Fifty years after it reached the Top Ten, Blue Mink’s smash hit Melting Pot has been banned from the airwaves.
The broadcasting watchdog Ofcom has ruled that the 1969 Number Three song is ‘racist’ and too ‘offensive’ for modern audiences.
Which is pretty hilarious, given that it was intended to celebrate racial integration, and featured the fabulous black American singer Madeline Bell alongside Roger Cook, who co-wrote it with his regular songwriting partner Roger Greenaway.
We live in an age of instant, perceived outrage, when we must all be protected from insensitivity. The broadcasting watchdog Ofcom has ruled that the 1969 Number Three song is ‘racist’ and too ‘offensive’ for modern audiences
Along with the Equals, Georgie Fame’s Blue Flames and Hot Chocolate, Blue Mink were one of Britain’s pioneering multi-racial pop groups.
The modern diversity police, however, object to references to ‘curly Latin kinkies’, ‘yellow Chinkies’ and ‘Red Indian boy’.
This is despite the fact that the song imagined all the races combined in a ‘great big melting pot’ which would ‘turn out coffee coloured people by the score’.
Fifty years after it reached the Top Ten, Blue Mink’s smash hit Melting Pot has been banned from the airwaves. The band is pictured above
Still, irony and a proper sense of proportion have gone the way of bowler hats, frock coats and pinstriped strides.
Or, come to that, long hair, large collars and the kind of loon pants favoured by groups like Blue Mink half a century ago.
We live in an age of instant, perceived outrage, when we must all be protected from insensitivity.
It can only be a matter of time before Ofcom bans Black Is Black, by Los Bravos, and the old music hall favourite Any Old Iron, by artistes various, including Peter Sellers, Harry Champion and Kermit the Frog.
These days, Any Old Iron is considered toxically homophobic. According to a piece in the Guardian — where else? — Any Old Iron is full of, and I quote, ‘steamy queer meanings’. For the uninitiated, ‘iron hoof’, shortened to iron, is rhyming slang for ‘poof’.
And Daddy Wouldn’t Buy Me A Bow-Wow, for reasons I won’t go into here, is something to do with lesbians.
You live and learn.
Anyway, it’s hardly surprising that Melting Pot doesn’t make the cut. Maybe it’s time someone rewrote it, properly to reflect our modern times.
So here, with apologies to the great Greenaway and Cook, laydeez and gennulmen, I give you Melting Pot 2019, by Blue Ermine. As always, it helps if you sing along . . .
Take a pinch of Brexit
Until Gina Miller wrecks it
Add a touch of Boris
And a little-bitty bit of Jacob Rees-Mogg
Surly Anna Soubry
Has gone completely Looby Loobry
Lump her in with Bercow
And you’ve got a recipe for a Very British Coup
Yes, she does like a drink
Just don’t mention the Chinks
Huawei, Huawei . . .
What we need is a Great British Farewell
Big enough to tell Remain to go to hell
Or we’ll be squabbling for 100 years or more
Let’s stop Brexit being such a sodding bore.
Spread-Fear Philip Hammond
Needs his head examined
So does John McDonnell
Diane Abbott and his lordship Michael Heseltine, too.
Huawei, Huawei, the lads!
Hypocrite Keir Starmer’s
Having trouble with his Farmers
Ally Campbell’s such a charmer
He says we should all get together and overturn Leave
Jacob, call up the Queen
It’s only fair she prorogues,
Prorogues, prorogues!
What we need is a Great British Farewell
Big enough, big enough to tell Remain to go to hell
Or we’ll be squabbling for 100 years or more
Let’s stop Brexit being such a sodding bore . . .
What fun to hear the Remoaners squealing
Haven’t stopped laughing since Boris bowled the Remoaners a short one which would have done Jofra Archer proud.
Get that in the lower abdomen for a start, mate.
Goodness knows how he’s managed to keep a straight face, pretending that proroguing Parliament is all about preparing for the Queen’s Speech.
And nothing to do with making sure Brexit actually happens on October 31 — cross my heart, hope to die, stand on me, guv, my word is my bond.
Demonstrators are pictured outside Number 10 yesterday afternoon. Oh, and by the way, how does Remain manage to rustle up a few hundred demonstrators at five minutes’ notice? Do they keep them billeted in a warehouse over the river from Westminster?
In the words of the McDonald’s advert: I’m lovin’ it! What an unbridled joy it is to see someone at last sticking it where it hurts to self-righteous Remoaners.
It’s the kind of decisive gesture which Tungsten-tipped Brexiteers like me have been hoping for ever since 17.4 million of us voted Leave more than three years ago.
Watch and listen to them squealing like stuck pigs.
This is the same anti-democratic rabble who earlier in the week were planning to set up their own ‘People’s Parliament’ specifically to thwart the will of the people.
In the words of the McDonald’s advert: I’m lovin’ it! What an unbridled joy it is to see someone at last sticking it where it hurts to self-righteous Remoaners
Does that posturing pipsqueak Jean-Claude Bercow have any idea how absurd he sounds, whining about a ‘constitutional outrage’ — having bent every rule in the book to stop Brexit dead?
Of course not. Oh, and by the way, how does Remain manage to rustle up a few hundred demonstrators at five minutes’ notice? Do they keep them billeted in a warehouse over the river from Westminster?
It only goes to prove that Remain is largely a London metropolitan obsession.
We’re not talking the Jarrow March here, are we?
Still, does any of this mean that Brexit will happen on October 31, or that Boris won’t sell us out in exchange for some dodgy deal on the phoney Irish backstop?
Nope. But enjoy it while it lasts.
From Wednesday’s Sun newspaper: ‘A drug-driver led police on a 13-mile pursuit the wrong way down a motorway while 14 times the cocaine limit.’
Hang on a minute, I know there’s a drink-drive limit, but since when have you been allowed to get behind the wheel with any amount of cocaine in your system?
The Old Bill have effectively decriminalised drugs, without bothering to wait for a change in the law. But am I missing something here?
How did they find out he was 14 times over the limit? Did they make him walk along a white line?
