VOTE, VOTE, VOTE for PUBLIC ENEMY nos 1-to-20

The list of “greatest television dramas” constructed by The Guardian last week (see the immediately previous posting) got me thinking about the compelling need for yet more lists. So here I propose one that all of us can enjoy: The Twenty Most Overrated and Irritating Figures in the Public Eye.

Having dibs on the notion and, what’s more, proprietorial rights on this particular corner of the world wide web, I shall herebelow propose my own list of overexposed underachievers, but I do urge my readers to join in the sport and to add to, amend, reinforce or excoriate any or all of my choices (and do tell your e-familiars; who knows, we may together begin a thread that eventually topples a star and gets a mention on BBC Breakfast).

There are those “celebrities” who, were I to encounter them on any kind of regular basis, would, I feel sure, propel themselves into the lists. Sensing that they are emphatically not for me, I simply skirt their manifestations. As a result, I would argue that, in all good conscience, I should not include them if I cannot begin to essay any account of why they are to be publicly humiliated. Others are welcome to sketch quite what it is that makes them so compellingly dispensable. For the record, I will here list these also-rans alphabetically but in the manner we are perforce accustomed to on the net (as illustrated in my index of subject labels to the right of the site), to wit, in alphabetical order of their forenames: Ant & Dec, Chris Evans, David Gest, Gordon Ramsay, Katie Price (whoever that is), Paris Hilton, Richard & Judy, Sadie Frost and Simon Cowell. These are people who – I am relieved to admit – I simply do not feel competent to describe.


A complete winker

Unlike the following, the real list:

Andrew Lloyd Webber: Crossover artists are always deeply suspect and His Lordship has been crossing over these 40 years. His father William was a distinguished if not especially individual composer, particularly for the organ (his instrument), his mother was musical too and his brother Julian is of course a renowned cellist (if not a very arresting one). Andrew was a published composer at nine and went on to study at the RCM. His long career as a composer of musicals has continually brought an ersatz operatic style to the form, most obviously aping Puccini (I have traced the main theme of one of his most popular and most recorded songs, ‘The Music of the Night’ from Phantom of the Opera to a passing phrase in La Fanciulla del West: “e provai una gioia strana,/una nuova pace che dir non so!”, the last two lines of Dick Johnson’s ‘Quello che tacete’ in Act One. It’s a barefaced lift). Lloyd Webber has worked with the three worst British toilers in the field of writing lyrics – Don Black, Ben Elton, and Sir Tim Rice – but his shows, especially Phantom, have enjoyed vast, unprecedented success and have made him seriously wealthy. My sense of it is that he has brilliantly tapped into the shallowness of the age and that, like Chu Chin Chow and the shows of Ivor Novello (which were comparably popular in their day), his work will not stand the test of time.

Anne Robinson: In truth, I see The Weakest Link very rarely. As a quiz, it’s hardly at a level comparable with University Challenge or BBC4’s Only Connect. Even so, the simplest questions appear to defeat contestants, whether obscure or famed, on a regular basis (see Private Eye’s regular selection under the title ‘Dumb Britain’). Robinson’s preposterous Nurse Diesel act may make some viewers long for her to meet her match but it just turns me off. Much of the reason for that repellent quality is that it is patently phoney, a not very well applied mask for the purposes of stirring up the contestants. And how her producer can permit her to perpetrate a wink at the end of every edition beats me. Winking is a peculiarly naff form of communication at the best of times but anyone who, like Robinson, cannot actually perform it properly should be soundly beaten until she stops. It astounded me that the US took her to its bosom when the show was launched on American television but at least her star fell there as swiftly as it had risen. I don’t imagine it hurt her pension fund, however.


"That barbeque's in Birmingham – and that's your weather"

Daniel Corbett: Modern weather forecasting is a debased endeavour, with a curious, florid meta-language of its own. But Corbett is the only one I actually have to switch off before hearing his forecast. He thinks he’s a redcoat, I imagine. Certainly he believes that patronising his audience with matey references to “that barbeque” or “those umbrellas” is endearing. It’s not. Just tell us the bloody weather, you prat. To discover that he learned his trade on American television, where he was a much prized (and, I imagine, much mimicked) token Englishman, explains a great deal about his style and manner. Come back, Bert Foord, all is forgiven (oh sorry, you can’t, you’re dead).

