The Big Man's actions were just deserts for a foul mouth
Television has made swearing seem inoffensive, yet nothing is more likely to turn an argument into a fight.
By Jenny McCartney
17 Dec 2011 The Telegraph.co.uk
If a snap general election had been called last week, at least among those who are connected to the internet, I think it quite possible that “The Big Man” would have ended up Prime Minister. “The Big Man” is the burly Scottish gentleman – real name Alan Pollock, an asset manager and father of three – who intervened to chuck a mouthy youth called Sam Main off a ScotRail train last week, after Main had a lengthy confrontation with the conductor because he was presenting an invalid ticket.
The train was stalled, the wrangling was continuing, and the Scottish night was no doubt chill, when The Big Man finally arose impassively from his seat like some mythic giant, with the quiet words: “Do you want me to get him off for you?”, whereupon he simply used his impressive bulk to push the 19-year-old off the train.
There have, inevitably, been recriminations: Main says that he cut his face falling on to the platform, that he is diabetic, and that he plans to take legal action. I think he might be well advised to chalk the matter up to experience. In tougher times, the public is increasingly impatient with young people who appear to combine rudeness towards authority with a sense of entitlement. Nor is patrolling our trains a cushy job: only last Friday, a ticket inspector in Essex was stabbed after he challenged two teenagers for not having tickets.
Despite such cases, passengers are usually inclined to be tender-hearted towards muddled young men wending their way home after a few drinks. In Main’s case, they weren’t, as the grateful cry of “Cheers, big man!” indicated. So what happened? Well, all public argument is essentially theatre, and Main lost his audience by swearing. He had the wrong ticket. The conductor pointed it out. Did Main apologise, or respectfully ask if he could stay on and sort it out at his destination? He did not. Instead, he swore at the elderly conductor that he had already given him the “----ing ticket”. The conductor didn’t like that, and warned: “You need to bar the swearing.” There he was, a white-haired railway employee taking casual abuse from a callow 19-year-old student in a bobble hat: it understandably offended him, and the other passengers too.
And yet Main’s generation has been led to believe that swearing is fundamentally meaningless, inoffensive and without weight: it is merely a kind of conversational paprika, adding zest and emphasis to expression. Earlier this month, Caroline Thomson, the BBC’s chief operating officer, told an audience how tricky it was to police swearing on air, because there is “an enormous inter-generational difference about what is acceptable”. “Language that will give you offence,” she said, “won’t give me offence. And language which gives me serious offence won’t give my son offence.”
Strangely, the logical conclusion was not drawn – if something is likely to cause unpredictable numbers of people serious offence, it might be better not to encourage it. (And one might ask who or what has shaped that “inter-generational difference”, if not the media itself?) But television doesn’t do things by halves. When Gordon Ramsay was in his television heyday a couple of years ago, he used the F-word every 20 seconds, on average, in one particular show. In response to complaints, a Channel 4 spokesman argued that “the swearing was a genuine expression of his passion and frustration”. What was strange was that Ramsay was able thoroughly to curb his passion when he went on US television, where bad language is deemed unacceptable.
Few of us are saints, and most of us swear occasionally: if you simultaneously stub your toe and spill boiling hot tea, it can be hard not to, although I try to avoid it in front of children. But an expletive directed at someone – rather than blurted at an abstract Fate – has genuine force: it escalates a situation into one of aggressive confrontation, and publicly dents the other person’s dignity. It implicitly demands a reaction: are you going to just stand there and take it, or do something about it?
As swearing has become more prevalent, that explosive dynamic hasn’t changed. The addition of expletives still has an almost magical power to turn an argument with a stranger into a fight. Thirty years ago, the general public swore – if not as much as now – but scarcely anyone on television did. Now, things often seem to be constructed the other way round, and what is deemed acceptable on television is often still abhorrent in the world beyond. On TV, however, the F-word is most frequently used for comic effect, while in real life its employment and consequences are often no laughing matter.
It strikes me that Britain’s TV executives have done the likes of young Main no service, if he still can’t understand what he did to get The Big Man up from his seat.
Also, I said I'd suggest some more titles for essays to work on at home, so here they are:
1, When is it right to kill someone?
2, In today's world, happiness without money is not possible.
3, Women want to be slim and beautiful to impress other women, not men.
4, Shopping is so addictive it should be banned.
Any questions, let me know. Merry Christmas!
