Some years ago the NABD were approached by some people from the BBC who were involved in making the short film sections relating to different causes on Comic Relief day. They wanted a short piece about the NABD to include in the ‘Disabled People’ section of the programme.
We agreed to this and a dozen of us spent a long freezing-cold day filming in the Peak District for what was planned to be a thirty second piece of the five minute section to do with disabilities.
Some weeks later I had a call from the director saying that they were so pleased with the film and the positive image it portrayed of disabled people pro-actively helping each other that they were going to make it the lead two-minute feature of the disabilities section.
Obviously we were rather proud of this and happy to see the BBC moving away from the ‘pat the poor drooling cripple on the head’ type of image they had previously favoured when dealing with disability related charities. We wrote to all of our members and supporters and to the bike press encouraging people to support Comic Relief and to look out for our bit on the day.
The BBC sent me a video of the piece and our bit was set to the song “I Wasn’t Born to Follow” off the Easy Rider soundtrack. It was really impressive and showed disabled people reclaiming their independence and living life to the full (and looking cool doing it).
Then three days before Red Nose day I had another call from the BBC director saying “I’m really sorry about this Rick but we’ve had to edit the NABD piece out completely!” There had been a meeting to finalise the running order for Comic Relief and one of the presenters, a tenth rate media nobody called Emma Freud (daughter of the MP Clement Freud who’s only notable contribution to British society was a set of dog food adverts where he was up-staged by a baggy faced dog) had objected to our inclusion on the basis that “Comic Relief should not be associating itself with bikers” and the rest of them agreed so the piece was dropped.
It has pained me every year to see hundreds, if not thousands, of bikers getting involved in fund-raising for a charity that is controlled by people who so obviously despise bikers. I for one will never support such a cause in any shape or form and I urge all other bikers to take the same stand!
And from the NABD Projects Officer
It would seem the cat is well and truly out of the bag on this.
Bike, trike , hotrod and builder forums all over the www have picked up on this and The sense of outrage seems to be building a bit of momentum.
The Beeb has apparently had a high volume of calls and emails complaining about this blatant discrimination by a celebtity nobody who's only claim to fame is that she's married to the bloke who runs comic relief.
Perhaps the BBC needs asking if it's supportive Freud's stance or whether it intends to look into the matter and disipline this misguided and bigoted view by members of it's staff attached to one of it's premier public service events.
There are a couple of Facebook sites about this apparently - I'm not on Facebook myself so I haven't seen them but the links are here:
http://apps.facebook.com/causes/240513/ ... m=ac75a943
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=56091643799
And if you'd like to complain to the BBC, this is where to do it-
[email="http://www.bbc.co.uk/complaints/complaints_stage1.shtml"]http://www.bbc.co.uk/complaints/complaints_stage1.shtml[/email]
The original discussion on the DisabledBikerForum is Here
I'm really shocked and will certainly not be supporting Red Nose Day! Not that I won't support charities, I shall choose them myself and contribute whatever I think is right - which is what I usually do anyway. But I do usually give some support if there's a local rednose effort - but if Red Nose shouldn't be associated with bikers - so be it!