Delia Smith: This entry, I realise, could be the most inflammatory in the list. Delia has legions of devoted fans. Why? Talk about Little Miss Suburban. It always seemed to me that she has never had an original thought in her dreary little head and learning, as we have lately, that she “cheats” (her word) was no surprise to this viewer. Her descriptive powers are certainly not tested by her recipes – “nice” seems to be her most emphatic term of approval. Her idea of “a pinch” of some ingredient always looks as if it is in actuality about half a cup, and “a small cup” about a cauldronful. There are of course way too many television cooks, most of them wholly unnecessary and some not at all watchable (Tamasin Day-Lewis always looks to me as though she could do with a good scrub, either before or after removing all that finger jewellery that she repellently wears while at work). So Delia may stand as representative of a whole deplorable breed.

Esther Rantzen: This woman has been a major part of the British television landscape for more than 40 years. A great deal of her work has been dedicated to shoehorning serious and even urgent issues in alongside matters of stultifying triviality, as if to proclaim that it is all grist to her limitless mill. Eloquently enough, her most widely viewed vehicle (it ran for more than two decades) was called That’s Life. That show grew out of On the Braden Beat, a light consumer affairs magazine made by ATV that switched to the BBC and employed Rantzen as a researcher. When Bernard Braden was sacked after doing an ITV advert (a BBC contract breach), Rantzen got her chance. Not dissimilarly, her chat-and-issues show, Esther, was carefully modelled on Oprah. Such programmes gave her a succession of vehicles upon which to leap, preferably of a heart-on-sleeve, campaigning nature. (She must seriously wonder where her damehood has got to). It’s the trademark Rantzen smug grin that always gets me, the one that seems to say “and I brought you this heart-tugging story/colourful character/smuttily-shaped potato, I did, me”. Now she reckons to be standing for parliament as an independent anti-expenses candidate. The voters of Luton South should be sure to demand full disclosure of her BBC expenses.


Eyes up, please

Fiona Bruce: It’s not just Bruce’s faintly creepy and oleaginous manner that turns me off, it’s also that way she puts a surprised spin on certain words of a news story, like a junior school teacher trying to catch the kids’ attention. Don’t patronise me, Fiona. If it weren’t already worthy of my attention, it wouldn’t be on the news. And here’s another weird thing. Ordinarily, I don’t find myself looking at women’s breasts but Bruce always seems to wear clothes that draw your attention to her flat-chestedness, as if she’s making a virtue of it. This is most disturbing. Of course one looks in an appraising manner at people on the box, notes that one is overweight, another thin-lipped, another rather camp. Personally, I don’t feel that newsreaders need to be especially easy on the eye as long as their appearance isn’t positively distracting. I never wanted to watch that newsreader who had the look of a woman who appears in porn movies (you know the one I mean). I especially liked Moira Stewart who I thought was charming-looking, but more important had a deliciously authoritative voice that made me pay attention. I was astonished when she was “pensioned off” as too old. But if I’m squirming at Bruce’s vocal quirks and staring at her (lack of) tits, I’m not getting proper value from the news. And I think it must be significant that, without thinking about it at the time, I found myself drifting away (after many devoted years) from Antiques Roadshow pretty much as soon as she took over from Michael Aspel. I read that the figures have increased since she joined (though it also has a different transmission slot) so what do I know?

