'TV shows that invited on vile "prankster" Mizzy should also be scrutinised'

05 June 2023 , 19:44

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Mizzy's antics are alleged to have caused genuine distress to members of the public (Image: Tik Tok)

Never did I ever see myself devoting column inches to the social media attention-seeker Mizzy.

Not when his antics are alleged to have caused such genuine distress to so many unsuspecting members of the public.

And not when the teenager, real name Bacari-Bronze O’Garro, has taken dogs from old ladies, walked brazenly with his friends into strangers’ houses and screamed in the faces of people standing in the street before posting the footage on social media.

His behaviour, for which he has been prosecuted, has been reprehensible. To call him a prankster grossly overestimates the term.

The legendary Jeremy Beadle was a prankster. You could see the funny side when it became clear you were being framed. Dom Joly is a prankster. Sacha Baron Cohen is a prankster.

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Mizzy sums up the online race to the bottom on social media as young people trash the boundaries of taste and decency for likes and retweets.

There are more of them than you think – Mizzy was simply the one whose videos gained traction.

But here’s the thing. The TV treatment of the 18-year-old from North London has also exposed much about our media culture and its obsession with piggy-backing the likes of Mizzy for online engagement.

What was he doing on any station, let alone so many with substantial audiences? What message does that send out to the other internet narcissists? And what does it tell us about the editorial judgement of shows as reputable as Newsnight which platformed Mizzy when they could easily have recruited a Black social commentator with actual expertise in analysing toxic masculinity?

It defies belief that Newsnight would not consider the implications in putting Mizzy to air in terms of the representation of Black men – without an additional commentator for counterbalance.

Some had Mizzy on simply to shout at him. Others had him on in a naked attempt to gain just as much notoriety as he has found on social media.

Some threw slurs of a racial nature at him and one grandstanding commentator used the expression on the teenager’s face as a shameful, disgraceful pretext to threaten him with violence.

The action was such a transparent, desperate attempt to go viral that it told us more about said commentator – chastened by the young man who’d called out his brazen attempt to use him (the full video provides important context) – than it did about Mizzy.

And there’s the rub. In George Orwell’s Animal Farm, the animals come to realise in the book’s final image, that the pigs have become as cruel and oppressive as the human farmers.

Mizzy deserves the opprobrium coming his way. No doubt. Particularly when he accepts his many invitations to go onto these TV shows. But let’s not kid ourselves – some of those casting stones should be under the microscope too.