In Which I Note That Moore Is Less

Sir Patrick Moore is no more. Many will mourn his passing, and will say such things as “he was the longest running presenter for any television show ever,” and “he helped map the moon for the Apollo landings” and so on and so on. He was notable for having a monocle and drumming up interest in astronomy by twatting about on a xylophone. I have already heard it said that he was one of a kind, and his like will not be seen again. Good. Sir Patrick Moore was one of those people who seemed to deliberately set out to prove the maxim that “only the good die young”. He was a product of a less enlightened time, and his antiquated views evidence this. Here is a man who was sexist, homophobic and racist. On a totally unrelated note, here is a picture of a baddie from the James Bond film "A View to a Kill" next to a picture of a racist astronomer:

Sir Patrick

Bond Villain

During the previous decade, the Radio Times interviewed Sir Patrick to commemorate the 50th anniversary of his magnum opus, The Sky at Night. He decided to discuss astronomy by taking this less than conventional approach:

“I would like to see two independent wavelengths- one controlled by women, and one for us, controlled by men.”

To be fair, the man's right. There is literally no way that a man and a woman could enjoy the same television programme. To the unenlightened interviewer's horror, he carried on talking.

“I used to watch Doctor Who and Star Trek, but they went PC- making women commanders, that kind of thing. I stopped watching.”

Again, he's right. The very idea that a woman could be in a position of authority is a shocking one, unless its being in charge of a television channel for women or being the leader of a knitting club. We shall assume that no-one told him that the longest serving Prime Minister started HER term back in 1979, a full 28 years before this interview was conducted. To be unaware of this, Sir Patrick would have to have his head far in the past, and far in the past is exactly where it was:

“The trouble is the BBC now is run by women and it shows soap operas, cooking, quizzes, kitchen-sink plays. You wouldn't have had that in the golden days.”

Where to start? Yet again, the man is right. The BBC is run by women, although somewhat subtly as the BBC has yet to take the disgustingly liberal route of appointing a female Director General. Quiz shows are a bastion of the ladies- I can think of nothing more feminine than an episode of University Challenge presented by the physical embodiment of all things female Jeremy Paxman. The BBC showed its first cookery programme in 1936, so we shall assume that these golden days of which Sir Patrick Moore spoke of occurred before he was a teenager (he was born in 1923), and probably before the BBC started showing television programmes at all. It would also be fair to assume that the good old days he pined for included terrible working conditions, capital punishment and none of these johnny foreigner types coming over here. Fair to assume? Actually, there's evidence for it. He was noted for his opposition to the Race Relations Act (essentially a law saying let's not be racist because it's a bit of a dick move), and he openly discussed joining the BNP. It's interesting to note that every time I've typed that Sir Moore is right, the computer has offered to tack a hyphen and another word onto the end. Even a word processing program knows that he's right-wing.

“How dare you! How dare you speak ill of the dead! It's not like he can defend himself now, is it?” Ah, so I shouldn't say that Hitler was a nasty man on account of the fact that he's dead? “Well no, but that's different. You can't say that Sir Patrick Moore and Adolf Hitler were similar...” Actually, I can. And will. Unfortunately, Sir Patrick's wife was killed by a German bomb in 1943. This might explain, but not mitigate his attitude towards the Germans. First of all, he referred to the Germans as krauts, which isn't exactly the most PC of terms nowadays. Nowadays? Yes, he said this as recently as 2012:

“The only good kraut is a dead kraut.”

This seems a little extreme to me. I mean, the Germans have some strange ideas about which species are okay to have sex with, but saying that 80 million people are responsible for an event 69 years ago is a bit unfair. He might as well have said you and I are responsible for the massacre at Amritsar, or the invention of Marmite. I'm sure he didn't really mean it. After all, a man as learned as Sir Patrick would be able to see the irony of calling for the death of an entire people when that's exactly the sort of things the Nazis were known for...

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