50 sHaDeS oF iDiOcY: pArT 3
Do you know who I've got a bit of a soft spot for?
That Victoria Coren, off of the telly. You know the one I mean?
She recently married QI favourite and comical clever clogs David Mitchell from Peep Show.
For the purposes of this article however, it would seem improper to refer to her on the basis of the dude she's hooked up with - this is merely the underpinning of a far more interesting personality.
You may have been seduced by Ms Coren's mellifluous tones randomly emanating via your speakers from the studios of Radio 4 hosting the talk show Heresy?
There are also the books she writes, the columns she pens and the TV shows she presents.
She's appeared as a guest on You Have Been Watching, Have I Got News For You and Question Time, among loads of other satirical or 'highbrow' shows and she's really funny.
Okay, I'll admit it, I quite fancy her. There's something about her playful smile, compounded by a razor-sharp wit that gets me going. She apparently has a kind of Usain Bolt Deluxe model brain where the electrical impulses zip along the craggy synapses of her cerebral cortex in a speedier fashion than self-styled 'skyfisherman' Jose Escamilla's Rods from the crazy pseudoscience universe of cryptozoology.
Victoria also plays poker. Professionally.
In September 2006, she won the main event of the European Poker Tour in London, scooping a not-to-be-sniffed-at £500,000 after defeating Australian Emad Tahtouh. In November 2011, she finished in second place at the International Federation of Poker's inaugural Table World Championship after losing a heads-up to Spaniard Raul Mestre. For this achievement, she collected $100,000, ($10,000 of which she donated to Age UK).
Somehow she also manages to industriously shoehorn the writing of a weekly column for The Observer and the fronting of BBC Four quiz show Only Connect into her schedule. Damn you Mitchell, she is actually amazing.
I suppose, in some ways, Victoria Coren is something of a femme fatale - a highly intelligent and attractive female. A feminist who can more than hold her own in the daunting intellectual company of the likes of Stephen Fry, Charlie Brooker or David Dimbleby.
She does however harbour something of a dark and most sinister of secrets...
The kind of shocking, shameful, cupboard-dwelling skeleton that occasionally reveals itself to the horror of onlookers.
And it appears in the shape of a proper boneyfied nitwit.
This closet-creature goes by the name of Giles and it happens to be Ms Coren's big brother.
A stigma-stained sibling of the sort of indescribable entity that H.P. Lovecraft might have dreamt up in one of his 'weird fiction' Gothic horror novels. The kind of impalpable monstrosity that dwells amid the pages, shackled to a beam in the abandoned attic of a dilapidated house.
A gelatin; a slime, yet with shape. A thousand unnameable embodiments of terror. Wretched and beyond all memory or contrivance. With horns. And hooves, cloven.
And, unfortunately, he's also got a laptop.
As it goes, Giles Coren also happens to be a columnist, although his media outlet comes in the far-scarier shape of the MailOnline - a truly hideous manifestation of evil way beyond the imaginings of Victorian horror writers of the like of Lovecraft, Machen or Poe, though his opinions do have something of the 1800s about them.
On the back of the Richard Keys/Andy Gray furore regarding sexism in football, a particularly insightful piece was written by Mr Coren for the Daily Mail entitled:
So why is it all right for women to be sexist about MEN?
It's good that he used those upper-case letters for the word 'men' otherwise I might have overlooked the immediacy of this issue.
You see, according to Giles, the world is all topsy-turvy when it comes to sexism and it's about time we flipped the playing field upside its own stupid head. So, what are his contentions?
Over to Mr Coren:
"You shouldn’t pass unflattering remarks about women behind their backs because it is not a well brought-up thing to do. I would never do it myself. Not because I am a feminist, but because I am a gentleman."
An admirable stance, I think we'd all admit? Apart from the er.. hey, come on, you've got to start an article somewhere so give him the benefit of the doubt:
"To be a man in this country is constantly to have to apologise for oneself and to be ever so careful about every sentence we speak or write which contains any reference at all to members of the opposite sex. At the same time, we ourselves are fair game for women. While sexism from men is the outstanding social crime of the modern world, women can say absolutely whatever they like about us. Make no mistake, sexism is alive and well in this country and applauded in all quarters — as long as it is practised by women. And they are allowed to say the most terrible, terrible things."
