’t know if you’ve ever been called a humourless uptight cunt, for two weeks in a row, by hundreds of strangers  but it’s not exactly easy, even without other things happening in your life.

This wasn’t someone I loathed, the fuel for many of Ricky’s critics online. This was a man whose work I really admired and about the fragile but important issue of artistic freedom & artistic expression which I believe is sacrosanct.

None of that matters to Twitter though. “Who does this bitch think she is” was the narrative. My assigned role was the uptight Shropshire housewife trying to ban fun and erase comedy and I was going after their guy.

Every story however needs a hero and this took the form of Robin Ince who was a feminist in those days, before he decided that defending Trans rights against a perceived enemy of women asking for careful consideration of the conflict between self ID and women’s safety, became his primary focus.

Back then Robin was capable of huge empathy to women being verbally attacked by mobs online.

And as it was then not now, he was also following me and he stepped in.

He asked me by DM if he could talk to me so I sent him my number. He called and he explained that after hearing me on the radio he’d spoken to Ricky. Ricky himself felt totally besieged at this point. The hate his team was getting in the form of death threats and that he was getting online was immense. But after Robin explained what was happening to me online from his fans and that I wasn’t just a social justice warrior or a hater, Ricky said he wanted to speak to me.

I really wasn’t sure about this. I’d dealt with public figures before and the defensiveness when they feel criticised, stems often from feeling attacked.

I don’t attack people. I don’t tell anyone what to do. I always just ask what they mean when they use disability pejoratively because their influence is huge and life is hard enough for learning disabled people.

It’s not a cease and desist imperative from me, I don’t think I have that right or responsibility.

My worry was that Ricky would be defensive and I was wary that tired & burnt out as I was at that moment, I wouldn’t be able to stand it.

Anyway I said yes, because conversations even tricky ones are important when it’s about important things. Also we’re all just human and I’m an optimist when it comes to people’s capacity to agree to disagree. So he called me. It was surreal to hear him on the end of my phone saying hello.

He was funny and kind, empathic and apologetic. He was in short, just a nice bloke who seemed genuinely worried that I’d got a ton of shit from his fans and sorry and perplexed that the whole situation had spiralled so badly. A human being just as flawed and imperfect as any of us and just as vulnerable and empathic too.

I was sorry that he got death threats because that particular type of silencing, is sickening, popular and meant to frighten people into compliance.

In those days it was seen as the last resort of the intolerant. Today it’s seen as standard along with suggestions to kill yourself. We really have fallen too far.

You can read a version of our conversation here because after Ricky detailed the death threats he’d received I suggested a “Twinterview” to try and turn the tide.

The conversation in the media continued. All famous comedians in all interviews were asked for their thoughts on mong gate as here with Tim Minchin, who suggested I speak to Ricky on the phone, after I’d spoken to Ricky on the phone, so he was right.

This had the desired effect. The hatred targeting Ricky stopped almost straight away. However, it had to go somewhere so once I again became the focus of the online rage.

Those who hated Ricky, those who campaigned for disability rights and those who were just a bit confused about where to put their defence of their comedy hero, turned the anger onto me. I’ve long made the point that I get all of the negatives of being a public figure and none of the perks  and this was particularly true in this moment.

“Who does this bitch think she is” round 2 began.

Now as well as being lectured to by the “perhaps you’ve learnt your lesson Mrs Nicky Clark and realise Ricky is a wonderful person” brigade, the “What is wrong with you, he’s a monster who hates disabled people and so do you” brigade decide to wade in.

Two comedy forums took particular exception to me and the threads and posts were lengthy. On one alone the thread ran to 172 pages, not posts- pages of posts.

I got a lot of requests for radio interviews. I ran every single one past Ricky. He said if I didn’t mind that would be great. So I did and defended him and explained as far as I undersood it, his point of view. Cancel culture is wrong now and it was wrong then, I’m far better in defence of other people being attacked than I am of myself.

Anyway the Twitter storm died down and Ricky asked me to review the Derek pilot which I did and shared my thoughts. I guess a sort of consultancy, a sensitivity viewer if you like, it was a favour not a job.

I did it around my mum unexpectedly dying and I tried to fit everything in as best as I could but the Twitter savaging’s didn’t really go away regardless of what was going on for me offline. That’s the rule for a woman online.

If I wrote articles they came for me, If I wrote tweets they came for me. It went on and on resurfacing every couple of months when people late to the hate party would find the whole thing on Twitter and send me their thoughts.

So there I was front and centre of the very rage and malice I was trying to curb online. It was also tricky personally because in the midst of still grieving for my mum, Emily’s behaviours of distress were off the scale and our autistic oldest was recovering from a nervous breakdown and had to leave school.

Lee & Emily.

I met Ricky & Jane for a coffee in London having cancelled when my mum died. This wasn’t something Ricky wanted me to share online so I didn’t. They were both lovely to me and it was nice to meet them.

Life settled a little online. People moved on to the next outrage because it really was the start of cancel culture as a robust activism tool, after Ricky’s public apology.

When Derek came out I suggested reviewing it with an interview which I posted on my blog. This was covered by the BBC and various other news sites.

