Patrick West

After seventeen years and more than 200 episodes, the cackling and sniggering is finally over for the panel show Mock the Week. As the BBC announced yesterday: ‘The next series of Mock the Week will be the last, we are really proud of the show but after 21 series we have taken the difficult decision in order to create room for new shows.’ What could be behind this decision? Its veteran presenter, Dara Ó Briain, sought to apportion some logic to the matter. ‘The storylines were getting crazier and crazier – global pandemics, divorce from Europe, novelty short-term prime ministers,' he said. 'It couldn’t go on. We just couldn’t be more silly than the news was already.

In times of war and strife it’s only natural to feel anxious and worried. It’s a normal, primal reaction. What’s not normal, however, is to conspicuously advertise that fact, and to use a calamity to let the world know what a deeply concerned and conspicuously compassionate person you are. Not for the first time in living memory a serious global issue has been reduced to the self, refracted through the prism of me. This week the war in Ukraine has provided a pretext for celebrities, social media users and newspaper columnists to talk about how they feel and how scared they are.

A leading artificial intelligence professor has said that children should learn to write software. According to professor Michael Bronstein of Oxford University, this would make children more logical. 'I think coding is an extension of language – it's a way of disciplining your mind for formal, logical thinking.' Indeed it is. But so is learning an actual human language a way of disciplining your mind, of making it more logical. A better idea would be to resume teaching other human languages up to GCSE level. Not only do second languages improve powers of logic, they also teach you to deal with nuance and irrationality. Languages are full of idiosyncrasies and illogicalities – common irregular verbs being the most obvious.

There has been much anger after the Colston statue verdict this week, in which a jury cleared four protesters of criminal damage over the toppling of the monument in Bristol. It is an affront to many that vandalism can be exonerated on the grounds of supposedly righting the wrongs of the past, owing to Edward Colston’s role in the slave trade. Yet the most egregious aspect of the case was the plea, on the behalf of the defence, that the jury ‘be on the right side of history’ in reaching their decision. This ingratiating phrase has become popular among progressives in recent years. It’s not just annoying and absurd because of its pretentions to clairvoyance from those who utter it, from those who seemingly derive their morality from what it says on the calendar.

It’s a well-known fact that social media makes you miserable. While Facebook forever abounds with people apparently having a marvellous time, in exotic climes, never without ubiquitous smiles and exclamations of delight, Twitter seems too often awash with malicious imbeciles, who even when they are right, still get on your nerves. At their worst, Facebook makes you hate people you do know; Twitter makes you hate people you don’t. This, at least, is a popular opinion. And the consensus that social media makes us unhappy and lonely – in that it encourages us to unfavourably and unrealistically compare our lives to those of others – has been repeated this week in a Harvard study published in the journal JAMA Network Open.

The latest casualty in the culture wars is an innocent-sounding word: 'curry'. Apparently it's inappropriate to use it, and incorrect to use it to refer to all spicy Indian food. It's far too broad as to be misleading, doesn't even have pan-Indian usage, and it remains tainted by its colonial origins. This is the widely reported opinion of Chaheti Bansal, a Californian blogger who posts Indian recipes on Instagram.  'There's a saying the food in India changes every 100km and yet we're still using this umbrella term popularised by white people who couldn't be bothered to learn that actual names of our dishes', she writes, imploring people to 'unlearn' the term. The word was indeed made popular by colonialists: the Portuguese.

Facebook has been accused of failing to combat extremism and hate-speech among its users. But as I found out this week, sometimes it does far too much to take down controversial opinions. Coffee House recently published an article by me with the headline 'Michael Parkinson is right: men are funnier than women'. In the piece, I argued that men are more adapted to and adept at humour because they are less grounded in reality and more at home with incongruence. I said that because humour is often based on cruelty and schadenfreude it is also suited to the typically more aggressive male mindset. In short, I said that men and women were different. I did not say than men were better than woman. If anything, I actually implied the opposite.

The BBC and Channel 4 are self-censoring their comedy output because they are so terrified of offending people. So says Jimmy Mulville, the producer of Have I Got News For You, who claims 'cancel culture' has resulted in a fearful atmosphere in these institutions:  'People who cause offence now can be cancelled. And the BBC are worried about it. I know that Channel 4 is worried about it, they're all worried about it. I'm not blaming them, it's the culture in which we live.' This is becoming a familiar complaint. Comedian Dawn French recently bemoaned how censoriousness and offence-seeking was suffocating comedy.

Corporations and charities virtue signalling has become a familiar spectacle in everyday life. Sainsbury's, Virgin West Coast, HSBC, Ben & Jerry's, Gillette and Nike have all pronounced their various anti-racist, anti-sexist and pro-gay, pro-trans principles. The latest to join in this festival of conspicuous compassion is Barnardo’s, which yesterday pronounced on the matter of 'white privilege'. Unveiling its new guide on this hot topic for parents, the children's charity said:  'Talking about white privilege means looking at how our own actions maintain and support racist systems and structures.' Unsurprisingly, this has generated some angry responses. 'As a former Barnardo’s Boy, I find your stance as disappointing as it is nonsensical,' was one reply.

As befitting his public persona of a plain-speaking Yorkshireman, and making the kind of devil-may-care social transgression that is the privilege of the very old, Sir Michael Parkinson has declared that men have a better sense of humour than women. In a interview with the Australian Daily Telegraph, the veteran broadcaster, 85, was asked whether men found it hard to express their emotions. 'Most men I know are the opposite, they're very sensitive and also very funny,' he replied. 'That's the the thing I like most about men. It's a contentious statement but they're much better than women in their sense of humour.' Such gender essentialism, especially that in favour of males, is taboo these days. So many unfashionable truths are.