He’ll Be Having A Go At The Lilies Next

It’s not often we find cause to be envious of The Artist Formerly Known As Bateman (right). Handsome, successful and well-adjusted, we have no need of his talent, fame and chiselled, windswept features. But every once in a while even TAFKAB does something that takes our breath away. This week: TAFKAB tells the BBC to do one. Quoth the Belfast Telegraph:

Award-winning author Colin Bateman has launched an expletive-fuelled tirade against politically-correct BBC chiefs for carrying out a “witch-hunt” against him.
  In a bizarre episode, which could be straight off the pages of one of the Ulsterman’s own comic novels, the Beeb blasted Bateman for being offensive to albinos.
  Now Bangor-born Bateman — the creator of the hit Belfast telly detective show Murphy’s Law — has responded by telling them to, “Get a f****** life!”

  TAFKAB’s crime, apparently, is that Mo, one of the characters from his YA series, has albinism, and that other characters in the novel remark upon her unusual pigmentation.
  As gritty realism goes, it’s not quite The Wire. It does, however, reflect the real world.
  Now, Mo isn’t some token background character. She’s the hero. She does hero stuff. She’s a powerful role model. She doesn’t use her albinism as some kind of super-power, but neither does she allow her condition to prevent her from doing all the kinds of things people who don’t have albinism do, and then some.
  So why the witch-hunt?
  A quiet day at the news desk? Lazy journalism? Political correctness run amok? All three combined?
  And where does it all end? At what point do we censor Shakespeare for his depiction of Jews in The Merchant of Venice? Or get all tabloid on his ass for depicting Richard III with a hump? Or suggesting that it’s even remotely cool for a 14-year-old boy and a 13-year-old girl to elope, and then commit suicide?
  Or, as the venerable TAFKAB says: “If a bank robber is an Apache, I want to be able to say he’s an Apache without getting a tomahawk in the brain from the f****** political correctness police.”
  Amen, brother.