© WikimediaPlaying the Great Hunger for laughs! Holocaust, Ebola next?
British TV station Channel 4 has commissioned a sitcom about
the Irish Famine in which one million Irish died of starvation and one million emigrated. What a great subject for cheap laughs!No this is not an April Fools story, this is a January 1st story, incredible as it may seem.
The writer will be Dublin-based Hugh Travers, a 31-year-old, who has already had a major hit with a show called
Lambo. He is a former film student at UCLA.
The sitcom will be called
Hungry and Channel 4 has given the Dublin writer full freedom to write his own scripts which he says is seriously daunting.
Asked by the
Irish Times why The
Famine, Travers stated, "Well, they say 'comedy equals tragedy plus time'," he says, laughing.
"I don't want to do anything that denies the suffering that people went through, but Ireland has always been good at black humor. We're kind of thinking of it as
Shameless in famine Ireland."
The Showtime US version of
Shameless series depicts the dysfunctional family of Irish American Frank Gallagher, a single father of six children. While he spends his days drunk, his kids learn to take care of themselves.
So we are basing a sitcom on The Famine on a drunken Irish American series.
Hard to beat that I'd say.
What's up next?? A sitcom on The Holocaust maybe with funny fat
Nazis eating victims alive?
Or how about a comedy about Ebola with black kids dying on screen and doctors telling funny jokes about them?
'Sure you are being way too sensitive,' I can hear people say, 'time to have a laugh about the
Famine. Did you hear the one about the starving children? Some of them ate grass...Ha Ha Ha.'
As a kickoff to the New Year I doubt I will write a story about a more ridiculous idea for the rest of 2015.
The 31-year-old Dubliner started writing in college and got a film scholarship to UCLA. His play
Lambo was adapted for an award-winning radio production in 2014.
. . it was an atrocity, named by the website seen at this [Link] , "The Irish Holocaust. "
Excerpted from the page linked above we can read:
"Is Britain's cover-up of its 1845-1850 holocaust in Ireland the most successful Big Lie in all of history?
The cover-up is accomplished by the same British terrorism and bribery that perpetrated the genocide. Consider: why does Irish President Mary Robinson call it "Ireland's greatest natural 1 disaster" while she conceals the British army's role? Potato blight, "phytophthora infestans", did spread from America to Europe in 1844, to England and then Ireland in 1845 but it didn't cause famine anywhere. Ireland did not starve for potatoes; it starved for food.
Ireland starved because its food, from 40 to 70 shiploads per day, was removed at gunpoint by 12,000 British constables reinforced by the British militia, battleships, excise vessels, Coast Guard and by 200,000 British soldiers (100,000 at any given moment) The attached map shows the never-before-published names and locations in Ireland of the food removal regiments (Disposition of the Army; Public Record Office, London; et al, of which we possess photocopies). Thus, Britain seized from Ireland's producers tens of millions of head of livestock; tens of millions of tons of flour, grains, meat, poultry & dairy products; enough to sustain 18 million persons.
The Public Record Office recently informed us that their British regiments' Daily Activity Reports of 1845-1850 have "gone missing." Those records include each regiment's cattle drives and grain-cart convoys it escorted at gun-point from the Irish districts assigned to it. Also "missing" are the receipts issued by the British army commissariat officers in every Irish port tallying the cattle and tonnage of foodstuff removed; likewise the export lading manifests. Other records provide all-revealing glimpses of the "missing" data; such as: ... "
The page continues at this [Link]