..............................
Apologies for the pause, I just needed to clamber back onto my chair from the carpet. He sounds like he might cry. I think I might join him.
Buggering arse-barnacles - my blubbing is making the ink blot across the screen. Hope it's not too blurry to read.
With good faith, the only factually incorrect part of Coren's opening paragraph are all of the words that he's written. Apart from that, it's a perfectly typical passage of hyperbole from the Daily Mail's bottomless gorge of guff.
You have to be careful about every sentence spoken or written?
That's pretty much the same line that Bruce Forsythe frothed in Anton Du Beke's defence after he 'slipped-up' and called dance partner Laila Rouass a Paki on Strictly Come Dancing. It's also much the same line that Jimmy Hill volunteered in defence of Ron Atkinson following his post-match analysis of Marcel Desailley's Champions League performance (broadcast around the world) where he described the then-Chelsea captain as "a fucking lazy, thick nigger."
The thing is, most enlightened members of our 21st century masses don't actually 'have to be careful about what they say' whatsoever because it just wouldn't enter their noodle to burble antiquated, offensive bullshit like a circa '73 'Chubby' Brown with terminal Tourette's. Most people can function perfectly capably without the aid of a political-correctness advisor.
If you're addressing your Asian dance partner as a Paki (to her bewildered face) or describing a World Cup winning captain (who happens to be black) as a nigger, it's very simple - you're a bigoted cunt. A fucking plum. End of story.
The worrying thing about Giles Coren is that he doesn't need these things pointing out to him. That his comments are offensive and inflammatory is something that he's surely only too aware of. He feels that the rest of us have got it wrong and should accept his reasoning. Either that, or he's just taking the piss.
And once he gets on a roll, the results are spectacular, sinister and staggering:
"The great lie. All men want is sex. Not so. If anything, it is women who think only of having it off. Girls on average lose their virginity much younger than boys and have more sexual partners in youth."
In fairness to Coren, he backs these 'facts' up with absolutely no statistical evidence whatsoever. Well he couldn't - he made them up.
Then brutally, aggressively and possibly with a petty, small minded venality he goes on to state that: "Women are far meaner, more brutal, aggressive, small-minded, jealous, petty and venal than any man." And it's hard to argue with that.
Without doubt, the funniest proclamation issued forth by Littlejohn's understudy regards our health and well-being, particularly 'man flu':
"It is women who make a big fuss about mild discomfort, not men. I have never had so much as a cold in my life, nor claimed to. I even suspect sometimes that the whole palaver about the pain of childbirth is a conspiracy to ride roughshod over men."
Proscribing to the same factual databank as Mr Coren, I can emphatically state that even Iron Man once suffered from a bout of mild nasopharyngitis - his GP told me. He was mates with my uncle and he ain't no bullshitter. He ain't. Fuck you, he ain't, well ring him then, go on, ring him. RING HIM!
Exactly.
Never once has Giles Coren had a cold. The 'childbirth palaver' is purely fiction. Seeriasss guv. Get a grip blud. Pffft.
His sister is amazing though, no lie - fuck's sake bruv, believe.
Coren finishes his piece by equating the unfair male disposition regarding women with:
"If that's not off-side, I don't know what is."
And he's right. He doesn't know what off-side is.
According to Sky Sports' Soccer AM's Helen Chamberlain:
"The off-side rule aims to prevent strikers from scoring easy goals by lurking around the opposition's goal post. Players are forbidden from standing between the opposition post and the last opposition defender unless the ball is kicked forward towards the goalposts."
Simples. *Squeak
That Victoria Coren, off of the telly. You know the one I mean?
She recently married QI favourite and comical clever clogs David Mitchell from Peep Show.
For the purposes of this article however, it would seem improper to refer to her on the basis of the dude she's hooked up with - this is merely the underpinning of a far more interesting personality.
You may have been seduced by Ms Coren's mellifluous tones randomly emanating via your speakers from the studios of Radio 4 hosting the talk show Heresy?
There are also the books she writes, the columns she pens and the TV shows she presents.
She's appeared as a guest on You Have Been Watching, Have I Got News For You and Question Time, among loads of other satirical or 'highbrow' shows and she's really funny.
