A YEAR ago this week, we launched Piers Morgan Uncensored on TalkTV and included a quote from the late, great cricket legend Shane Warne.
‘In this day and age,’ said Warnie, ‘you have got to be a little bit careful but sometimes, you've just got to say “get stuffed” to the fun police.’
I thought of this splendid philosophy when I heard of the deaths of both Barry Humphries and Len Goodman in the past 48 hours.
They were very different men, born on other sides of the world – Barry in Melbourne, Australia, Len in London – but they shared a common attitude that straight-talking, common sense, good humour, and an allergy to all things woke are the spices of life.
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And if you occasionally cause offence with an ‘inappropriate’ off-the-cuff comment, or an opinion not shared by a bunch of shrieking, pinch-faced, green-haired, vegan ‘activists’ who last laughed, accidentally, when still in their nappies and after slurping too much milk, then so be it; that’s the price of a free democracy.
Better that than we sentence ourselves to a world of draconian joyless censorship endured by people in totalitarian regimes like North Korea, Russia, and China where all the fun is sucked out of daily existence by actual police.
Or the kind of ludicrously hypocritical world where someone like Labour MP Diane Abbott gets to harangue us all endlessly about racism, but then sends a letter to a newspaper this weekend suggesting Jewish people – six million of whom were murdered by Hitler’s Nazis - have never had to go through much worse prejudice than ginger-haired people, and certainly nothing remotely as bad as black people.
Like so many on the ultra-woke left, Ms Abbott has always been first in the queue to be grievously offended by absolutely everything, however petty or insignificant.
Yet here she is, being so staggeringly offensive herself that her boss Sir Keir Starmer has had to suspend her. Ironically, the canceller-in-chief just got cancelled!
Barry Humphries pushed the offence envelope via his over-the-top comedic creations like the fabulous Dame Edna Everage, and the grotesque skirt-chasing Australian cultural attaché Sir Les Patterson who would boast drunkenly of what he wanted to do with his ‘trouser snake’.
But their often-merciless gags always came from a place of warmth.
As he observed: ‘I say things other people wish they could say – but I don’t pick on people, I empower them.’
Goodman could be equally strident as a dance judge around the world, but he was never cruel either. He was just bluntly honest with his critiques, good, bad, and sometimes ugly. And like Humphries, he was always commendably frank and honest in interviews too, calling things exactly as he saw them even if it ruffled a few over-sensitive feathers.
But isn’t that what we all should all strive to be – people who can laugh and say what we really think?
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In private, Barry and Len were just the same as they were in public.
I loved time in their company because it always involved a lot of fun and mischief, and a lot of very strong opinions.
They were both true to themselves and I value authenticity as the greatest of all virtues.
The last time I saw Barry Humphries was at a star-studded private lunch in London four years ago where he had guests including Liz Hurley, Tracey Emin, Jimmy Carr and Nigella Lawson in regular fits of laughter.
I asked him then if he’d had to tone down his stage act to appease the woke brigade.
‘NO!’ he roared. ‘Les Patterson is the last offensive man standing! I can get away with anything so long as it comes out of his mouth, or Edna’s.’
And unlike Diane Abbott, he practised what he preached.
Barry could take a joke at his own expense as well as one he dished out to others.
Before the lunch began, he let slip that his hearing was deteriorating, and he had to use a hearing aid controlled by his wife Lizzie Spender’s iPhone.
‘She keeps turning me off,’ he confided to me.
Later, as Barry was deep in conversation with Nigella, I asked Lizzie if this was true.
‘Yes!’ she laughed, pulling out her phone to show me the app that controlled Barry’s aid.
‘Let’s have some fun,’ I said, taking the phone and turning Barry’s volume down to its lowest level.
We watched in mounting hilarity as he edged closer to Nigella, straining to hear anything she was saying.
‘BARRY!’ I eventually shouted across the table.
He turned to me, startled.
‘I TURNED YOU OFF!’
He looked bemused for a second but then saw Lizzie’s phone in my hand, saw the pair of us smirking, and did the maths.
(Memo to any ultra-woke imbeciles reading this anecdote and now spewing their guts out in indignant rage at my blatant ‘ableist’ mockery of a deaf old man: Get stuffed.)
Then Barry burst out into heaving uncontrollable laughter.
And that’s always the best response.
As Dame Edna once memorably said to Jeffrey Archer: ‘Never be afraid to laugh at yourself. After all, you could be missing out on the joke of the century.’
Elon Musk has described wokery as a ‘virus’ infecting society with a deadly dose of shaming, virtue-signalling, abusive, job-destroying cancel culture.
Barry Humphries and Len Goodman represented a gloriously liberating vaccine for such a virus because they didn’t give a damn what they said or if people were upset by what they said.
Their legacy should be that we all try to be as fearless in voicing our thoughts, and in having a bit of naughty fun, as they were.
