What is Ted Hastings’ problem with homosexual police officers?
The BBC has received hundreds of complaints after Adrian Dunbar’s Superintendent repeatedly uses the homophobic slur ‘bent coppers’ to refer to gay serving officers
Reporting by corruption correspondent George Dixon
The year is 2020 and you would have thought that homophobic slurs like gaylord, bum bandit, brown snake pusher and bent would have been long disposed of alongside other redundant words or phrases like traditional, anti-abortion, family-oriented and Christianity.
So why Jed Mercurio would write one of his characters to be so blatantly homophobic and why the character made it through BBC quality control is a mystery.
Episode after episode the Superintendent irately expresses his desire to hunt down, catch and imprison bent coppers.
In a fictional show this is borderline acceptable if the offending character is depicted to have no redeeming qualities but for some reason Hastings is one of the show’s main heroes.
His anti-gay behaviour goes unchallenged every episode with sidekicks Steve Arnott and Kate Fleming even seeming to share his depraved passion for identifying and exposing gay officers just for being gay.
Thankfully we weren’t the only ones to notice the obvious anti-gay sentiment throughout the show and the BBC has received hundreds of complaints all citing the excessive use of ‘bent coppers’.
So far ‘bent coppers’ is the only homophobic phrase identified in the show but we fully expect there to be ‘poofter pig’, ‘bumboy bobby’ and ‘fudge-packing fuzz’ to be used in the upcoming series.
While some have said the intended use of bent in the show is to refer to corruption — which isn’t true as homophobia is everywhere — they do not realise that using such a word even when it’s meant to mean something else can be extremely harmful to people of a gay orientation.
BBC’s Saudi Arabian equality and inclusion controller Farooq Al-Fawadi said: “At first we thought ‘bent’ simply referred to corruption.
“When it was brought to our attention that we were wrong and lots of people were seriously offended on the behalf of gay people, we of course got the wheels in motion to buckle to every one of their demands.
“In my home country gays get stoned for just existing and it’s despicable that discrimination on a similar level also still takes place in Britain.”
The BBC have asked Jed Mercurio to explain why he hates gay police officers so much. He is shortly expected to submit a grovelling apology followed by his prompt sacking and banishment from the industry.