On one, a female journalist critical of Ricky took sections of my exclusive interview and quoted it without crediting me.  Women online who hated him at that time (not now) discussed me at length. I “fascinated them” apparently; they “wondered” what my “motivation” was.

When I saw Boyd Hilton defending me to a group of these women, I wandered over to the tweets to take a look. I asked them why I was of any interest at all to them, as I was just trying to dial down the online rage we all suffered from.

They blocked me.

But then something odd happened. Ricky gave an interview at the launch of Derek and said a strange thing. When asked about mong gate he said “Mong gate has gone into myth and legend. I said at the time I never used that word to mean Downs Syndrome -never would, never have-and then when I was contacted by the Downs Syndrome association and they said “It’s still used” I went okay, I won’t use it again.”

Which was obviously news to me. I was fairly sure there was someone else who’d explained that to Ricky but this was perhaps a misquote or an accidental exclusion by another journalist, or Ricky just deciding in the moment that a charity was a better fit “source wise”, I dunno.

Ricky goes his own way as always. I did feel though that my work was being airbrushed.

I chatted away to Ricky over the years, on Twitter and by text. Not often but occasionally I’d ask him something and he’d answer. I can’t every say we were friends in the way I understand the word but certainly friendly. The same with Jane Fallon.

Occasionally in his mercurial way Ricky would tweet something and everyone would get into a kerfuffle, but he stuck by his word & he never used mong again during the whole of the following nine years after mong gate so well done the Downs Syndrome Association, apparently.

It’s been twelve years since mong gate so I might have missed him using it for the last three because there is a sad ending to my tale, children.

You see in January 2020 the good ship “HMS Good Mates With A Funny Bloke’ was capsized by the fact that despite that time being etched into my memory from all the trolling and all the venom and all the work I did, Ricky seemingly forgot.

He’d been out for dinner and has what I have, a visceral hatred of hearing other people eat. Sitting across from him was a man who clearly hadn’t got a clue about the effect he was having on one diner in particular. Ricky, as is the habit with all of us to a greater or lesser degree when we’re annoyed, tweeted about it :

That evening had been tricky for us. Emily had left home in 2012 into residential school and her life had followed the path of many disabled teenagers into adulthood, difficult and precarious.

She’d then had to move from the residential school, into her own home with 24 hour, 3-1 support workers and they had been great but there had been some tricky moments.

What Ricky didn’t know, what he couldn’t have known was that Emily was born at SaTH which was becoming increasingly the focus of one of the worst maternal and baby death and brain injury scandals (resulting in lifelong disability) in the country.

We were part of that inquiry. We’d approached the maternity care review team at the end of 2019, when it became clear that the years they were looking into, had widened to include Emily’s birth year.

Emily faces what all learning-disabled women face, a life expectancy which is 27 years less than non-disabled women and in the pandemic that was about to break, Emily as a learning disabled woman of 23 was 30 times more likely to die from covid, than non-disabled people of the same age.

Emily’s learning disability doesn’t arise from a genetic or chromosomal cause. She doesn’t have Downs Syndrome, Emily’s disability we now know, most likely stems from a brain injury at birth as there was a problem during the second stage of my labour.

We were dealing with confronting this after joining the Ockenden review. Dealing with what that meant after years and years of fighting for basic things like education & social care. I don’t know if you’ve ever been treated like you’re asking for too much when you’re only asking for equal treatment for your child, but it’s tough.

I’d never looked for a cause of Emily’s disability outside the genetic factors because ultimately it doesn’t matter. Except when it does. Then the need to know “why” that you’ve put aside, because of all the work you have to do, demands an answer.

There were a lot of early mornings for me, a lot of late nights as all the years all the fighting for basics, all the ignorance and thoughtlessness of providers and the lack of help from overstretched under funded services, played on my mind.

Being a family carer is extremely lonely and being Emily is often frightening, frustrating and lonely too. That is the devastating birthright of learning disabled people around the world. Because the world with very few exceptions, isn’t really equipped with enough empathy. So society allocates that empathy into the ‘deserving” and “undeserving”. Learning disabled adults tend to fall into the “undeserving” empthy section. And when the world doesn’t care about you, terrible things can and do happen because there’s no one there to prevent it.

For the first time I wondered what her life could have been like if she had been born in a different hospital. One where an avoidable brain injury, didn’t render her learning disabled.

That was still haunting my mind when I saw Ricky’s tweet two weeks later. It wasn’t an issue that conveniently or objectively stands back and prioritises his context, but rather the net effect of the words as written.

Again it wasn’t his considered stand up, it wasn’t an empathic script, just him annoyed about his dinner and using brain injury as a pejorative.

Ordinarily I might have let it go. Ordinarily I might have moved past it, but that night I couldn’t.

To me in that moment it was mong gate again and despite everything I felt I’d gone through and despite all assurances to the contrary, I realised irrevocably that to Ricky in respect of me, being friendly wasn’t even close to being friends.

So I challenged him on it. He explained it was a simile. I challenged him on that he explained that I’d misunderstood.

We went back and forth and his fans waded in and again for the next week just like in 2011, I was subjected to his fans calling me a brain damaged cunt and him doing nothing whatsoever to stop it.

