More4 News: Linda Bellos as Millie Tant?

Did anyone see this? They chose to interview Linda Bellos about it. And there she is, in the studio, looking more like Millie Tant than I thought was humanly possible. Most mischievous. I bet she's never heard of Ms Tant.

http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/uk/viz celebrates its 30th birthday/3412002 3 mins 36 secs.

ROFL. Not just looking, but acting like her too. Irony levels through the roof, good spot.

I shall ask my mole at ITN whether it was a set up.

She looks the way she looks, and none the worse for that. In no way does she act like Millie Tant who is an overbearing mad bigot. She was polite, calmly spoken, and she made her points with good humour and passion. She wouldn't let the smarmy young interviewer talk over her - maybe that makes her like Millie Tant in your eyes.

I also noted that she wore her poppy. Respect.

That's what I thought too. And I couldn't see why they chose to interview Bellos as the first thing she said was she hadn't read it!

Millie Tant was brilliant.

Whoops, sense of humour failure. Millie Tant is a cartoon character. You'd need your irony gland surgically removed not to crack up when Linda Bellos launches into a lecture that PC stands for Professional Competence and objects to the use of 'self-confessed'. That was pure Millie Tant. Someone at ITN is obviously an avid Viz reader.

You are imposing your assumptions on reality. It may well be that somebody at ITN reads Viz. I know I do. However if you or they see any resemblance between Linda Bellos and Millie Tant you seriously need to work on your ability to see the world in more than two dimensions and to see beyond the labels applied to people.

Linda can actually be quite witty when parodying over zealous militancy or the right's attitude to bigotry, but with a degree of subtlety that wouldn't work in Viz. I suspect that what you actually need is to have your sense of humour replaced with one designed for somebody over 12 years old.

Wow, she comes across as pompous.

So, according to the report, The Modern Parents were undone by having obnoxious children? And the final commentator is someone who hasn't ever read Viz?

Good job, Channel 4, good job.

ha ha

I remember when Simon Donald performed at offline and went down like a lead balloon. I thought he was funny as fuck myself just not pc enough for the audience he had. I've never heard so much tutting at a gig in all my life.

Top geezer.

Indeed....The Modern Parents were undone by having children that were cool as fuck.

Hear hear.

I would have expected far more of Channel 4.

"Graduate" "journalism" at its worst. I would guess the one who did the video commentary was fresh from cut and paste local "journalism". I expect the Modern Parents would have gone right over her head even if she'd read it.

Some of the obviously young contributors to this thread demonstrating at least one reasonable point made by the male presenter - that perhaps things are slipping again in the generations who didn't live through the 60s, 70s and 80s ...

I don't know who Linda Bellos is but in that clip she has more than a passing resemblance to Millie Tant.

I thought it was quite funny.

this

as for Linda Bellos, I was at a meeting at the then Brixton Women's centre in the early 1980s where she introduced herself as a black, jewish, disabled, lesbian single parent. Which back then was effectively holding a royal flush in your hand, points wise. Oh those were the days.

I thought Linda Bellos was a nutter before I watched this clip, but I thought she came across excellently. I like(d) Viz, and found the Millie Tant character funny, but that doesn't mean Bellos came across as pompous at all with this.

If thats not Millie Tant, nothing is

Bear in mind that Linda Bellos, in all her PC glory, pre-dated the Viz character by a good 15 years.

LInda Bellos, despite her sometimes over-intellectualising issues, is a nice person, and was a damn good local politician.

I, for one, am glad that the days of overt identity politics are over.

When did that happen then?

The dressing down she gave about Professional Competence vs Political Correctness could have been lifted straight from Modern Parents. Linda must have scripted it - it's just too good to be true. Perhaps she's been secretly writing for Viz all these years?

But the highlights are the pompous posts by urbanz stuck in the groove of '80s student politics Please keep them coming - soon we'll have enough for our own comic.

I'm guessing you're either an ageing Tory , or one of the younger generation mentioned in the "piece" who have no idea of the struggle others have undertaken for your freedoms.

EDIT - checking out some of your other threads, I'm guessing you're being ironic.

I interviewed Linda Bellos for the Pink Paper, and she was great, a very warm and knowledgable lady.

Researcher FAIL.

Having watched it all now, I don't think Bellos came across like Millie Tant at all, or looked much like her.

The interviewer in fact railroaded her into talking about PC when she was trying to talk about Viz being funny.

One of bellos's better performances..

But I'm nearly certain she was set up - only in the eyes of the puerile production team could she be said to resemble the Viz character.

She is a campaigning feminist and a reasonable choice to pundit on a comic which features Mili Tant, The Fat Slags, Those Thieving gypsy bastards and so on...

... except she claimed never to have read it .. just as the female presenter clearly hadn't ...

Yep, if we were to look at it uncharitably at worst it looks like a sixty year old woman being a bit out of touch with a comic... Not really crime of the century.

The thing is I was willing to laugh at her, she was a mental in her day, and was no doubt part of the group that inspired Millie Tant, but she has either calmed down - or is much cleverer than the production team thought she would be.