My turn to expose some bullshit, Mr Brooker

I thought the whole Gray and Keys hoo-ha was a little bit too obvious for me to write about. The debate was on a stupidly low level and The Sun was fishing for equality points. Let them on, I thought.

Then Charlie Brooker went and said that we all say stupid things and that banter and creativity go hand in hand, and that sacking someone for what they said off-line is the kind of thing that will lead to a society of utter boring niceness. So I changed my mind.

I have always been a fan of Charlie Brooker and his articulate way of exposing bullshit, and I’m sure when he approached the Sky Sports saga from a freedom-of-speech point of view he won over yet another heap of Guardian readers. In an analogy that triggered associations to Orwell’s 1984, he compared the incident to following someone around with a concealed microphone for a day, during which you could be sure to catch a stupid or offensive comment sooner or later, and said that we can’t forget about the context here.

Of course we can’t forget about the context; in fact, a lot of people seem obsessed with the concept of private conversation. We all say silly things in private. We all joke with colleagues, and we trust that they will know us well enough to tell the difference between sexist comments and cheeky jokes. After all, as Charlie writes, Gray and Keys were “advanced enough to know what was suitable for broadcast and what wasn’t”.

But this wasn’t a private conversation. This was the conversation between two professionals at work, microphones on and crew ready to go, about another professional whose performance they get paid to discuss in public. And she had barely even put her foot on the pitch before they had decided that she was laughably incompetent – her, as a professional linesman, and all other women with her. Just imagine the outrage if instead their generalisation had been based on ethnicity.

I don’t wear a microphone in work, and no cameras are rolling – but if I made an idiotic remark about a new member of staff, judging their skills because of their gender, right in front of my boss, I wouldn’t be surprised if they decided to take action against me. If on top of that they found out that I had repeatedly behaved that way, making inappropriate jokes in front of other employees, I would understand if they saw it necessary to let me go – particularly so if I were the public face of the business.

This whole story is riddled with hypocrisy and double standards, and one could certainly say that Gray and Keys are products of a sexist work environment as much as they are products of a society in which remarks like these are most often laughed at and excused. But I won’t accept that these two fools don’t know better, that they didn’t think their microphones were on and that they shouldn’t have to think twice about asking their co-workers and studio guests whether they would ‘smash’ some woman, just because that’s the world of football. That’s not the same as making rude jokes in a writers’ room that exists solely for the purpose of writing jokes, and it’s not the same as saying that same brainless thing to your brainless friends in the pub. And The Sun and their page-three girls can try to hijack the story as much as they like, but they have absolutely nothing to do with it.

“Bollocks to a world in which all conversation is shorn of its private context,” says Charlie. Well bollocks to a world in which even intelligent, articulate writers are happy to turn a blind eye to sexist comments made by dimwits like these, I say. You can be as much of a prick as you like in private, but football isn’t a free zone. Enough is enough.