One of the most surreal moments was being lectured to on my behaviour, by an account which posed as a yorkshire terrier and bizarrely referred to Ricky, as uncle.

In 2020 Ricky’s follower count wasn’t 400,000 anymore it was almost 14 million.

This wasn’t a stranger anymore who thought me nothing more than a politically correct, uptight, humour wrangler. This was a man I’d gone out of my way to help get past a torrent of online abuse. A man who I’d supported through a horrible time, not returning the favour when it was easily within his gift and when I needed it.

He had my number now he could have called but he didn’t because I suppose not unreasonably and viewed from his perspective, there was nothing to be gained for him.

He had been kind and friendly over the years we had known each other, that’s a fact and one which I don’t think should get lost in the points I’m making here. Ricky isn’t a horrible person or a pampered celebrity devoid of understanding of the real world.

I think he didn’t help me because he’s unkind or because he couldn’t help but rather because he didn’t need to.

By 2020 this sort of issue didn’t make the news anymore, because by 2020 few journalists care what you say about learning disabled people or how many pejoratives for learning disability you use, as long as you’re not being unkind to trans and non-binary people.

So there was no celebrity outrage, no backlash and no need to reconsider. No harm, no foul.

Imagine for a moment that tweet had been written by JK. Rowling and instead of brain damaged she had written trans & non-binary.

The answer is obvious. She wouldn’t still have an account to tweet from.

As a woman Rowling has 1000 times the rage from social media for emphatically but empathically, expressing the inconvenient truth, that women need the safeguarding of single sex spaces. No man tweeting as she does, receives the abuse she does.

Despite the abuse continuing from his fans, I continued defending myself.

So predictably and again not unreasonably because we can all do what we want with our own timeline, Ricky blocked me. I think he was annoyed.

Funny really, how that works isn’t it.

I rarely get angry online anymore. I try my best not to contribute to the rage that ruins all our lives but this wasn’t a random troll, this was someone I felt understood the point I was making, who’d genuinely apologised in 2011 for getting it so wrong and understanding that the hate targeting me was something he could help to stop.

But I now wonder if Ricky regrets most of all, apologising in the first place. As though that was the most egregious error of all.

Perhaps he does.

But it was never about demanding an apology for me. Apologies without empathy, mean nothing so I don’t care about apologising because it’s usually a PR exercise. The worst case scenario is always the non apology apology which express regret “if” offence has been caused. That’s a popular one. I also loathe demands for apologies, recieving one than refuing to accept it, even when it’s honestly given and meant.

But Ricky’s seemed genuine at the time.

I’m also not overly interested in offence. That’s equally meaningless, in the vast majority of cases. Because what we’re all offended by is so different, so disparate, so conditional on a huge range of variables that it’s truly impossible to quantify offence objectively.

Even within the trans community itself, which I’m referring to again as it’s the only equality story in town these days, opinions vary hugely. Blaire White, Buck Angel and Debbie Hayton for example are trans people who don’t think JK Rowling is transphobic at all whereas some other transpeople do.

So deciding who is the final arbiter of offence, transgression or hatred, on behalf of a whole demographic is tricky at best and for organisations, institutions and broadcasters it seems to be quite selectively applied at best.

Some disabled people similarly think Ricky ableist & I remain to many beyond the pale for supporting him in 2011. Whereas I thought him mistaken then & I think him unconcerned now, rather that actively hateful, mainly because he’s unaffected by the pejoratives.

3 years on from “brain damage gate” all that I can say is that I still enjoy Ricky’s work whenever it drifts past my timeline. I’ve watched his stand up shows and his series on Netflix.  

Ricky is uncancellable and he should be. But he wasn’t always. It was a horrible time for him in October 2011 and I loathe cancel culture, or mob rule as I called it then, so I did what I could to stem the tide on that and to try and turn it. But to say he didn’t experience and hasn’t experienced the worst of what social media is capable of in terms of abuse isn’t the case.

The work of writers like Roald Dahl being altered and presented in a more acceptable way opens the door to something else. It isn’t the understandable removal of a racist epithet from a book title by Agatha Christie, it’s the rewriting of characters through their words and the selective reinterpretation of what the writer meant.  

Also it’s ultimately counterproductive. If I thought there was another version of books from my childhood that would make me keen to find & read them.

It would be like the director’s cut of a film.

In the case of the work of writers being rejected or banned because of their tweets well it really does depend what the tweets are. When it comes to the work of any artists and of all writers, past and present, as audiences we have the right only to choose to consume their work or not, we don’t have the right for it to be expunged entirely.

Book burning to my generation, is generally regarded as bad.

We can’t change the work, we can’t force them to change it and we absolutely shouldn’t posthumously change it to what they “should” have said in a kinder world, because we don’t yet inhabit a kinder world.

We inhabit one where kindness is demanded by those simultaneously rationalising death & rape threats sent to non-compliant women voicing an opinion.

We can explain to writers when we feel they’ve been thoughtless or callous or lacking in a wider perspective, but ultimately the final arbiter of sensitivity in any writing has to be the writer.