Channel 4; Proud and Prejudiced - An Admission

Yesterday evening Channel 4 showed a documentary "Proud and Prejudiced" covering the rivalries between Tommy Robinson (leader of the EDL) and Sayful Islam (head of a group of Muslim extremists whose name changes depending on whether they've been proscribed that week or not). The EDL had been excited about this show for weeks and had already begun the process of replacing their aged and creaking Pentium 2 with a big series of Cray Supercomputers in anticipation of the membership drive that this should would promote.

But then a few hours before, the EDL made this announcement. Tommy had seen the footage, and he wasn't happy (spelling corrected for sanity and legibility purposes):

"In a worrying development its being alleged that the government have organised an 11th hour edit of tonights C4 programme (“Proud and Prejudiced”) and overruled the editor - Tommy just rang in the local radio station and tried to get a message out, tonights Channel 4 Documentary has been edited by the government, a statement will be released after the programme which airs at 10pm. He sounded very angry, looks like another media/government stitch up job. Whether you’re a supporter of the EDL or not you have got to agree the moment the government interfere with news stories, we live in a type of cold war dictatorship"

As we know, our Government is regularly accused of taking minor documentaries which won't be watched by many people and editing them for their own sinister purposes. However, this time it looked as though they'd been caught in the act red handed. Faced with the harsh reality of this statement and the accusations therein, the red-faced government released the following press release this morning:

Mood shot for insert of second album

From: The Government
To: the members of the EDL
Date: 28th February 2012

It’s time to come clean. We’re all a little embarrassed that you’ve seen through our obvious subterfuge and lazy attempts to discredit your organisation. Your street movement is of such an overwhelming size and your rallies have such an incredible and important effect on our communities that we felt we had no choice but to overrule the editor and spend a considerable amount of time amending this minor documentary which would have only a million or so viewers to suit our purposes. The original intention of the documentary was to make both you and Sayful Islam look like ignorant, objectionable extremists (Oh, a Plague on both your houses by the way) but from the initial footage it was determined that you came out of the whole thing looking rather too good.

As a kindness, please allow us to go over the amendments made to the footage we stole from Channel 4 to achieve these purposes, along with the time signature where the excised footage in question should have fell;

[11:16:23 - 11:18:09] Whilst being interviewed inside a room, Tommy Robinson is suddenly distracted by something on the opposite wall. The interviewer asks the next question but it is clear that Tommy hasn’t heard it – Without any further warning Tommy suddenly stands up and reaches towards the lens of the camera. His hand returns into frame and he is cradling a small money spider, and he can be heard to mutter “There you go, wickle spider. Don’t want you getting cwushed by the nasty camewaman!”. He is then seen to carefully take the spider over the window, open up said window and carefully place him outside.

[18:10:07 - 24:01:59] An unexpected moment in which whilst being followed on the streets Tommy Robinson hears an explosion and suddenly rushes to the aid of a burning bus full of non-extremist Muslims. Approximately six minutes of footage was excised of Tommy carrying them all out, one at a time (becoming increasingly weary and smoke-blackened) over his shoulder and delivering them to the waiting paramedic teams. This footage was deemed unusable due to the shaky handheld nature of most of it, and we couldn’t get the license for “Eye Of The Tiger” to be played over the top of it in the show.

[28:01:16 - 32:05:19] Footage of Robinson addressing a rally of twelvety million EDL supporters from a variety of ages, creeds and colours, all of whom were perfectly sober in a day that resulted in absolutely zero arrests. We felt this footage was unnecessary as the documentary featured a number of rallies already.

[36:01:02 - 36:01:03] Footage of Robinson not coked up and out of his face. Footage removed because we couldn't get the licence agreement sorted out in time for the one second snippet of music playing in the background.

[41:07:01 - 43:01:15] Footage removed of Jeremy Paxman weeping openly after being solidly beaten in debate by Robinson on Newsnight. Removed at behest of Jeremy Paxman.

So there you have it, we apologise. We've been well and truly rumbled and admit that we have, in effect, doctored the resulting documentary to portray the EDL in a bad light. We're also forced to apologise for the clumsy CGI used in the documentary in which we made a computer generated Tommy Robinson threaten to shoot a Muslim doorman, state that Muslims are breeding 4 times faster than us whilst keeping a straight face, laugh openly at the murderous activities of Anders Breivik and openly defy bail conditions to attend a demonstration. The footage was made at very short notice, and was spotted by eagle eyed viewed who identified that the pupils we'd used for the eyes of the CGI Tommy Robinson were way too large.

With our humbles apologies,

The Government

P.S. Despite our apologies, we're still considering charging you for the cost of cleaning up and policing your rallies though. No hard feelings, eh?