The scene is a BBC talk show. The subject is a particular niche pursuit enjoyed by a very disparate group of people who otherwise have nothing in common. And things aren’t going well.

The presenter – a man known for actively disliking this group – has assembled a seemingly balanced two-person panel, but repeatedly interjects to make it clear he finds the people being discussed annoying and weird.

One of the pundits, meanwhile, is making absurdly sweeping generalisations and factually incorrect statements, which the presenter does not challenge. A selection of viewers’ tweets at the bottom of the screen take a similarly disparaging, hateful tone.

It culminates in the pundit openly comparing the group to Nazis, complete with him making a one-arm salute.

Who is being demonised? That’s right, it’s cyclists – the one heterogenous, harmless minority who it is seemingly still fine to denigrate, dismiss and generally invent facts about.

I’ve written before about the problem parts of the BBC have in covering everyday cycling, and how blind it can be on the issue. To stress, this is not uniform – some people, such as Tom Edwards and Jeremy Vine, treat the subject admirably.

I’ve also got no desire to target the BBC. What interests me on this is that the corporation justifiably holds itself to high standards of impartiality and respect. The fact it so often ignores this when it comes to cycling, shows how demonised cyclists are more widely. This is a real problem, for reasons I’ll get into later.

This particular discussion happened on a BBC Northern Ireland talk show on Wednesday evening hosted by Stephen Nolan, an award-winning broadcaster who nonetheless has plenty of form when it comes to being deeply silly about cycling.

The chat was loosely based around whether there should be more dedicated cycle lanes. Speaking up for cyclists was Malachi O’Doherty, a Northern Irish journalist and author who did a reasonable job despite arriving – at the apparent request of Nolan – dressed as a stereotypical cyclist in waterproof jacket and helmet.

Lined up next to him was George Hook, an Irish broadcaster whose contribution began with a series of generalisations and inaccuracies about cyclists and, amazingly, managed to deteriorate from there.

Cyclists make “no contribution whatsoever to this enormous expenditure” on cycle lanes, he opined, forgetting that in the UK, road tax – as in a tax paid by drivers for maintaining the roads – ended many decades ago; roads are now funded from general taxation.

Hook seemed utterly obsessed by cyclists being two things: constant lawbreakers and part of the some shadowy community (or “cult” as he put it) with shared values and collective responsibility.

Here’s a couple of his comments Hook made to O’Doherty:

You represent the cycling community, who break every known law of the road, for whom red lights mean nothing, for whom pedestrian crossings mean nothing, for whom one-way streets mean nothing, for whom pedestrian ways mean nothing. There is an entitlement among the fanatics – and they are, they are fanatics. We don’t share the same space. If there’s any reasonable person in the audience, whether it’s Belfast, Cork or Dublin, will they say that the routine of a cyclist is to go through a red light? Will they say, any reasonable person, that the routine of a cyclist is to go through a pedestrian crossing?



Fanatics? This is the sort of language more commonly used on the BBC to describe Islamic State fighters, not people trying to get from A to B.

Hook went on, jaw-droppingly, to compare cyclists to Nazis: “They used to wear brown shirts, sing the Horst Wessel song, and have a sign – now you guys make rude remarks to people …”

He was then cut off as a shaken-looking Nolan shouted. “Not acceptable! Not funny!”

So, just a rogue pundit? No.

To begin with, Hook is not your ordinary guest. He was briefly suspended from his radio show only in September for suggesting rape victims who had gone to an assailant’s hotel room should take some of the “blame” for the crime (he was later moved to a different time slot).

It would seem curious for the BBC to book him just eight weeks later – unless you are looking for extreme views.

Also, Nolan was very clearly biased in his approach, if not as openly so as Hook. At one point he showed footage of a cyclist being struck by a driver opening a car door on him, asking: “Whose fault is that?”. Whose fault? The driver, Stephen.

Nolan also introduced a journalist, Yvette Shapiro, to discuss a tweet she sent complaining about “roads clogged with lycra warriors pursuing their hobby on everybody else’s time”.

Driving anywhere on a summer Sunday is a pain. Roads clogged with lycra warriors pursuing their hobby on everybody else's time 🚴 😤 pic.twitter.com/8jjUjVEBon — Yvette Shapiro (@yvetteshapiro) August 27, 2017

Did Nolan want to challenge her on this? No – it was a chance for her to defend the opinion as “fairly innocuous” and discuss the negative reaction it caused.

As the discussion went on, a stream of selected tweets at the bottom of the screen had a few pro-cycling views but the great majority were derogatory and sometimes factually incorrect.



They included: “As soon as you pay more road tax you can have more of the road”; “Completely agree cyclists think they own the roads. Two and three abreast. Not on. We pay taxes – move over.”; “Cyclists should do tests, get licenses and pay road insurance.”; “Cyclists should pay insurance the same as car drivers.”

There’s two key points I take from this. The first is how it illustrates the curious way cycling exists in the UK consciousness, and how it remains perhaps the one socially-acceptable out-group.

To talk of “cyclists” is to mean a huge (if proportionately quite limited) group taking in everyone from the most gung-ho cycle courier or road bike enthusiast to trundling grannies or six-year-olds pedalling to school. And yet they’re somehow one group, ripe for the mocking and insult.

With BBC comedies mocking mothers-in-law and the like now decades in the past, is there another such varied group for which this treatment exists? I can’t think of one.

Why does this matter? Because there is evidence that the way drivers perceive cyclists can have an impact on the manner in which they treat them on the roads. And this is not an equal interaction: unprotected flesh and bone versus a tonne or more of speeding metal.



It is my belief that footage like that aired on the BBC this week cements and reinforces negative generalisations about cyclists in the minds of the majority in the UK who do not cycle and know no one who regularly cycles.

It’s thus fair to argue that each time such an item is shown it – marginally, but definitely – makes the situation for me, my loved ones and other cyclists more risky when we ride on the roads.

This shouldn’t happen. The BBC wouldn’t allow this to take place on any other subject, and it needs to change. It’s time for action, BBC.

• This headline on this article was amended on 23 November 2017.