AWWWW, THAT’S RACIAL

Once upon a time, Saturday mornings used to be a special time at Casa Depth a time for savouring the morning’s hangover and, provided it was gone 10.30am, hitting the wine cooler and getting to work on the next one. Lie around moaning, read the morning papers, listen to Radio 5 Live’s peerless sports coverage, sweet. Those days are now gone, and I am not forced to pursue other channels of relaxation, like leaving my flat to go out into the public and buy things, or masturbating like a tramp.

The reason for this is that 5 Live has decided to shift the worst show on the radio in the entire world into the Saturday morning slot. For those of you unfamiliar with Danny Baker’s 5 Live football show, imagine a football-specific version of Steve Wright And The Posse being broadcast direct from the torture antechambers of Purgatory itself, specifically the ones specialising in evisceration via the anus, and it’s basically about twice as bad as that.

Baker himself is a king-sized fuck in every sense, a master exponent of the tactic of “saying unfunny things as if they are funny in the hope that the listeners mistakenly assume they are funny,” and he is assisted in this by his sidekick Izzy Clarke, whose over-excited delivery and cretinous gleeful honking at every last tragic non-joke makes Baker sound like the other, good, American Steve Wright. Together, they preside over a two-hour sewage blast of unfunny – although to call it “shit” would be an insult to the baroque faecal fountains that jet forth from me at 8.15 on an average weekday morning. It is a self-high-fiving jaw-flapping diarrhoetic gush of sixth form surrealism, where questions like “what kind of fruit would your team be?” are posed (sample response: “Well, my team is Plymouth, and we’d be gooseberries because we play in green”) and completely pointless mirth-vacuum exercises in which random British teams are “twinned” with other British teams FOR NO REASON AT ALL are commonplace.

Anyway… The reason why we mention all this is because it’s always fun to point out when a fat fucking asshole and his hooting idiot second-in-command are being gleefully racist. One of the hilarious things that Dan and Izzy concocted was the laugh riot that was a female jazz vocalist called… well, whatever, extemporising the names of the Portsmouth squad into a jazz vocal, with specific repetition afforded to Papa Bouba Diop, Aruna Dindane and Aaron Mokoena. There it is up there on Youtube, look. I mean, really. Why not go the whole hog and do a segment called “Don’t black people have funny names nowadays?” The gag fails on many levels – for one thing, the morphemes required to string together to make “Danny Baker” would fit just as perfectly into scat improvisation as any of the Portsmouth boys. For another, when it comes to stupid fucking names, “Izzy Clarke” takes the whole patisserie. But mainly because, well, on a national radio station you are perhaps not entirely justifying the license fee when you eat up airtime by scraping LOLZ from the names of black Africans for sounding a bit foreign. In addition, it makes you sound like cunts.

Besides, the greatest ever Papa Bouba Diop joke actually involved two young and hungry Fat Lace famalam, while sitting in Soho’s fashionable Lyric pub watching the opening match of the 2002 World Cup, a game in which Papa Bouba Diop scored the opening, winning goal.

DEPTH: That’s not the first time I’ve heard the name Papa Bouba Diop today?
HUGE: Really, how’s that?
DEPTH: I farted in the bath this morning.

Now THAT is funny, motherfuckers.

Words by Johnny Depth

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