Two weeks ago the courts in Dubai sentenced two Britons to three months in jail for having sex on a public beach. The couple had met for the first time at an all-you-can-drink champagne brunch earlier on the night in question. Around the same time that their sentence was handed down, two comedians left obscene messages on a retired actor’s answering machine during a live BBC radio broadcast. The second incident provoked 18,000 complaints and was denounced by the British prime minister as “offensive and inappropriate.” After several critics took issue with the fact that both comedians were receiving large salaries out of the annual television licence-fee money that the BBC receives, its director offered a “personal and unreserved apology” to the insulted actor and regretted a “gross lapse of taste by the performers and the production team.” The Dubai incident, by contrast, attracted much less notice and was widely viewed as little more than a cautionary tale against frolicking in countries with conservative attitudes.
Last month, Russell Brand, one of the suspended BBC comics, provoked another heated response when he hosted MTV’s Video Music Awards in Los Angeles. During the show, Brand ad-libbed too freely for much of his audience. A characteristic remark was his observation that: “Some people, I think they’re called racists, say that America is not ready for a black president. But I know America to be a forward-thinking country… [why else] would you have let that retarded cowboy fella be president for eight years?” Brand openly mocked Governor Palin’s family and made a number of suggestive references about a Christian band who had made a public commitment to abstaining from sex before marriage. The next day, MTV’s website was flooded with complaints and the right-wing blogger Michelle Malkin explained Brand’s performance as follows: “MTV, of course, is a division of left-wing media giant Viacom. Viacom’s PAC is among Barack Obama’s biggest supporters.”
Part of the shock the MTV audience felt arose from a lingering stereotype that Britain is still a quaint and old-fashioned country. Outside of Europe – which has suffered from English football hooligans long enough to know better – this impression has proved surprisingly durable. For years, many Americans have taken Tony Blair’s easy fluency and apparent thoughtfulness as proof of Britain’s greater political and cultural sensitivity, so much at odds with their own president’s public manner – and, more recently, the indecipherable sinuousities of Sarah Palin. Actual Britons, however, often hold a less flattering view of themselves. Commenting on the Dubai couple, the Times journalist Minette Marin pointed out that for many people in contemporary Britain it “is apparently quite normal for two strangers to meet at a hotel brunch, drink themselves silly and proceed to perform sex acts on each other in public…That is what Britons do at home and abroad. They belch, vomit, copulate, litter and barge their way through public spaces, dressed like hookers and louts, defying the police without shame or modesty.” Ms Marin also noted that one week before the sentencing in Dubai a senior British police officer had recommended a policy of tolerating public sex, “to avoid offending or distressing people seen doing so, and to protect the human rights of those who frequent open spaces to have sex, particularly those in pursuit of dogging and cottaging [slang terms for public sex], who might easily be alienated or humiliated.”
To be fair, American and European tourists are often no better. Every year, thousands of them holiday in the Caribbean knowing they can shed their usual inhibitions with little fear of rebuke. For decades, instead of insisting on reasonable standards of public behaviour our “hospitality sector” has preferred to accommodate their excesses without complaint. Like other tourist destinations all over the world, we save our outrage for local mischiefs – overloud music, suggestive lyrics – and adopt a Socratic tolerance towards our immodest visitors. Forty years after independence, we are still likely to assume that people from developed countries are inherently well behaved, even though there has always been plenty of evidence to the contrary.
Our double standard is embarrassing but perhaps no worse than Britain’s own. After all, why should Mr Brand’s off-colour humour (and that of his fellow comic Jonathan Ross), attract so much censure while a far more provocative incident in Dubai has been largely ignored or dismissed? Further afield, we might wonder at America’s disproportionate appetite for outrage within presidential campaigns, and its surprising indifference towards the current administration’s illegal detention, mistreatment and torture of foreign nationals.
We have every right to get angry at obscenities, but shouldn’t some make us angrier than others?