Gary Lineker: Not being interested in football, it should be noted that I haven’t seen the majority of Lineker’s broadcasting work and I am in no way qualified to assess his days as a player. But I sometimes watched They Think It’s All Over, mostly because I found the regular feature in which blindfolded panellists felt their way round a mystery guest was one of the most astonishing and captivating things on the box. The quiz part didn’t interest me (and I couldn’t stand Rory McGrath and other participants) but the way Jonathan Ross smelt Lineker’s blood and cruelly undermined him like a schoolyard bully made me think Lineker was a major wimp. It’s not that he’s just too "nice", because I feel sure that he isn’t at all "nice". Certainly the years he coined it fronting the ad campaign to push unhealthy crisps at kids undermined any claim he might have had as a role model. When Chris Morris stitched him up royally in his Brass Eye special, nominally on paedophilia but in reality on the stupidity of media coverage, Lineker was exposed as a fool who would do anything for cash and exposure. Sounds right. And serves him right.


Fifteen years older – than everybody


Ian McKellen: I have followed McKellen’s career pretty much from its outset, having seen him in the 1960s in the West End in The Promise, alongside two other young thesps of promise, Ian McShane and Judi Dench, then in the double whammy of the title roles of Richard II and Edward II that he played at Edinburgh, at the Mermaid and on tour, thereby sealing his reputation. By that time, those of us who sussed these things already knew that McKellen was gay, but it was another twenty years before he “came out” as we’d almost given up calling it by then and doing so, rather shamingly, only through the urgings of gay activists in the States. Knighted by a notably homophobic Tory government in 1991, he became known in the biz as Serena but hey, girlfriend, I prefer to call ‘er Damian. While not quite as pompous about his title as Sir Ben Kingsley, Damian is clearly proud of it and it is often included in his credit when he appears as himself. The London Lighthouse centre for HIV care has an Ian McKellen Room, dubbed before his elevation, but wouldn’t The McKellen Room have sufficed, if indeed his support really needed to be so acknowledged at all? All of that aside, McKellen makes my list for his acting, which I have never truly enjoyed. I have seen him enough to know all his tricks. And I have never witnessed a performance of his – not even his Macbeth, Iago or Richard III, and villainy suits him best – when I couldn’t detect the wheels going round. In that respect, he is like a parody of a stage-trained actor, a latter-day Donald Wolfit (whom I am old enough to have seen on stage), the opposite of an American movie actor. Mostly his screen performances are just too big for the medium – he hasn’t learned the obvious lesson that the camera projects to the back of the balcony for you. So while I concede that he has given his all to acting, especially in the classical repertoire, I think more rounded players have led the profession before and will do so again.

James Nesbitt: From the would-be sublime to the frankly ridiculous: most actors do not enjoy a career like Damian’s. These fifty years, television has provided a good living to thousands of jobbing actors, many of them very accomplished, some – like Michael Bryant who specialised in challenging television roles in the 1960s and ‘70s before leaving the medium altogether and spending some twenty years as the backbone of the National Theatre company – utterly brilliant. In recent years, casting directors (the curse of the business in my view but that’s an argument for another day) have focussed on a small group of supposed bums-on-seats actors to such an extent that dramas are hard put to get the green light unless at least one of these privileged people has signed up. What is so depressing about this system is the dreary quality of those players: Robson Green, Amanda Burton, Martin Shaw, you know the type. James Nesbitt may even be the best of them but, dear god, haven’t we seen everything he does over and over again? If the hands of directors and producers weren’t tied by know-nothing executives who can’t make a decision unless at least a dozen marketing people have done their “research”, we might get teledramas that were appropriately and interestingly cast. As it is, you know that if Nesbitt and his peers are taking the lead, it won’t be anything you haven’t seen before, probably better done.


Cheeky Chappie


Jeremy Clarkson: The American radio shock jock is evidently a force in that land and largely responsible for the otherwise inexplicable collapse in President Obama’s support. The nearest thing we have here to Rush Limbaugh and co is Juvenile Larksome, the all-mouth-and-trousers opinionist and climate-change denier. Needless to report, I have never seen a single minute of Top Gear which, I understand, is now followed on a global scale. Well, my old friend, we are going to hell in a handcart and no doubt the Juvenile is steering that handcart. Meanwhile, I suppose every age has to have a licensed blowhard bloke and at least until this one is rendered dead or quadriplegic by driving head-on into a bus queue at 130 miles-per-hour, we probably won’t have need of another one.

