CELEBRITY JUICE
Written by James Ward
Last night, I watched an episode of Celebrity Juice, the “hilarious topical panel show” presented by “madcap host Keith Lemon”. Normally, the two team captains are Holly Willoughby and Fearne Cotton, however, as Willoughby has just had a baby, she was replaced by Chris Moyles.
I’d never watched the show before, and didn’t really understand what was happening. I had been drinking for most of the day, which I assumed would help get me into the right frame of mind to enjoy the programme but even this wasn’t enough.
Chris Moyles took part in a round called “Be A Dingbat”, where he had to get the answers wrong. Lemon explains:
You’ve got to answer incorrectly, but it can’t just be random, it has to have some relevance.
I like the “it has to have some relevance” qualifier as it’s a sort of admission that it’s actually not a very good idea for a round on a quiz show.
The round started with the first question:
Lemon: What did you set the world record for last month?
Moyles: Masturbating.
We’re already off to a good start. Moyles demonstrating the wit which has made him famous.
Lemon asked a couple more questions which Moyles correctly answered incorrectly. One question got him a bit confused.
Lemon: Is Fearne Cotton a good DJ?
After a slight pause, Moyles answered “No”. Fearne was upset by the length of time it had taken Moyles to work out how to answer that question, so Moyles asked Keith to repeat the question and this time he answered it a lot quicker to appease Fearne.
Then, Keith asked the next question:
Lemon: Is Fearne Cotton good in bed?
Moyles: Yes.
Cotton: The answer is you don’t know. The answer is you don’t know and you won’t know.
Moyles: No, I do know, you don’t – rohypnol!
The audience laughed and the quiz continued.
I felt the “rohypnol” joke wasn’t very funny. I mean, it’s not actually even really a joke. Moyles is saying he knows what it’s like to have sex with Fearne Cotton despite the fact she doesn’t remember it because he drugged her with rohypnol. Even aside from the fact that it’s a really unpleasant thing to say, it doesn’t even make sense. You can’t judge whether someone is good in bed by giving them rohypnol and raping them. It’s not a fair test. It’s not an accurate way of assessing their sexual prowess. The victim may not be giving their best performance because of the sedative effect of the drug.
I mentioned it on Twitter:
A few people agreed that it was kind of an unacceptable thing to say. I noticed that the actor Charlie Condou had tweeted about how funny he thought the programme was and wondered if he thought the “rohypnol” comment in particular was funny:
He replied:
Charlie later explained that he misunderstood my question and just meant that the programme as a whole was hilarious and that obviously date rape isn’t funny. I suppose the question “Did you like the bit when Moyles joked about drug raping Fearne Cotton?” is a bit ambiguous and does sort of look like “What did you think of that episode of Celebrity Juice?”. It’s an easy mistake to make.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that Chris Moyles made an unpleasant comment (that’s his job, after all). It’s just sad that it seems OK to make jokes like that. It’s sad that no-one bothered to challenge him. It’s sad that it’s broadcast on a mainstream comedy programme, even if it is only ITV2. It made me sad. I don’t really have anything more to say about it. It just made me sad.
You could argue that people should be allowed to make jokes about any subject, and I agree, but the trade-off there is that the joke should be funny and “I do know, you don’t – rohypnol” isn’t funny1.
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NOTES
1 In fact, you may have noticed that I was able to criticise Chris Moyles’ “rohypnol” joke by suggesting that the main problem with the joke is that it’s logically (rather than morally) flawed. As if to say it is the lack of logic that I find more disturbing than the joke itself and that I have no specific objection to using rohypnol to have sex with someone but think it’s unfair to then use that experience to judge how good the person is in bed. This is (sort of) a joke about (sort of) the same thing as Chris Moyles’ original joke, but my joke is better because I am cleverer than Chris Moyles.
Moyles’ laddy badinage is seething with fear and hatred. I felt proud to be one of your followers last night.
