Some people will cast their referendum vote based on ignorance or fear, but that's their right and there's no point grumbling about it.
In a typical general election campaign this hardly matters, does it? Nothing is really won or lost in these contests. We just swap one set of suits for another, and if you hear your old auntie say she'll be voting Labour because her mammy voted Labour you can just smile and nod. It hardly matters in the interminable swap between Labour and Tory.
But the referendum is different. Anyone voting based on tradition or sentimentality for a long-dead mammy should be stricken from the electoral roll! We can allow them back in for the usual round of general elections, Euro elections, local elections, but not the referendum. It's just too important and it's maddening to hear people plead a case based on daft tradition or irrational fear.
Strangely, despite endless debate and omnipresent campaigning, some people are still clueless. One news outlet found people saying they'll vote Labour in the referendum. Others, like a hairdresser on the BBC last week, fretted there will be no business in an independent Scotland. Then there are infuriating Facebook updates where people say they're going to write FREEDOM!!!!!! on their ballot paper, so invalidating their vote.
These buffoons need to be disenfranchised before they muck it up for the rest of us. Scotland deserves a referendum result delivered by voters who've thought about the issues; people who have exercised logic and reason, not those who're cowed by Project Fear or who're rustling to the polling station with a tinfoil claymore to spoil their ballot paper in the name of Mel Gibson.
But, in the absence of a campaign to weed out these dafties, we can poke fun at them instead. What's Funny About The Indyref? (BBC2) was a sketch show written by young Scots aged 16-25 on all aspects of the referendum and, to my delight, targeted idiots.
One sketch had students ask absurd questions about the referendum, like 'please sir, if someone from Scotland were to go to England would they die?' That's deliciously close to some of the scare stories the No campaign have produced. Another student asks if they'll have to move Scotland 'with tugboats and stuff'. So there, a neat sketch lampooning the ignorance and fear which threaten a result based on common sense.
There was also mockery of the self-important Scot who believes anything England can do, we can do better: 'the Rolling Stones are a Del Amitri tribute band fronted by an auld woman!'
The best sketch showed two neds in a polling booth whispering to one another as though in an exam. 'Whit ye putting?' asked one, but the other was unsure as she'd only ever voted in X-Factor telephone polls. She thought she'd be clever in using her 'Foundy Maths' to calculate how much oil we had. As before, this sketch was funny but nagged at the viewer as we all know someone who has the same lazy, ill-informed approach to voting.
Most of the other sketches fell flat. Two boys in Scotland strips with tin hats and guns moaned that being in the Tartan Army was more fun before independence and there were repeated short sketches about the Scottish Office being futile: 'No, we're not Scottish Widows,' sighs the receptionist into the phone. 'We are very important!' There were also sketches which were slack and predictable, such as when Salmond phones Cameron to beg for help. The camera slowly pulls back from the phone to reveal what we all saw coming a mile off: Salmond's cronies crouched around him giggling at the crank call.
There was also an infuriating and inexplicable repetition of certain fragments. I don't know why. Maybe there was some arty, clever reason for this but only God knows what it is. The inclusion of sketches of lesser quality, and then the weird repetition of others, suggests the BBC gave these young, inexperienced writers some young, inexperienced editors too.
This programme was not very funny. I hate to say that as I was delighted to hear new writers were being given this platform on the BBC, but it was a clunking disappointment with just a few scattered points of light. If you want Scottish referendum comedy don't look to the BBC, but to YouTube and the brilliant Dateline Scotland. They're perhaps not as young as the writers on this programme but, if they're funnier, who cares?
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