Just a minute, Mr Merton

Maria Oshodi

For more than 40 years, Just A Minute has been a staple of Radio 4’s panel game roster. In a recent edition, I was surprised and deeply offended to hear Paul Merton’s repeated unhelpful and ill-informed comments about blindness. Asked to fill a minute on “What The Buttler Saw”, Clement Freud had, quite innocuously, made a passing reference to “blind butlers”, which Paul Merton then picked up and elaborated on in the most denigrating way. He presumed a blind family would not know what money they would be paying their butler and that he, Paul Merton, could pour soup over his blind butler’s head and get away with it as the butler would think it was rain.

This poor attempt at humour, revealed a nasty, demeaning attitude towards blind people’s abilities or perceived lack of them and went unchallenged by the programme’s chair, who rewarded Merton by giving him extra points. There was also much laughter from the audience.

Distasteful and prejudiced jokes levelled at disabled people like this, should have been cut in the same way that I am sure jokes made about other minority communities would be by a responsible producer. In the past, Paul Merton has acted as a PC monitor of himself and others on the subject of crossing the offensiveness barrier in humour, but it’s a shame his detector failed this time.

Ultimately, it’s counter-productive that while one Radio 4 programme like In Touch is attempting to address the increase of hate crime towards visually-impaired people, another of the station’s programmes, Just a Minute, is allowed to freely demonstrate negative and damaging perceptions towards the same community.