Iggy Pop's Tribute to Bernard Manning

When some people say racist stuff on television they have effigies of themselves burned in public in foreign countries, and are banished from the public eye, lest they be ritually egged at Tesco's.

When Iggy Pop - apparently - does it, the TV presenters don't even bother apologizing.

So there I was watching the BBC's Glastonbury coverage on Saturday night, when none other than the sweating lunatic himself pops up on BBC2 to have a chat with Mark 'Please go back to doing stuff with Marc Riley' Radcliffe, and Jo 'I can't believe she's 42 on Wednesday, but I still definitely would' Whiley.

The interview kicked off with the almost ritualistic chat about wellies, like they continually find it astonishing that celebrities don't turn up in their finest diamond-encrusted suede brogues when they're invited to play what is effectively a mud pit with a couple of speakers.

Anyway, after this opening gambit Radcliffe decided to question Mr. Pop about the see-through pants he wore when he appeared on The White Room years ago, to which he said this:

Initially I was stunned, but given the presenters' rather nonchalant attitude I just assumed I'd misheard, or thought possibly that the word had another meaning in North America that I wasn't aware of, which is indeed true:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquor_store

However, the fact that the BBC has apologized for this incident would seem to shoot down that theory.

Thing is though, without wishing to play down the seriousness of the term, I'm pretty sure it isn't commonly used in the States, and I'm actually prepared to believe Iggy didn't really have any concept about what he was saying, much like when George W. Bush used the word in front of the cameras a few years ago. But then, he does have the excuse of being unable to eat a pretzel without nearly killing himself, so at the time it was written off as an understandable error.

Although given the controversy caused by Bush's gaffe you'd think it would have gone straight into everyone's 'words not to use in polite company' file.

I think the best thing Iggy could do would be to get some new friends to hang around with when he's in London, although he really didn't help himself later on when he wrote off Gogol Bordello as a bunch of 'gypsies with women's clothing.'

What really strikes me about all of this, deliberate racism or not, is the relative lack of hoo-hah about it all. The only reason I'm writing this now nearly a week after the event is because I'd rather assumed every blogster and his dog would have shoved their two penneth about this in our faces by now.

This may initially be down to the fact that it all occurred at god-knows-when-o'clock in the morning, when all but the most hardcore/drunk were the only ones watching (the BBC received three complaints about their Glastonbury coverage, but were unable to say if they were even actually related to that particular incident), but I would have thought it would have filtered through by now and got more people talking.

Looking around the Internet, there's a few cursory mentions here and there, but they mostly entail no more than 'Iggy Pop said a word, the BBC apologize (later)'.

Curiously, I did find this Guardian article which contains the following paragraph:

"At the time of the broadcast, both Whiley and Radcliffe made it clear to viewers that the use of the phrase was not acceptable."

Which contradicts every other report I've read about this, not to mention the actual flipping footage up there. Unless embarrassed, jokey exchanges count as a damning indictment these days.

Don't get me wrong, I love Mark Radcliffe and Jo Whiley (both for very different reasons), but they really should have said something, instead of deciding to shamble on and pretend nothing happened. What if he'd used the N-word instead? Is that really any worse?

My real gripe here is the varying treatment of this issue in the media; the girl who recently got kicked off Big Brother (one of the rare occasions I'm prepared to mention that wretched programme here) for using the N-word, seemed, much like Iggy, entirely oblivious to the impact of saying it, and yet was pilloried nonetheless. I think she's even received death threats, but then there is the average intelligence of a Big Brother viewer to take into account.

I think what I'm saying here is that there seems to be a perception that some unacceptable words are less unacceptable than others, when there doesn't really seem to be any good reason for that.

Is it too much to ask for a bit of consistency?