Okay, I'll admit it, I quite fancy her. There's something about her playful smile, compounded by a razor-sharp wit that gets me going. She apparently has a kind of Usain Bolt Deluxe model brain where the electrical impulses zip along the craggy synapses of her cerebral cortex in a speedier fashion than self-styled 'skyfisherman' Jose Escamilla's Rods from the crazy pseudoscience universe of cryptozoology.
Victoria also plays poker. Professionally.
In September 2006, she won the main event of the European Poker Tour in London, scooping a not-to-be-sniffed-at £500,000 after defeating Australian Emad Tahtouh. In November 2011, she finished in second place at the International Federation of Poker's inaugural Table World Championship after losing a heads-up to Spaniard Raul Mestre. For this achievement, she collected $100,000, ($10,000 of which she donated to Age UK).
Somehow she also manages to industriously shoehorn the writing of a weekly column for The Observer and the fronting of BBC Four quiz show Only Connect into her schedule. Damn you Mitchell, she is actually amazing.
I suppose, in some ways, Victoria Coren is something of a femme fatale - a highly intelligent and attractive female. A feminist who can more than hold her own in the daunting intellectual company of the likes of Stephen Fry, Charlie Brooker or David Dimbleby.
She does however harbour something of a dark and most sinister of secrets...
The kind of shocking, shameful, cupboard-dwelling skeleton that occasionally reveals itself to the horror of onlookers.
And it appears in the shape of a proper boneyfied nitwit.
This closet-creature goes by the name of Giles and it happens to be Ms Coren's big brother.
A stigma-stained sibling of the sort of indescribable entity that H.P. Lovecraft might have dreamt up in one of his 'weird fiction' Gothic horror novels. The kind of impalpable monstrosity that dwells amid the pages, shackled to a beam in the abandoned attic of a dilapidated house.
A gelatin; a slime, yet with shape. A thousand unnameable embodiments of terror. Wretched and beyond all memory or contrivance. With horns. And hooves, cloven.
And, unfortunately, he's also got a laptop.
As it goes, Giles Coren also happens to be a columnist, although his media outlet comes in the far-scarier shape of the MailOnline - a truly hideous manifestation of evil way beyond the imaginings of Victorian horror writers of the like of Lovecraft, Machen or Poe, though his opinions do have something of the 1800s about them.
On the back of the Richard Keys/Andy Gray furore regarding sexism in football, a particularly insightful piece was written by Mr Coren for the Daily Mail entitled:
So why is it all right for women to be sexist about MEN?
It's good that he used those upper-case letters for the word 'men' otherwise I might have overlooked the immediacy of this issue.
You see, according to Giles, the world is all topsy-turvy when it comes to sexism and it's about time we flipped the playing field upside its own stupid head. So, what are his contentions?
Over to Mr Coren:
"You shouldn’t pass unflattering remarks about women behind their backs because it is not a well brought-up thing to do. I would never do it myself. Not because I am a feminist, but because I am a gentleman."
An admirable stance, I think we'd all admit? Apart from the er.. hey, come on, you've got to start an article somewhere so give him the benefit of the doubt:
"To be a man in this country is constantly to have to apologise for oneself and to be ever so careful about every sentence we speak or write which contains any reference at all to members of the opposite sex. At the same time, we ourselves are fair game for women. While sexism from men is the outstanding social crime of the modern world, women can say absolutely whatever they like about us. Make no mistake, sexism is alive and well in this country and applauded in all quarters — as long as it is practised by women. And they are allowed to say the most terrible, terrible things."
..............................
Apologies for the pause, I just needed to clamber back onto my chair from the carpet. He sounds like he might cry. I think I might join him.
Buggering arse-barnacles - my blubbing is making the ink blot across the screen. Hope it's not too blurry to read.
With good faith, the only factually incorrect part of Coren's opening paragraph are all of the words that he's written. Apart from that, it's a perfectly typical passage of hyperbole from the Daily Mail's bottomless gorge of guff.
You have to be careful about every sentence spoken or written?
