Oh My God - They Killed Kenny - You Hirsute, Scottish Bastard! (1/3) By Silver Fox

(1/3), (2/3), (3/3)

Against every humanitarian plea, against every civilised instinct, against reason and sense themselves, they did it. Ken Bigley is dead; a victim of a struggle about which he (like many of us) neither wished to participate in nor particularly understood. His headless corpse is the latest gory monument to the unthinking, barbaric nature of an enemy that will stop at nothing to seize the machinery of power and turn Iraq into a terror-ravaged wasteland where the only law is their demented, godless bloodlust.

Our nation is united in a state of shock; paralysed by outrage, we can do nothing but prey that the Powers That Be will hew down these infidel monsters with the flaming sword of vengeance. Personal differences - the petty squabbles of quotidian political life - must surely be put aside and the multi-hued colossus of British Parliamentary Democracy must close its ranks against the most insidious threat it has ever faced.

Regardless of the cost in money or human lives, the nefarious vermin that cower behind the Axis of Evil must be thwarted; for freedom, for human decency, for the future of Life As We Know It. The day that a cadre of fanatical warmongers can decapitate a man who carries a passport bearing the Royal Seal without fear of swift and righteous retribution is a bleak one indeed. Surely, we are as one in crying havoc and letting slip the dogs of war even as we lay to rest a true British hero; an everyman-turned-martyr - Mr Kenneth Bigley. There; that should do it. It seems, www.catsandkittens, that you can't be too careful in dealing with this issue. It's an emotional matter, and feelings are running high.

Apparently, there is only one acceptable position to take on Mr Bigley's murder, and neither one's personal opinions nor the facts of the matter should be allowed to detract from a good old session of wailing and teeth-gnashing. Step even slightly over the party line with this baby and a chap could find himself in serious trouble - Billy Connolly trouble. BBC: Connolly: Outrageous sense of humour?

The recent media persecution of the Big Yin has been a truly sickening spectacle. In The Sun, on Richard and Judy, and in The Cookham and Thames Ditton Chronicle for all I know, the boy Connolly has been lambasted as a sick and insensitive beast for his heartless gibes about the late Ken Bigley (although he wasn't late at the time, of course).

One simple, throwaway line - Don't you wish they'd just get on with it? has turned the man who was named in a national poll (Channel 5's Greatest British Comedian) Britain's funniest man into an odious pariah; a depraved spiritual vulture gorging himself on the carrion of national tragedy.

Pundits, leader-writers, and lightweight TV personalities have been trampling each other in the rush to pour scorn and vitriol on the head of one hairy Scotsman in the sort of media feeding frenzy we've not seen the like of since David Beckham decided to get jiggy with PA-turned-pig-spooger, Rebecca Loos. Connolly's statement that his remarks were an attempt to highlight the hypocrisy of the Press' coverage of Bigley's plight have been - unsurprisingly - derided by the baying pack of journalistic shit-pimps, who have sought to describe it as an insult. Fair enough, I suppose - it was one, and one that they richly deserved, at that.

Because, quite simply, he was right. Not in what he said, of course, because it wasn't true. It was merely the vocalisation of a distorted world view intended to provoke a reaction from an audience - an audience in a theatre, I might add - such as one hears and sees in such places every day. Now, for those of you who - like the mealy-mouther who rode out of Billy's show on his high horse and went straight to The Sun - are unfamiliar with the principles of The Theatre, the subsequent explanation may come as something of a shock.

Essentially though, it breaks down like this: it's all pretending. When you see Richard II weeping and bemoaning his lot on the stage, he actually isn't upset at all..hell, I'll go even further; he isn't really the King of England, either. In fact, if you cast your mind back, you may well recall seeing the same man wearing a cardigan and arguing with David Jason in A Touch of Frost a few months ago.

And although a comedian isn't exactly the same as an actor (many of them don't wear cardigans or chain mail armour, for a kick-off) it's a similar thing. They too are showing you an alternative reality; a distorting mirror reflecting the world in which we live. Those things that they say about their wives/nights at the pub/badger parades? They're called jokes, and they are not (nor are they intended to be) the truth. Harry Hill - I feel fairly safe in saying - does not actually own a grooming bay for woodland creatures. Emo Phillips' father probably didn't bury him up to his neck and kick him in the head.

Many of the old-school comics were/are devoted husbands (clearly, cockney cretin Jim Davidson is an exception to the rule here - but then he also doesn't strictly adhere to the far more fundamental point of comic dogma that a comedian has to be funny). By the same token, it is hugely improbable that Bad Boy Billy sat by his TV at night and slavered joyously at the prospect of Ken Bigley's swede being lopped off by his kidnappers. All he was doing was positing a surprising and unpleasant point of view in order to provoke people into examining their attitude.

And what, let us ask ourselves, attitude did we have towards Ken Bigley. The simple answer is: none at all. By that I mean there was no single, collective viewpoint, the claims of journals of respected opinion notwithstanding. We are each of us disparate individuals who respond to things in ways that are unique and inimitable to ourselves.

Continued on www.thisisUll.com...... Oh My God - They Killed Kenny - You Hirsute, Scottish Bastard! continued..

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