Madonna: Whatever one says about Madge, she’s certainly a world-beater at one skill – self-publicity. She persuades commentators and punters alike that she constantly reinvents herself and that the latest manifestation is even better than the last. As my partner puts it, she’s especially adept at catching every passing wave. A large part of that self-promotion is her aggressive projection of her own sexuality. But this kind of appeal is hardly new – think Clara Bow, Mae West, Eartha Kitt, Julie London, Marilyn Monroe, Lena Horne, Tina Turner, Pat Phoenix … As a performer, singer, songwriter, interpreter of a lyric, several of her contemporaries are or were superior: Annie Lennox, Bette Midler, Sade, Cyndi Lauper, Chaka Khan, Alison Moyet and Kirsty McColl for starters. I would rather bracket Madonna with Whitney Houston, Donna Summer and Cher – in other words, pretty limited performers whose natural constituency was quite small but who drew attention to themselves (and hence to varying degrees expanded that fanbase) by behaving in an ostentatious way. Cher in particular has a saving grace that Madonna signally lacks: Cher doesn’t take herself seriously, indeed takes delight in sending herself up. Madonna could profitably study Cher’s stance.

Mark Lawson: Soi-disant polymath and incorrigible swankpot (“my 45th visit to the States”), Lawson is the jack of all trades/master of none for the age. Following the Clive James/Charlie Brooker route from television reviewing to television appearing, Lawson has a view about anything and everything and, necessarily, makes a wealth of egregious errors of both fact and judgment in expressing his view. He is certainly no great shakes as an interviewer, never having learned the first law of interviewing: an interview is as good as the interviewer, not the interviewee, so you have to listen to the answers as well as prepare the questions. Lawson of course thinks anyway that it’s about him rather than them. He’s wrong. I would happily watch, say, a programme called Alan Bennett Talks to Mark Lawson but why in hell would I want to see one called Mark Lawson Talks to Alan Bennett? And who wants to look at Lawson, a face for radio of ever there was one? He’s fifteen years younger than me but he looks all of fifteen years older.


Before and after lunch: Winner eats all

Michael McIntyre: Has anyone come down the pike lately who is quite so pleased with himself as this chortling stand-up comic? I thought the Cheeky Chappie style went out in the 1950s but McIntyre appears to thrive on it. In that he seems terribly impressed by everyone else, he is perfect for hosting that show whose title I forget that’s been on BBC1 recently; and indeed perfect for showbiz in general. Surely he’ll be hosting the BAFTA Awards before too long, which would present another perfect reason not to watch them. With any luck, he would do a Jack Docherty and thereafter sink without trace.

Michael Winner: As for being pleased with oneself, no one exudes self-satisfaction more expansively than the alleged movie director and gourmet. At the time, I was quite diverted by a couple of Winner’s ‘Swingin’ Sixties’ movies (I’ll Never Forget What’s ‘Isname and The Jokers, though I can’t guess how they would look now), but nothing he’s made since is worth anyone’s time. The advertising satire of What’s ‘Isname sits awkwardly with Winner’s recent sideline as “an insurance salesman”. But his main showcase is playing restaurant critic for The Sunday Times. Winner earns his place in this list in part to represent all those non-journalists who have gaily taken the bread out of the mouths of bona fide journalists like me by writing (or, as often as not, merely putting their names to) columns in the papers. Not many movie directors do that. Roland Joffé had a general comment column in The Evening Standard for a while. The most common sort of celebrity columnists are novelists, sports people and stand-up comedians – is there any British humorist under 55 who has not at some point had a personal newspaper space? As a writer, Winner makes a competent lavatory cleaner at Kings Cross Station. I read the first third of his piece at the weekend and then flung the paper across the room.

Richard E Grant: There are plenty of actors whose careers are already a mystery and who then, as the parts start to dry up (or, like Simon Callow, they don’t after all get to play all the big classical roles), parlay themselves into a series of secondary careers as a personality-cum-cultural observer. While he seems to have clambered onto that track, Grant has also set off in other directions favoured by slipping actors, such as directing, writing novels and presenting programmes. A one-note actor if ever there was one, Grant got a seriously lucky break in his first movie role, playing the title character in Withnail and I. As a result of this, he can evidently do no wrong in some quarters. In others (like mine), he is the star of almost certainly the most overrated British movie ever made.


