MR PENDLE: PC brigade ban mum-in-law jokes

When was the last time such an election warranted the interruption of a Saturday afternoon sports programme to tell us who had won, as happened on Radio 5 on September 26th?

To read or listen to some of the media coverage, you would have thought the cardinals of the Catholic Church had gathered at Manchester Central to elect a new Pontiff rather than MPs, party members and trade unions electing the new leader of an opposition political party.

Even the fact the two leading protagonists were brothers could not excuse the drip, drip, drip coverage of something that was not of the slightest importance to the vast majority of people in the country.

The election of Ed Miliband as Labour Party leader will make no difference to the lives of the people of Pendle.

The same thing would have been said had his brother been elected.

The best thing is that it is all over with, the brothers have buried their differences and we can all get on with our lives without constant media speculation on a matter which has been blown out of all proportion.

REGULAR readers will know political correctness and Mr Pendle go together as well as a fox in a chicken run.

So they will not be surprised to know that when he read of the London Borough of Barnet banning mother-in-law jokes, he was far from amused.

The po-faced pen pushers responsible for the ban trotted out the lame excuse that the ban was necessary to spare any mothers-in-law being offended.

But Mr Pendle has heard that one almost as many times as he has the jokes in question - ones which the likes of Les Dawson, Ken Dodd and Bob Monkhouse have told hundreds of times down the years.

Mother-in-law jokes are funny because they are a gross exaggeration on real life situations and are not meant to be taken seriously.

And far from being embarrassed by them, Mr Pendle would wager almost every mother-in-law in the country will roar with laughter on hearing them.

As for the PC brigade, if they weren’t so serious in their far from funny intentions, Mr Pendle would have thought they were joking.

A MEETING attended by Mr Pendle recently saw a discussion on something called biodiversity.

Now having won his bet on mother-in-law jokes above, he will double up by betting the majority of people in Pendle have no idea what biodiversity is.

He certainly hadn’t - it is, he discovered, the variety of living things around us.

And now, having won again, Mr Pendle might just indulge in some mushy peas with his fish and chip meal this evening.