[Note added 16.10.15: The excerpts referred to in this blog post have been captured in a video posted on our YouTube channel, here.]
Earlier this evening I watched the first episode of a new BBC series, Earth’s Wildest Waters: The Big Fish, which will be available on iPlayer for 29 days. We’ll extract a few minutes from the programme for our YouTube channel shortly.
There will be six episodes in the series, in which eight anglers compete to win the ultimate prize, whatever that is. They travel to a different country each week, the next episode will be in Cuba, where BBC executives presumably feel very much at home.
In my younger days I was a keen angler – coarse fishing, fly fishing, and a little sea fishing. At least 99% of anglers then – as now, from what I can see – were men or boys. Statistically, no more than 1% of the eight anglers in the programme – i.e. not one of them – should have been women. It will hopefully not come as a great shock to you, to learn that two of the eight anglers – 25% – were women. A 25-fold preferencing for women right from the outset of the ‘competition’.
The local angling expert in the first episode, in Iceland, was – hold onto your hats, folks! – a woman. I wondered how the programme’s producers would preference the females by making the scoring subjective – in common with GCSEs v O Levels, since 1987 – and didn’t have to wait long for the answer. At 4:10 Ben Fogle informs us:
Because there is a lot of luck involved in fishing, we’re going to be taking into account location, technique, types of bait used.
I’ve never heard of such a subjective ‘system’ being used in any angling competition, anywhere in the world… er… ever. Other that, I have no rational objections to it. If I did, that would obviously be both sexist and misogynistic.
Some comedy gold – rare on the BBC for several decades, as we might infer from regular repeats of Dad’s Army and The Two Ronnies – happens between 17:52 – 19:15. One of the women’s rods curves suddenly, and she utters the immortal lines (to any experienced fisherman, anyway):
I think I have a fish on the line…
It’s not moving how you’d expect a fish to move.
She courageously battles with the denizen of the deep for 45 minutes before singing plaintively, ‘I don’t know what to do…’. Dan comes to her assistance, at the cost of his own fishing time and prospects of progressing in the competition. She says to Dan:
Will you give me a hand? Will you have a go at this, and see whether you think it’s a fish, or the bottom?
Dan says cheerily, ‘Of course I will!’, and takes only seconds before informing the daft trout she’s caught the bottom of the lake. She laughs.
The final section, in which one of the eight anglers is sent home – something which will happen every week – starts at 53:34. Three anglers are selected as the group from which one will be sent packing. One is a women, two are men. You’ll never guess whether it’s the woman or one of the men who is selected.
I couldn’t claim to have been a very proficient angler, but I was struck on numerous occasions in this programme at the lack of competence of some of the male anglers. The fly casting techniques of most of them, for example, were woeful. I’d wager any of the six could have been replaced by tens of thousands of more competent male British anglers, proficient in many forms of angling. The conclusion is inescapable. The producers actively selected poor male anglers, so as to make the female anglers look competent, in comparison.
It’s a sad day when BBC feminist propaganda extends even to overwhelmingly male-dominated spheres such as angling. Is there nothing these vile harpies won’t poison with their toxic ideology?
