Terry Gilliam is being predictably depressing about the BBC's push for diversity in comedy
You know what they say about heroes: They either die early, or live long enough to damn near kill themselves making a movie about Don Quixote, and then spout off a bunch of toxic bullshit about how they’re suddenly a trans black woman. That old axiom was never truer than in the case of director and Monty Python alum Terry Gilliam this week, who took some time out of showing off his new film, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, in order to whine about a recent BBC effort to increase diversity in its comedy efforts.
Specifically, the organization’s controller of comedy commissioning, Shane Allen, made a statement dedicated to the idea that the BBC needs to tell “the stories that haven’t been told and the voices we haven’t yet heard.” When asked about Python—both a comedy institution, and the work of “six Oxbridge white blokes”—Allen made it clear that, if he was assembling a team of comedy writers and performers in the modern era, it isn’t the route he’d choose to go.
Gilliam, for his part, took Allen’s comments about as badly as such a statement could probably be took, tackling the issue during a press conference for Quixote and declaring himself “a black lesbian in transition” in the process: