There are some things that you cannot escape unless you are fortunate enough to live in a cave. A cave that is isolated. Away from any poorly secured wifi connections, radio transmitters or vociferously bothersome newsmongering town criers. A blissful cave of ignorance. Free from insurance comparison website advertisements, people who walk 3-abreast on pavements and those who are only slightly better - racists on TV. Unless your cavemates are a trio of rather inconsiderate pathway-hogging bigots. If you happen to be taking part in an underground version of Strictly Come Troglodyte then the chances of you being able to avoid inevitable showers of ignorant mouth muck are about as slim as a silver Rizla with a Tapeworm. For the higher-end professional recluse these things aren't going to be an issue but for those of us left to fend in the world above they come thick and fast.

Reality television did seem to have a monopoly on widely broadcast racial slurs until last week, when the news media broke into a chorus of dysphoria as it announced that there was to be a new king of controversy - the BBC's 'flagship' show, Question Time, was to don the dubious crown, which is believed to be made of three parts genocide and one part child abuse. It's kept clean with a few sprays of Cillit Ethnic Cleanser. BANG! And the tribe is gone.

For those who are unaware the British National Party is not, as you would like to think, like the halcyon days of Noel's House Party. Mr Blobby was clearly mixed-race.

There are two reasons this story broke into my otherwise ignorant sphere of unconsciousness. The first was because I never knew Question Time was the flagship show of the BBC; I had always assumed that honour went to Match of the Day or Groundforce. I'm not even sure Groundforce was on the BBC. That's how little I knew about the flagship and how little I know in general. I could easily research these things but that would take time away from watching the high definition episode of 'Life' I'd recorded. I may be woefully uninformed about anything other than unusual frogs but I am so at 1080p. David Attenborough is the rightful BBC bellwether. Get fucked Dimbleby.

The second reason the story aroused my torpor is because it spoke at exhaustive, repetitive, length about the BBC giving the leader of the far-right British National Party a hugely visible platform on state media. For those who are unaware the British National Party is not, as you would like to think, a super-happy-sunshine-shindig for everyone in Britain. It's not like the halcyon days of Noel's House Party. The British National Party are friends of the common man - but only if those common men happen to be holocaust-denying, white-supremacist, homophobic xenophobes. It's unlikely that any of Noel's charges would be welcome even if the British National Party were the non-stop sovereign fiesta it's name promotes. Mr Blobby was clearly mixed-race. There are, however, sickening BNP adaptations of Noel's House Party stalwarts 'Beat your Neighbour (if they don't look like you)' and the self-explanatory 'Wait Till I Get You, Homo'.

Unite Against Fasicsm counter demonstration against the Welsh Defence League, Swansea

My life has never been intruded upon by the BNP quite so much before. I was aware of them in the same way I am reluctantly conscious of horse racing. It exists, certainly. It is to be ignored, for its core demographic is 'The Idiot' - not the Dostoevsky story, the other kind. The dimwitted stupid-head kind. The only brush I’d previously had with this party, who clawed their way from the ashes of the National Front as they learnt to fasten a necktie or at least work a clip-on, was when their membership list had been leaked last year. Inevitably I had to check it to make sure my relatives weren't on there. The grandparents can be trusted not to donate to anything other than the National Trust but their eyes aren't what they used to be and 'Trust' does have a marked similarity to 'Front' when viewed through the opacity of their cataracts.

Not since that bit in The Matrix where Keanu Reeves goes to see that women in her flat and breaks that cup has a self-fulfilling prophecy been so evident.

There were arguments for and against why the leader of the BNP, Nick Griffin, should be allowed on the BBC show. It was the arguments about the argument that the televised argument might give the BNP a wider audience that gave it a wider audience. My lack of research has shown that regular audience figures for Question Time were consistently around the 14 mark - which is actually the number of people the controversial party figurehead believes died in The Holocaust - whereas the edition of Question Time featuring Griffin drew in 8 million. That is around about 8 million more people than usual. An increase of over 700 million per cent - even athletes can't boast that kind of percentage boost when they talk of effort they expelled. Not since that bit in The Matrix where Keanu Reeves goes to see that women in her flat and breaks that cup has a self-fulfilling prophecy been so evident.

If nobody had mentioned who the guest was to be, there would have been no more interest in the show than usual - I, for one, regularly have no clue who is on Question Time and I'm sure most people only tuned in because they had heard the hype. If you remove the incestuous media coverage of media events, it is likely to burn itself out without attracting unwarranted attention. Fight ignorance with ignorance!

Failing that you could always do the most important point. A point that was, shamefully, not highlighted by anyone on the QT panel - vote for anyone other than the BNP. Get a few people together get a garden gnome, put it in a Barbie dress, nominate and vote for that. A cardboard cut out of a week-old dog poo in a fez. Anything. Anyone watching the show would not have been enamored with the politicians involved. This will probably only serve to alienate more people from the main political parties, causing more people to 'protest' by running away from the polls to live as hermits in their blissful cave. Leaving the fiercely active BNP members free to roll stones over the cave entrances and waddle down to cast their vote - struggling as they remember how to write an X.

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Images:

Unite Against Fascism march, Swansea: an original photograph by Mike Mantin.

All images appear under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license.

Title Image:

Anti-BNP Demonstration: an original photograph by James M Thorne. Modified image appears here under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license.