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Unbelievable..
I’m hanging onto my old books and those I don’t have I will look out for in the local charity shops.David Walliams watch out you’ll be next.
JacThings turn out best for those who make the best of how things turn out...This’ll cheer you up Jac , my fav episode was the one with Glynis Barber and Nicholas Ball , Dahl did the intros , norm in front of a fire in a cardigan
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I remember them well Ground…
Wasn’t Nicholas Ball in his own series back in tbe day..some sort of detective series.Can’t believe they are going to chop about RD’s children’s books.
Replacing fat for enormous sounds even worse in some contexts and taking out the word ugly where it’s been written in books like The Twits and The Witches.
I believe there is even a village called Ugley in Suffolk where Terry Wogan made a comment about meetings of The Ugley Women’s Institute.
We really do have to laugh at ourselves sometimes dont we?
Jac
Things turn out best for those who make the best of how things turn out...And all of this is happening in a world where I live in a suburb where the local women who go to the local Slimming World happily joke with one another about going to “Fat Club,” their words, expressed about themselves, not mine.
It’s the middle classes trying to impose values on the working classes, who are actually perfectly happy the way they are.
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It's the "Millwall FC" of Point broadcasts: "No One Likes Us - We Don't Care"Can’t beep the car horn
can’t wolf whistle
can’t pinch the fat bottomed girls bottom
Don’t know how the pro perverts will make it in this day and ageIan, are you sure it was Fat Club and not biscuit club the local women were talking about
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Once again, Hughesey being gratuitously unkind about an excellent establishment Chezza often regarded as the local Milf Central.
That said, “Biscuit Club” does have a definite ring to it!
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It's the "Millwall FC" of Point broadcasts: "No One Likes Us - We Don't Care"Today it is rewriting the work of classic authors because “sensitivity readers” jolly well know what is better.
Tomorrow it will be cancelling those authors and their work being banned.
I own a copy of one of the books in the “Thomas the Tank Engine” series, published in 1970. Some naughty boys have soot and smoke blown all over them by a passing train and are described as running away looking “as black as” and then the n word is used.
If the sensitivity readers saw that, they would faint and have to be taken into intensive care! Perhaps I should hand myself into the police for owning such a degenerate work?
This article sums it up, especially:
“The magic and misanthropy of Dahl’s work…was informed by the Norwegian fairy tales he was raised on and a personal life full of tragedy. To sanitise his work is to completely, utterly, idiotically misunderstand what marks it out in the first place. These are the people who have taken over our cultural industries and institutions – idiots who have no idea what it is they are destroying.”
Although thinking about it again, I think they do know what they are destroying.
Jac that was Hazell wasn’t it , written in part by Terry Venables , we are getting to the point were humour is going to be illegal
Pick 3 on Saturday champion 2025/2026
I read Dahl’s books a lot as a child and it doesn’t seem to have hurt me.
Literary censorship is hardly a new thing though. It took thirty years for Lady Chatterley’s Lover (something that would probably barely raise an eyebrow these days) to be legally published upon which Penguin had to defend themselves at a six day trial at the Old Bailey. Yes, Puffin is ultimately connected to that same Penguin that is now censoring works.
This re-writing of Dahl is ridiculous but the idea that ‘you can’t say nuffink these days’ as if there was ever a time that you could is nonsense. Book censorship has always existed as have ‘moral guardians’ such as Mary Whitehouse in the world of TV.
That was it Ground 💡. Didn’t know Terry Venables part wrote it though.
I think it only ran a short while before Minder and The Sweeney took over the East London patch.
JacThings turn out best for those who make the best of how things turn out...‘It’s the middle classes trying to impose values on the working classes, who are actually perfectly happy the way they are.’
Spot on Ian
Things turn out best for those who make the best of how things turn out...I don’t think that comparison quite works, Richard. Lawrence’s book was completely banned but when it was published the text was uncut and as Lawrence intended.
Here are works which have been in the public domain for years but an author’s own words are being rewritten by a self appointed group of people, sometimes to radically alter their meaning.
It is just as much an attack on artistic freedom as outright censorship and arguably worse.
Fair comment, it’s not a direct comparison but it does show that you’ve never been able to write what you want without some form of consequence (rightly or wrongly), it’s not a new thing.
The article you posted does make a good point in that there has not even been a public outcry over this which makes it all the more bizarre (and perhaps even a bit sinister, are they pre-empting it now?). I don’t recall hearing about how generations of kids have been corrupted by Dahl’s work. Even to a child they are quite obviously works of fantasy.
Do think they have missed a trick though, they could have promoted organic food in James and the Genetically Modified Peach.
If the sensitivity readers saw that, they would faint and have to be taken into intensive care! Perhaps I should hand myself into the police for owning such a degenerate work?
Never mind the N-word, you should be hung, drawn and quartered for reading a book containing a character called The F-word Controller
I’ve just been on Ebay and ordered the full set of 16 books written by Roald Dahl before they go out of circulation.
I’m putting them away to read to my grandchildren and enjoy every moment of the fun and originality he poured into each of his works.Richard I think (and hope) that now half term is over social platforms like mumsnet will pick this up and there will be a lot more to be said about the vandalising of Roald Dahl’s books.
Children’s imaginations should be allowed to run free and form their own opinions.
JacThings turn out best for those who make the best of how things turn out...Phillip Pulman writes today in The Guardian that he thinks the Roald Dahl books should be allowed to go out of print rather than rewriting them.
I tend to agree…https://amp.theguardian.com/books/2023/feb/20/roald-dahl-books-editing-philip-pullman
Things turn out best for those who make the best of how things turn out...
Jac
Jac
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