Channel Four are idiots

Repost for Blogging Against Disablism, 2013.

Australian comedian Adam Hills has attracted worldwide attention for blistering comments he made this week about fellow comedian, the legend that is Joan Rivers.

Rivers has been slagging off pop diva Adele for her weight and Hills went to town on his show The Last Leg. He said:

How dare you make fun of one of the best female role models on the planet for the way she looks. Adele is one of the very few women in pop music that I want my daughter to look up to – and you’re making jokes about the way she looks? When you’re so insecure about your own face, you’ve spent more money on it than the producers of Life of Pi spent on that tiger?

And much more ...

An American blog I follow alerted me to it but the embedded YouTube clip has been taken down because stupid Channel Four made a DMCA take-down request. As it has for the many other attempts to put Hills comments up on YouTube.

Why? What possible negatives could there be for the clip going viral? It makes absolutely no sense.

I'm sure Hills is just delighted (not) at C£4's actions.

Perez Hilton has video up so you can watch thanks to him after the jump:

Hills show ran during the Paralympics, both recapping the highlights and poking fun. The Last Leg was so successful that Channel Four commissioned a second series, which is now running. Hills said of his approach to the Games:

We'll be able to have fun with people's disabilities because they're funny. If the Paralympics is covered well, it can change way you look at and treat people with disabilities. You don't feel guilty or sorry about people in wheelchairs after you see them moving around a basketball court.

The show ran a regular segment using the Twitter hashtag #IsItOk, which allowed non-disabled people to ask anything - to regularly hilarious and definitely not po-faced end.

This was a big plus gained from the Paralympics for Brits; learning (mostly) how not to insult disabled people with language but how to include them with the rest of us as people we can laugh along with.

Wrote one of Britain's most controversial comedians, the Scot Frankie Boyle, on Twitter:

Nobody thinks it's a good thing to laugh at the disabled. But it is a genuine problem that we're not allowed to laugh with the disabled.

The argument of Liz Carr, an actor and comedian who is also in a wheelchair, is that of course it is fine to laugh "not cruelly at the athletes but instead at the ridiculousness of the rules or the Games or the gaffes". Things like when during the sit down volleyball at the Paralympics an assistant comes round with a supermarket trolley and collects the artificial limbs. Or that someone is monitoring those players to make sure they keep one of their buttocks on the court at all times.

After all we can laugh at horse dancing, synchronized swimming/drowning, the bike race where the riders follow a man on a moped or running around a gym mat waving ribbons and throwing beach balls into the air.

Here's Hills telling a great and funny story about a Chinese swimmer at the Beijing Paralympics: