To think Shannon Matthews the Musical should be cancelled.

[containsnuts]

I'm not easily offended but I find this wildly insensitive and inappropriate.

shannonmatthews.co.uk/

That poor child was held hostage, drugged and went though a traumatic ordeal at the hands of her own mother and the peadophile boyfriend. Why anyone would want to make a musical comedy out of this awful display of child abuse I'll never know.

Absolutely this. Shannon Matthews was a child victim in all this, it wasn't that long ago and she is still alive.

Oh please! The OP isn't saying everything she doesn't like should be cancelled. But this particular show, yes. Do you not think there should be any boundaries when it comes to protecting child victims of crime and neglect? Where would you draw the line, or do you think a musical about Arthur Lobinjo Hughes would be OK, for example?

Yup. The billing raves about:

"an irreverent, potty-mouthed, black comedy romp through one of the most bizarre news stories of this century" which reduces the poor woman's appalling trauma to entertainment to laugh at.

Not fucking funny.

Shannon wasn't murdered.

No, & if I were Shannon I would be wanting to sue. Not even sure if that's possible, but it's what I'd want to do.

So your line on acceptability for a musical is whether or not the child victim was murdered? Mine certainly isn't.

Wow. Just wow.

So the ordeal that poor girl went through is comedy fodder but Scotland loses its shit over park benches beautifully decorated with suffragette ribbons.

Sure comedy is subjective and subversive yadda yadda but if the stuff you write centred on an abused child then your scraping the barrel

If you don't like it, don't book tickets. SM:TM was released on CD in what, 2010? It was on Prime Music for years, not sure if it still is but I had a listen a few years ago. If it were worth getting angry about, people should have done so long before now.

It's just a satire about the things that go on in "benefits Britain" in the vein of Shameless. The idleness, the poor parenting and the idiotic money-making schemes, that kind of thing.

Spoiler alert: Shannon was much happier after being adopted by a normal family who didn't sit around all day watching Jeremy Kyle, eating Viscount biscuits and masturbating to child pornography.

It's a good job nobody is being forced to watch it.

If you don't like it don't book tickets is not enough, it's ok to feel outraged at something so despicable. In fact, we should be complaining about this, not just ignoring it.

I'm simply pointing out the key difference between the cases. I'm not saying anything about you, me or which of us is superior. You are.

It wouldn't surprise me if the makers of this show (which looks shit for all the obvious reasons and then some) claimed that posts like yours are partly what they're commenting on.

This surely has to be a joke . If not why has it not been stopped? Poor Shannon as if she hadn't had enough to deal with!!

I'm not going to be outraged about something I haven't seen. It's sold out and getting some good reviews.

"It's just a satire about the things that go on in "benefits Britain" in the vein of Shameless. The idleness, the poor parenting and the idiotic money-making schemes, that kind of thing"

I think social commentary is fine if the story is not about an identified real person or has their consent if it does.

What would you be suing for though? It's perfectly acceptable to make a film or piece of art about real events, generally people can only sue when the piece of art grotesquely distorts the truth and paints them in an unfair light.

In the Shannon Matthews case, unless they've greatly changed it since the CD was released over a decade ago, Shannon barely features at all (from memory, just an anguished scream when the police find her and tell her they'll be taking her back home to her mother). It focuses on Karen Matthews and Michael Donovan, who "masterminded" the plot to fake a kidnapping, wait until a reward was offered then "find" the girl and cash in. Also featured as a subplot is Craig Meehan's child porn habit.

I don't see what case anyone would have to sue. The harm done to Matthews was predominantly caused by her mother with a bit of help fom Donovan. The musical just uses the facts to tell the story in songs. It's true it ridicules Karen Matthews and Donovan to a great extent, but I doubt they'd be able to sue given that it's largely fact based. Regarding Meehan, if anything he comes off better than the others, basically he's just a normal guy in a shit job with no involvement in the faking of the disappearance, albeit gets caught with child porn when his computer is taken by the police to check for evidence.

How is that story ever fit to be entertainment ?

I know I'm being hypocritical since I'm participating on this thread, but no, we really should be ignoring it. It's clearly trying to play up the offensive element to get attention and the more it gets, the more it succeeds. If nobody's paying it any attention, it'll just close quietly after playing to three people in a small dingy room for its "world premiere at the Edinburgh Fringe".

Even if it does have some serious points to make, they're likely to be completely out of date by now anyway.

Hopefully no one will go and see it

Hitler is dead though. Shannon Mathews is still alive.

If you don't like it don't book tickets is not enough, it's ok to feel outraged at something so despicable. In fact, we should be complaining about this, not just ignoring it

This is exactly what peopleare complaining about with "cancel culture"!

I don't like this so it should be cancelled, I think this is bad so it shouldn't be allowed...well guess what, nobody asked you.

If we cancel everything someone finds offensive, there will be nothing left. There have always been plays, musicals, books, films etc about all kinds of things, many of which you may not personally like. But it's not for you to decide what plays people can put on and what plays people can watch.

It's for society as a whole to decide what is acceptable, the likes of Roy Chubby Brown and Jim Davidson don't get TV time anymore because society en masse decided they weren't acceptable any more, that's how it works. Not because outraged individuals screeched about how offensive somehting they haven;'t seen is.

No, of course it shouldn't be stopped. It's a free country and if enough people think its not ok, they won't sell tickets and it will disappear.

No one here is being forced to watch women being executed for adultery or being gay which happens daily in some parts of the world either. Doesn’t mean those things are OK.

A musical about what that young girl suffered and the abysmal circumstances her family existed in is not ok either, irrespective of whether you can choose to watch it.

It's just a fringe play. It's not coming to the West End.

It's designed to shock. I agree it's tasteless but you can't randomly ban stuff - censorship is a hugely slippery slope that ends in dictatorship.

There isn't a good enough reason to ban this - Shannon has a new identity, she doesn't have to engage with this, it's not inciting hate. Apart from this there's been a TV drama, documentary series and endless articles that have been consumed by millions of people. This will be watched by a few hundred at most.

Kunt also did the song "Prince Andrew Is A Sweaty Nonce."

What the actual fuck! This is horrific, the worst form of ‘entertainment’. What the hell do they think they’re doing? Especially using her full name as the title