- The joke’s on you! - 24th November 2025
- Georgia on my mind - 21st November 2025
- British Bashing Corporation (BBC) - 20th November 2025
For our Editor, Welshman Phil Parry there was always a fine line between the humour of a situation and its incredible seriousness, with this now firmly underlined by a new book today by Sir Salman Rushdie, as well as a promotional interview headlined: “SALMAN RUSHDIE: STABBED 15 TIMES BUT STILL LAUGHING”.
If the events I’ve been involved in weren’t so serious, I would have been splitting my sides with laughter.
They were actually absurdly amusing in reality, and if you tried to explain them to dinner guests, people would have been spluttering into their coffees!
For example on one occasion I confronted a fraudster with his birth certificate, but even though HE knew it was him, and I knew it was him, he still insisted: “No that’s not me”.
I then produced a photograph which was a dead ringer for him, yet he continued to say it wasn’t him!
I thought then and still think that this was so ridiculous it belonged in some kind of comedy sketch…
Another time when I was presenting a BBC Panorama programme we had secured an interview with a murder suspect, but the room where I knew it was to take place had windows all along the wall, so I was aware that if he had sat with his back to the window, my shot (from a secret camera hidden in my tie) would be almost useless because he would have had the light behind him.
I therefore hared up the stairs to the room so I could sit in that seat, meaning he would then have to sit opposite me with the light on him, as opposed to the light behind him so that the secret filming would be OK.
I remember thinking as I bounded up the stairs: “This is so absurd it could be a scene in a sit-com!”.
All of this has been put centre stage for me by an interview with Sir Salman Rushdie about his new book ‘The Eleventh Hour’.
Remember that he has spent nearly half his life under sentence of death, after a joyless Ayatollah told Muslims it was their duty to murder him for writing a novel that allegedly insulted the Prophet.
During the interview, Sir Salman was surrounded by body guards because three years ago he was savagely attacked, stabbed 15 times, almost lost his life, and is today blind in one eye.
One of the (less obvious) things that annoys Sir Salman about being famous for the Fatwa and the attack, is that people overlook the comedy of his writing.
He has enlarged on this theme by declaring. “Because the attack against [’The Satanic Verses’] was not funny, it was assumed that the book couldn’t be funny. And people stopped writing about me as if my writing had humour in it”.
This matters, because humour does.
Besides bringing joy, it pricks pomposity and is a weapon in the struggle against oppression.
“Humourlessness is a characteristic of narrow-mindedness; there are very few humorous dictators. Also, humour gets up people’s noses further than anything else, as we see from recent behaviour in America towards comedians”, Sir Salman has proclaimed.
His new book slyly mocks a wide range of targets: religious bigots, political charlatans, death itself.
In a deliciously satirical tale about piano-playing and revenge called “The Musician of Kahani”, a secular Indian woman starts to feel a “scrap of doubt” about her husband’s atheism, “a doubt that would surge to the forefront of her thinking when [he] walked out of their marriage to follow a religious fraud”.
The guru in question preaches that money is “more than okay”.
This kind of writing and humour need to be lauded.
Perhaps Sir Salman should write next about a reporter taking the stairs two at a time to get the right seat in a room, when he had a secret camera hidden in his tie…
The memories of Phil’s astounding, decades long award-winning career in journalism (when investigations often involved secret filming, and the incidents could be extremely funny), as he was gripped by the rare neurological disabling condition Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in a major book ‘A Good Story’. Order it now.
Tomorrow – how disturbing news that ANOTHER BBC programme has been accused of manipulating an edit, has again put centre stage the REFUSAL by executives to answer The Eye’s questions about the unbelievable scandals that have engulfed the giant broadcaster.
