What was on Jamie Oliver's jersey and why was it pixilated?

January 13, 2005 7:25 PM

I was just watching an episode of "Oliver's Twist" on the Food Network featuring female football players. Jamie Oliver was wearing a green short-sleeve jersey with "RD" on the sleeves, but the team logo on the front was pixelated. It read 'something" Tigers. What could be so offensive that Food Network Canada would need to pixilate? British Mefites? The Food Network wouldn't censor "Tamil Tigers", would it?
posted by gesamtkunstwerk to Media & Arts (17 answers total)

TV chef Jamie Oliver has apologised after he was seen around the world in a T-shirt supporting Sri Lankan rebel group the Tamil Tigers.
posted by ericb at 7:35 PM on January 13, 2005

gesamthunkstwerk - yup!
posted by ericb at 7:36 PM on January 13, 2005

Huh. I thought my theory was pretty good, alas it is wrong. I'll post it anyway:

English football jerseys usually have an advertiser logo front-and-center on them. Maybe the original TV station didn't want to provide a free advertisement.
posted by smackfu at 7:38 PM on January 13, 2005

The impact of words, images and attire. Prince's Nazi Costume Sparks Uproar in Britain. Truly, a costume malfunction on a grand scale!
posted by ericb at 7:41 PM on January 13, 2005

That's the most random thing I've ever heard.
posted by ascullion at 7:48 PM on January 13, 2005

What a person wears in public - particularly if certain words, images and symbols are involved - can have an impact, an affect on others. In the cases cited (above) - what the person was wearing (in the "public eye") clearly provoked outrage for some.

[Repost of Prince Harry link (New York Times Link Generator version)].
posted by ericb at 8:00 PM on January 13, 2005

Wow. He "apologized". So, he's either completely without principles, or completely ignorant. And to think, I've acutally defended him as something other than a complete dork.

As far as Reichschancellor Harry goes... no surprise... appearances with HIV+ Lesotho kids notwithstanding.
posted by stonerose at 8:07 PM on January 13, 2005

better "naked chef" than "terrahist chef", no doubt about that.
on the other hand one is reluctant to pile on young drunken Harry -- if you add booze and narcotics to a known family history of embarrassing Nazi sympathies and a clear lack of, ahem, intellectual curiosity (again a family tradition there), well, a Nazi uniform is the least he can do.
I bet Blair's kids are marginally less dumb.
posted by matteo at 9:05 PM on January 13, 2005

Maybe not so much offensive as not wanting to provide free product placement. You'll notice on Mythbusters, for example, that the labels on bottles and containers of chemical products are often obscured with a white "Mythbusters" label. You can obviously figure out what the products are from the container coloring - but Discovery isn't going to give free product placement to Pepsi so they just refer to it as "soda".
posted by mrbill at 10:20 PM on January 13, 2005

Related to what MrBill said (but unrelated to this particular issue), there have also been issues (MTV, for one, I believe) where the station will blur out the names of companies which have not paid a "sponsorship fee" (i.e. "Pay us or we'll blur out your name on musicians' t-shirts") or will blur out the names of companies which are competitors of the shows' sponsors ("No free advertising for Nike on a show sponsored by Adididas").
posted by Bugbread at 11:27 PM on January 13, 2005

There are about 50k Sinhalese in Canada, most of whom would likely be pissed about a high profile figure wearing a Tamil Tigers shirt. Imagine if he was seen wearing an IRA shirt.
posted by bonehead at 7:46 AM on January 14, 2005

Well, there are also 200k Tamils in Toronto, alone; Canada has the largest ex-pat Tamil population in the world, and the Canadian government is very cautious about alienating them, politically.
posted by cmyr at 9:07 AM on January 14, 2005

And to think, I've acutally defended him as something other than a complete dork.

dude, he's a celebrity chef.
posted by andrew cooke at 9:47 AM on January 14, 2005

Matteo: as far as I know, precisely one member of the Windsors (the hapless Edward VIII) had Nazi sympathies, and he was a king for less than a year, 70 years ago. Any others that you know of?

The young, expensively (but ineffectively) educated prats who were neither aware of the potential offence to be caused by wearing Nazi uniforms, nor know how to apologise appropriately when they make their regular blunders, can hardly be tarred with a sympathy to fascists from more than half a century ago. They're too dumb. A case of cock-up, not conspiracy, I'm afraid.
/OT
posted by dash_slot- at 11:23 AM on January 14, 2005

Response by poster: Thanks. It's hard for me to imagine not knowing who the Tamil Tigers are. It's even harder for me to understand how royalty could be so damn stupid. Just goes to show, some people really are as shallow and unaware as they appear.
posted by gesamtkunstwerk at 3:43 PM on January 14, 2005

dash_slot- - i have no evidence, but my understanding is that the uk upper classes were pretty sympathetic to the whole nazi/fascist thing for quite some time in the 30s/40s. the fascist side in the spanish civil war received a lot of support from the establishment - see comments in orwell for example. there was also (i understand) a lot of sympathy for eugenics, which to my mind at least is the kind of start you need to consider exterminating races.

if you want i can try digging some stuff up - that english journo whose name i've forgotten (ah, hitchens!) has a chapter in his latest book on churchill. i suspect there's some off hand comments in there about this. but as i say this is just general impressions. are you saying that the windsors were peculiarly different, or questioning the broader allegations i'm making above? i'm confused because i assume you know this anyway...?

actually, reading matteo's comment i think maybe we're saying the same thing from different angles, in that i don't think there's anything particularly special about the windsors.

(obligatory anti-royal/hereditary power disclaimer here)
posted by andrew cooke at 4:39 AM on January 15, 2005

Actually, I don't doubt for a second that the British upper classes had members with Nazi/Fascist/eugenics supporters in there, Andrew: so did the working class and the middle class. Then, and now (who marched in the streets with Mosley: the Dukes, or or the dustmen?).

When it comes to the great political divides of the 30's, the fact is that the socialists and the nationalists in Spain recruited supporters in the UK, and elsewhere.

My single objection was that the Windsors - as a family - exhibit a known family history of embarrassing Nazi sympathies. This is, as far as I know, inaccurate. I would happily look at sources which argued differently, it's just that I haven't found them yet.

I am a Republican (in the English/Irish sense, not the American sense), and would quite happily dispossess the entire aristocracy and royal family tomorrow. If they object, I'll challenge them to a bout of fisticuffs: after all, that's effectively what their Norman forebears did, in a crueller, more extreme but successful fashion.

I do see how the institution of monarchy works (almost without power, if you put aside the power that wealth brings: there is little the Royals could do in the face of a true challenge from Parliament, and this has been so since at least 1688, when we had our Gloriuos Revolution). For some Brits, it's like a social glue, and requires an almost religious loyalty. As an atheist, I feel alternate cycles of pity, embarrassment and nigh-on contempt for my fellow subjects who seem to require this relic of a pre-modern era so they can feel wholly British. Is it not enough to either be born here, or to subscribe to British civic values? Must we keep betting our national image on these damned donkeys?
posted by dash_slot- at 7:29 AM on January 15, 2005