As much as I don’t like defending Chris Moyles, I would lay the blame in this case in the hands of the editor.
Ultimately the show is improvised (at least I’d be horrified to think it was prepared) and even the best comedians can make indefensible jokes whilst improvising. A half decent comedian would address the fact they have made a faux-pas, but Chris is not a comedian even if he thinks he is, and it’s the nature of this show that sexual reference without innuendo = joke. The audience laughed, so there was no reason for him to analyse what had just come out of his mouth as being anything but funny.
However, the editor does not have this excuse. Someone must have watched that joke and decided it was funny enough to make the final cut.
This all said, I’m bemused that you got that far in without taking offence. When watching the show last night to see the context of the joke, there were many moments I found equally awkward, particularly trying to pester Fearne Cotton into having a lesbian kiss, which was really creepy.
BTW This is not to say that I don’t believe Moyles to be a boorish oaf, which he clearly is.
I don’t tend to watch TV panel games because I find that they tend to be contrived and plop. I liked this blog post.
I can’t remember a post you’ve made lately where you don’t mention going for a drink, deserving a drink, something about a bar being nearby, what happened in a bar, about drinking all day…just sayin’. Your drug of choice, clearly.
Not that I don’t think drinking jokes/bar incidents can occasionally be amusing, but date rape drug “joke” isn’t funny in the least, or the whole premise of this bottom/barrel show. Surely there is more to comedy than fucking jokes 24/7? Steve Martin said he was preparing a stand-up set that ONLY uses the word FUCK. “Sounds right,” he Twittered. Your postings are WAY funnier: wry, thought-provoking, seriously playful and playfully serious. I read every one. Sometimes twice. :)
I dont care what people joke about. I don’t wish to police people’s humour. I think it is good to draw attention to jokes and how they use some quite disturbing ideas about people/men/women/humanity.
But the fact Chris Moyles is a c*** is no news to me. I think we can critique this kind of humour without sounding ‘Mary Whitehouse’ about it.
I think the main problem in that scenario is Fearne Cotton is the butt of the joke and so has no power in that ‘panel’ show. It’s not so much the content of the joke but how she can’t react except by smiling or maybe, if she was really really smart, coming up with a killer retort. But that is always difficult off the cuff.
Just make sure no journalist from the Daily Mail reads this. They’ll be all over it like a rash.
Yeah that made me feel unpleasant too. There were another couple of really nasty jokes in it as well. Bleh.
It feels increasingly like anyone daring to question this kind of thing is branded as humourless or madly politically correct, so it was refreshing to read your tweet the other night. I am currently watching a repeat of the episode, it’s a show I’ve caught before on my return from work (I don’t do a 9-5) and it has always seemed like fairly harmless, childish fun. Fearne is often the butt of the joke, with Holly as her gentle, easily shocked foil. It’s actually seemed quite female-friendly, not in a pink and fluffy way, but in the sense that the women as captains are fair game just as men would be. Inevitably I am unable to watch it tonight without prejudice, however it seems to me that the tone is entirely different, and more insidious than I have ever seen it before. Perhaps it is Moyles’ presence (particularly post-swimsuitgate), perhaps Holly’s absence. The other three guests are hardly able to hold their own so there is no balancing humour or witty comeback. The audience bleats laughter at every rude word: no innuendoes necessary, never mind actual jokes. Moyles and Lemon acting out ‘Gay Bar’ for Louis Spence in another game falls only just shy of the kind of limp-wristed parody we hoped had died out with the new millennium. Perhaps they were just having an off-week, one can only hope. Even if that is the case, while we live in an age where men (and some women) are happy to bang on about Charlie Sheen or Andy Gray being a ‘legend’, I was supremely happy to see a little outrage at the sort of thing that usually passes without comment. You said you were sad that you had to be thanked, but it was a relief that it’s not just me and a load of hairy women who care – and also a moment of faith-in-humanity restoring. So – thanks again.