Political Correctness is a worldwide scourge.

DRG

-----Original Message-----
From: John Radcliffe
Sent: Mar 16, 2018 2:32 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: How the Rhinoceros Got his Skin

Such editing is an act of sacrilege! And very patronising to its audience !

(Speaking as an ex-producer of programmes for schools. )

All best

John R

Sent from my iPhone

On 16 Mar 2018, at 19:32, Alastair Wilson <00001b760784c1f8-dmarc-[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Members may be interested to know that, on the BBC Schools programme, broadcast last night at about 3.a.m, British time, read How the Rhinoceros Got his Skin.  Hooray.

BUT it was edited to exclude the fact that it was a Parsee man who baked the cake, which rather spoilt it.  I was in a semi-comatose state, and I cannot be sure exactly what else was edited, but I can say, with absolute certainty, that the sloka which he recited, came out as

Them that takes cakes  / Which a clever man bakes / Makes dreadful mistakes.

I also rather think that the marvellous list of places, in the direction of which the Parsee man went in the last sentence, was excluded or somehow edited.  I suppose that it was thought that many (most) children (and the audience is world-wide, of course) wouln't have the least idea of where they were.  I consider this a pity, because although many of Kipling's readers in the early 1900s would have been, shall we say, empire-savvy, I doubt is any of them would have known, either.  It's just a wondrous-sounding list of mysteious places, designed to fire a child's imagination.

But still, Good on the BBC for reading it.

Alastair Wilson