Stewart Lee on Football Supporters

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Show quote | Sign In to save your setting (remove disclaimer). Photo of Stewart Lee Ron Atkinson, the football manager, he got in trouble for calling a black footballer a lazy, thick nigger. Loads of people complained about it and then on May 17th, Jimmy Hill, the BBC-employed football commentator, came out in Ron Atkinsons defence, and said, that in his opinion, it was a load of fuss about nothing. He said in the papers, 17th of May, You have to understand that in the culture of football, calling a black man a nigger is just a bit of harmless fun. And I thought, Call me old-fashioned. I know the culture of football has a very broad definition of harmless fun, broad enough to include carrying out a racial assault and still getting in the England team, gang-raping a teenage girl in a London hotel and yet perversely allowing Jimmy Hill to carry on living. But surely that can't be the case. But Jimmy Hill qualified his statement. He said that in his opinion, calling a black man a nigger was no more offensive than calling him, Jimmy Hill, Chinny... because he had a big chin. I read that and thought, Call me a square from the past, but surely the word nigger is more offensive than the word Chinny? Because the word nigger comes with a whole weight of cultural and historical significance, that is not really there for the word Chinny. There are not people in this country standing for election now on the grounds that, People with big chins should be sent back to wherever they came from. Chinland, probably. I haven't done any research into it. There were not vast vast swathes of humanity historically enslaved on the grounds that they had big chins. If there had been, popular culture would be entirely different. There would not be a blues root underpinning all the late-20th-century popular music that you love if the Mississippi Delta had been populated by disenfranchised ex-slaves with big chins. Woke up this morning... Got a big chin. It's not that much of a problem, to be honest. I wont base an entire musical genre on it. You don't hear news reports saying, A man was beaten to death in Hull. The violence is thought to have been chin motivated. Although in Jimmy Hills case I'd be happy to see an exception made. Kill him! Kill Jimmy Hill! But kill him in an ironic way. Break in to the Natural History Museum, steal the jaw bone of a blue whale, the largest chin currently known to science, and beat Jimmy Hill to death with it, in an example of what sociologists are already calling chin-on-chin violence. But we shouldn't be surprised to find out that Jimmy Hill is evil and mad, because all people that are involved in the business of football or play football or go and support it or watch it on television or even know anything about it, are filthy, reactionary scum.
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