That's pretty much the same line that Bruce Forsythe frothed in Anton Du Beke's defence after he 'slipped-up' and called dance partner Laila Rouass a Paki on Strictly Come Dancing. It's also much the same line that Jimmy Hill volunteered in defence of Ron Atkinson following his post-match analysis of Marcel Desailley's Champions League performance (broadcast around the world) where he described the then-Chelsea captain as "a fucking lazy, thick nigger."
The thing is, most enlightened members of our 21st century masses don't actually 'have to be careful about what they say' whatsoever because it just wouldn't enter their noodle to burble antiquated, offensive bullshit like a circa '73 'Chubby' Brown with terminal Tourette's. Most people can function perfectly capably without the aid of a political-correctness advisor.
If you're addressing your Asian dance partner as a Paki (to her bewildered face) or describing a World Cup winning captain (who happens to be black) as a nigger, it's very simple - you're a bigoted cunt. A fucking plum. End of story.
The worrying thing about Giles Coren is that he doesn't need these things pointing out to him. That his comments are offensive and inflammatory is something that he's surely only too aware of. He feels that the rest of us have got it wrong and should accept his reasoning. Either that, or he's just taking the piss.
And once he gets on a roll, the results are spectacular, sinister and staggering:
"The great lie. All men want is sex. Not so. If anything, it is women who think only of having it off. Girls on average lose their virginity much younger than boys and have more sexual partners in youth."
In fairness to Coren, he backs these 'facts' up with absolutely no statistical evidence whatsoever. Well he couldn't - he made them up.
Then brutally, aggressively and possibly with a petty, small minded venality he goes on to state that: "Women are far meaner, more brutal, aggressive, small-minded, jealous, petty and venal than any man." And it's hard to argue with that.
Without doubt, the funniest proclamation issued forth by Littlejohn's understudy regards our health and well-being, particularly 'man flu':
"It is women who make a big fuss about mild discomfort, not men. I have never had so much as a cold in my life, nor claimed to. I even suspect sometimes that the whole palaver about the pain of childbirth is a conspiracy to ride roughshod over men."
Proscribing to the same factual databank as Mr Coren, I can emphatically state that even Iron Man once suffered from a bout of mild nasopharyngitis - his GP told me. He was mates with my uncle and he ain't no bullshitter. He ain't. Fuck you, he ain't, well ring him then, go on, ring him. RING HIM!
Exactly.
Never once has Giles Coren had a cold. The 'childbirth palaver' is purely fiction. Seeriasss guv. Get a grip blud. Pffft.
His sister is amazing though, no lie - fuck's sake bruv, believe.
Coren finishes his piece by equating the unfair male disposition regarding women with:
"If that's not off-side, I don't know what is."
And he's right. He doesn't know what off-side is.
According to Sky Sports' Soccer AM's Helen Chamberlain:
"The off-side rule aims to prevent strikers from scoring easy goals by lurking around the opposition's goal post. Players are forbidden from standing between the opposition post and the last opposition defender unless the ball is kicked forward towards the goalposts."
Simples. *Squeak
"I would never do it myself. Not because I am a feminist, but because I am a gentleman." Interesting that Mr Coren feels that chivalry is a reasonable replacement for feminism. Will chivalry protect our reproductive rights, I wonder, or help stop rape? Did it win us the vote? Surely chivalry is based in the notion that women are delicate flowers that need protecting and is just another way of telling women to get back in their place, albeit with a smile and a bow.
ReplyDeleteGreat blog, I love your writing style.
Ah thanks Liz, very much appreciated. Good to know people occasionally read these scribbles. I'm on a bit of a vent against the Daily Mail at the minute - easy target I know. I was going to bring up rape statistics in this but I'd spoken about it in the previous blog. I'm going to cover it more thoroughly in the future when I think I've got the tone right. =]
ReplyDeleteI know what you mean, I generally try and ignore DM as I'm pretty sure they mostly just troll for reaction, but sometimes they go too far! Worrying that those who read it regularly just soak up that nonsense, though.
DeleteAn interesting statistic I came across yesterday was that, although those like DM obsess over false rape claims, implying they are virtually the norm, Portland police found that just 1.6% of sexual assault claims were falsely reported, lower than false claims of car theft at 2.6%. Stats may be a bit out of date now & I haven't checked the source but it's food for thought (http://www.shakesville.com/2005/12/dont-just-blame-victim-prosecute-her.html)
Keep up the good work!