In a two-week-old interview the BBC’s comedy honcho Shane Allen said what any programming exec in any major urban city would say about diversity and inclusion.
Allen on the approaching 50th anniversary of Monty Python, a product of Cambridge University grads: “If you’re going to assemble a team now it’s not going to be six Oxbridge white blokes. It’s going to be a diverse range of people who reflect the modern world.”
Allen explained that he was part of “an industry-wide impetus” for people to be “telling stories that haven’t been told.” In other words you have to move on, engage, catch the next wave. On top of which Allen wouldn’t have his job for very long if he wasn’t saying “diversity…hey-ho!”
Naturally this didn’t sit well with former Python Terry Gilliam. Speaking at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, the director of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote said the following:
“[Allen’s] statement made me so angry, all of us so angry. Comedy is not assembled, it’s not like putting together a boy band where you put together one of this, one of that and everyone is represented. This is bullshit. I no longer want to be a white male, [and] I don’t want to be blamed for everything wrong in the world. I tell the world now I’m a black lesbian…my name is Loretta and I’m a BLT, a black lesbian in transition.”