How lengthy earlier than I’m hauled earlier than the court docket of political correctness?

Spare a thought for famous men of a certain age who find themselves totally at sea in the woke modern world.

One after another over recent days, those brought up in the era of Benny Hill, the Carry On films and Till Death Us Do Part have fallen foul of today’s fashionable rules governing acceptable and unacceptable behaviour.

Take John Torode, 59, the MasterChef presenter, who has been tried and convicted in the court of social media for cracking a puerile joke while he was plating up toad in the hole on Tuesday’s edition of the ITV breakfast show, This Morning.

Those of a sensitive disposition are advised to turn the page now, because I’m about to repeat it verbatim.

As he stood beside the show’s presenter, he said: ‘I never thought I’d say to Cat Deeley: ‘Here’s a little sausage for you, darling.”

All right, a seven-year-old schoolboy might possibly have found this quip hilarious. But I don’t believe that, these days, many grown-ups would agree.

As it was, I reckon Ms Deeley got her reaction exactly right. Having said ‘Oh, I like it, thank you’ (the food, not the joke), she turned to the camera and pulled a bored and faintly disgusted face.

Inquisition

In doing so, she made Torode look like the boorish ass he may well be. Game, set and match to her, I thought.

But of course this wasn’t punishment enough for the latter-day Torquemadas of social media. ‘Sack him!’ they cried. Cut off his livelihood, and never let this sexist fiend pollute our TV sets again!

Nor is Torode the only MasterChef presenter whose conduct has landed him in hot water this week. His co-host Gregg Wallace, who turned 60 yesterday, also finds himself up before the social media inquisition, charged with offences against the gospel of political correctness.

At the Cheltenham Literary Festival the other day, he was accused by Torode’s wife, Lisa Faulkner, herself a TV presenter and former contestant on Celebrity MasterChef, of repeatedly annoying her by telling dirty jokes when she appeared on the programme in 2010.

‘Gregg just told rude joke after rude joke to the crew,’ she complained. ‘You’re on the front bench just chopping away thinking ‘I’ve got ten minutes left’, and he’s saying: ‘So this girl walked into a bar…’

‘And I’m going: ‘Please, I don’t want to hear this joke.’

Now it is said that six years ago, Wallace was hauled before his bosses at the BBC, who instructed him to change his behaviour, after he was accused of making ‘inappropriate sexual comments’. It seems he was alleged to have boasted about his sex life to a younger female employee of the Corporation, and to have taken his shirt off in front of her while filming a game show.

Here I should stress that he denies these claims, saying he would never ‘flirt with’ or ‘hit on’ a woman other than his current wife, who happens to be his fourth.

All I will say is that Gregg Wallace with his top off is indeed a revolting sight (I’ve seen pictures of him on the internet, posing half-bare), while boasting to anybody about one’s sex life strikes me, frankly, as pathetic.

But is either of these sins really an unpardonable offence, punishable by professional ruin?

Then there was Wynne Evans, the 52-year-old Welsh opera singer famous for the Go Compare advertisements, who brought the wrath of the internet down on himself, after what he describes as an in-joke with his partner on Strictly Come Dancing blew up in his face.

I confess I’m no fan of Strictly, and I’m not at all clear about what this alleged in-joke with his professional dancing partner, Katya Jones, was supposed to be.

Bigot

All I know is that Ms Jones appeared to rebuff his attempt to high-five her on live TV. Then she seemed to try to move his hand away from her waist. (Was he making light of previous Strictly scandals about inappropriate behaviour? Search me.)

Then all hell broke loose, prompting Evans to issue a grovelling public apology, while saying he didn’t know quite why he was apologising, since he had nothing to apologise for.

All very mystifying.

Enough to say the bookies now predict his brief stardom as a ballroom dancer is about to come to an abrupt end.

As for my fourth exhibit of the week, well, perhaps the least said the better about Brendan O’Carroll, 69, and the crass racist joke he cracked during rehearsals for the Christmas special of Mrs Brown’s Boys. I reckon it’s no excuse that he was speaking in character as Agnes Brown.

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, when they were making Till Death Us Do Part, it may have been thought acceptable to put a blatantly offensive remark into the mouth of a character like that old bigot, Alf Garnett.

But couldn’t any ten-year-old have warned O’Carroll that times have changed – and that in 2024, it is most certainly not OK to make disparaging jokes about racial minorities, no matter how light-hearted the intention? He was lucky to escape further punishment after issuing an apology.

So, no, I’m not going to defend O’Carroll, and nor will I say that political correctness is all bad.

After all, it’s simply good manners to avoid giving gratuitous offence or making sexual innuendos when they are clearly unwelcome.

But can’t most of us agree that the vengeance of the woke has gone too far, in this age when countless people seem to make it their life’s mission to take offence at the merest suggestion of an off-colour joke or an -ism?

Puritanism

All I ask is a little mercy towards those of us past our prime, who learned our little ways in freer times and still can’t get used to the new puritanism.

Now business leaders have warned that we’ll soon have to be constantly on our guard against the banter police even in pubs.

Until now these have been the last bastions of free speech, where jokes of every hue, and opinions of every kind, have been tolerated since before Shakespeare’s time.

Under the new Employment Rights Bill, they say, landlords will become liable in law for any offence staff may take from customers, with a duty to take ‘all reasonable steps’ to prevent harassment relating to a protected characteristic such as sex, gender identity or age.

Where will that leave my own weekly gathering of old buffers?

After all, one or two us have been known to make the odd sweeping generalisation about woman drivers or Australians – while some of us are still struggling with the idea that men can have husbands, women can have wives, and any of us can choose to be male or female, however the fancy takes us.

Come to think of it, if this new law had been in force in 1979, I might not have dared utter the very first words I said to the pretty new barmaid at my local pub in West London.

As I may have mentioned before, these were: ‘A pint of bitter, a packet of cheese and onion crisps and your hand in marriage, please.’

Luckily for me, the barmaid in question took no offence – and the present Mrs U said Yes to all three.