Borkowski Weekly Media Trends 18-03-22
#HaveAWord | P&O Disaster | Little Britain
#HaveAWord cuts through the noise
The Mayor of London secured a PR win this week, with the premier of a new advert designed to tackle violence against women and girls. The two-minute video depicts some late-night banter between a rowdy group of lads that descends into the harassment of a young woman on the street – until one of them speaks up and puts an end to it.
The campaign, #HaveAWord, will see the ad streamed across London’s billboards, football clubs and men’s toilets, and has already garnered approval across social media. It feels like the culmination of a cultural shift that has been revving up since #MeToo and was accelerated by the Sarah Everard tragedy last year. A campaign like this could, we hope, cement the end of gender-based harassment and violence for good.
Except it’s not quite that simple. This was the same week that a black schoolgirl in Hackney suffered an unjustified strip-search at the hands of the Met Police – ‘It should never have happened’, said Scotland yard. It’s the same week, too, that the Home Office released a sponsored documentary with Channel 4 called ‘Untold: The Police’, which spotlights staff from minority groups in order to change public perception of the force. (In one trailer, a police officer says that using the word ‘community’ to refer to LGBTQ+ people is ‘misleading’ – a strange act of erasure that has the unfortunate effect of denial).
We find ourselves at a moment where the progress and positivity of the Mayor’s new campaign co-exists comfortably alongside the racial violence and discrimination that continues to pervade society. It’s a sobering reminder that actions speak louder than words – a lesson that those suffering are painfully aware of, and that those in power really should have learnt by now.
The Mayor’s ad is spot-on, whilst the Home Office’s documentary misses the mark. But neither change the trauma endured by that young girl this week. Only time will tell if either the Mayor or the Met will achieve the positive change they’re supposedly reaching for.
P&O’s PR Shipwreck
Today over 800 employees of P&O Ferries were fired via a pre-recorded Zoom message while busloads of agency workers sat dockside to replace them, igniting a media firestorm. Such is the scale of this misjudgement of optics and public sentiment, that it appears that the PR department was the first to go.
P&O Ferries said its survival was dependent on "making swift and significant changes now". But in trying to solve their financial crisis they beckoned a reputation crisis.
First, they misjudged the emotional impact; when you read details of how hundreds of people were fired with immediate effect you instantly empathise. Reports abound of workers refusing to leave their cabins on the ferries and balaclava-clad private security firms removing them by force; creating an image of resistance against tyranny that will only galvanise the public’s overwhelming sympathy for the employees.
Nor is there any reassurance of continuity for customers and commercial stakeholders. P&O Ferries’ fleet will be out of action for days –costing them significant revenue, creating huge disruption, and further damaging their reputation even among those for whom the company’s services a necessity.
The ugly scenes also feed into a potent ongoing political narrative: a big company exploiting a loophole in regulation to the detriment of its workers is the ugly side of capitalism.
This crisis also comes at a time when the media narrative is zoomed in on Foreign Ownership of British companies and P&O Ferries’ ownership by Dubai-based DP World will add to the perception that they are wantonly firing British workers to replace them with cheaper overseas workers.
The question is: will P&O Ferries’ rash layoff actually cause a rupture in the business? Will companies and passengers flock to competitors? Or will this be another case of a ‘better the devil you know’ brand with a near monopoly in their market getting away with murder?
Computer says no to Little Britain ‘updates’
In an age when we have access to decades, sometimes centuries-worth of art, literature, film and television, a trend has arisen whereby a ‘classic’ becomes a target for mob criticism, particularly on social media, generally because it displays examples of the societal values, attitudes or even humour of yesteryear - which are then held to today’s standards by new audiences, and left to be found wanting.
Disney classics now contain racism warnings, Fairytale of New York is now generally slur-free, and classic comedy is constantly being chopped and changed.
Poorly aged jokes come from across the comedy spectrum; well-regarded 21st century sitcoms such as Peep Show, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, 30 Rock and The Mighty Boosh have deleted scenes or even entire episodes that drew accusations of racial insensitivity.
This trend left early 00s British sketch show Little Britain in a bit of a pickle. Put mildly, it never received universal acclaim and much of its humour was based on broad, cartoonish portrayals of race, gender or disability. In the wake of complaints it was temporarily removed from BBC iPlayer with the promise to consider its position within the values of today.
So it was that an edited version reappeared this week proudly proclaimed to have been edited in line with today’s cultural norms.
But there was a problem with this approach. In effectively declaring the series ‘fixed’ the BBC was, firstly, positioning itself as the arbiter of taste and offense. Not an enviable or even viable position in a world where tribal subjectivity creates rapidly shifting sands, in which -to illustrate the point- the BBC is criticised both as a stuffy establishment monolith, and a smug liberal ivory tower.
Secondly, in doing so the BBC was inviting critics of the show – both those offended by its original content, and those who just thought it was rubbish- to comb back over the new edit for any scenes that may still be considered offensive.
This latter point in particular could make this issue drag. A glance on Twitter suggests that it finding scenes that might easily be considered offensive and yet passed the almighty censor wasn’t the most difficult task.
Ultimately the BBC should have either left the show up with a content warning (the Disney approach) or, given the huge proportion of it likely to cause offense these days, taken the entire thing down; this halfway house was both a half-baked half measure, and an over-reach which has created an easy target for criticism.