Simon Hogwash as a young lightweight

Simon Hoggart: Richard Hoggart, evidently in good shape at 91, is one of the great men of the age, having written several importanr books crowned by (almost certainly) the finest socio-cultural study since the War, The Uses of Literacy. There is no law that states that great men must have great sons and Richard doesn’t. Paul Hoggart is barely average in a field where mediocrity is the norm, that of television reviewing. The elder and wider-known son is Simon who has written for The Guardian for more than 40 years and did two stints chairing the radio News Quiz, a heavily scripted panel game. He writes parliamentary sketches, a lowly trade in which not very funny journalists (e.g. Quentin Letts) score easy points off politicians who work far harder and risk far more every day than such sketchers would dream of doing. He also writes a complacent diary column, frequently dependent on readers sending in stuff from which he has an unerring knack for selecting the least funny examples. He also fancies himself as a political sage, predicting a loss for Labour in the next election – how unusual – and lately setting himself up as a critic of Gordon Brown’s pronunciation, apparently unaware that the PM is a Scotsman. It’s way past time for a halfway good writer to replace him.

Stephen Fry: Fry can stand for all those Oxbridge graduates who arrived on the public stage bursting with talent and then frittered it away on frivolous, facile projects, so that the body of worthwhile work that they left was tragically and pitifully small, confined to the first decade or so of their working lives. I’m thinking of, for instance, Peter Cook and Richard Burton. John Cleese looks destined to accumulate a similar reputation. Like them, Fry appears unable to say no to any offer, especially if it’s easy money. Is there anything, one wonders, that he wouldn’t advertise? Fry provides another major source of irritation in that he is frequently accounted “the cleverest man on television”. Only someone who has never met anyone really clever would imagine such a thing. Then again, Fry is often not even the cleverest person on QI. And when I was a lad and television was bold enough to transmit programmes with intellectual content, programmes that actually dealt in ideas rather than trash, you saw people on the BBC every night of the week who would have eaten Fry for breakfast.

Steve Coogan: The last couple of decades have been marked by an enormous amount of overpraised television comedy, much of it heavily dependent on catch phrases that enthusiasts greet as uproariously on the five hundredth time of asking as on the first. I can’t list all the highly variable comedians to whom the strictures here apply but you know the kind of people I am writing about – Whitehouse, Lucas, Henry, Tate, Enfield – all of whom have done some work that is very nearly brilliant (usually more in concept and initial impact of execution than in any sustained level of working), but much more that is mere treading water. Coogan is the one who (along with David Walliams) interests me least. Alan Partridge seemed the dullest kind of running character with the weakest material – what kind of a show-stopping catchphrase is “Ah-ha!”? And if that’s (ah-ha) the point then it’s still only pointed the once and not exactly funny even the first time. You can perhaps argue on paper that Partridge always trotting it out is what makes it funny but only those who have willingly suspended belief (and critical faculty) can continue to enter into the spirit of the joke every time, behaving as if they are as deep-dyed wallies as Partridge is supposed to be. That is the definition of a comic dead end. Paul and Pauline Calf are less original creations and only intermittently successful, depending entirely on the script of the moment. Coogan is a passable actor but it’s hard to see him keeping his place in international movie-making unless he’s exceptionally lucky with projects that are brought to him.


Big Mc: News in Bun (Fry's not illustrated)

Trevor McDonald: Sir Trev always seemed to me to possess a sort of parody of gravitas, delivering the news as if at some level he heartily disapproved of most of it. Of course, he was the head honcho of News at Ten when it was in full decline, which was bad luck for him, save insofar as he contributed to that decline. What I couldn’t sanction was how, when editors had some grand occasion and put McDonald in as anchor, he consistently failed to rise to the occasion, neither able to improvise interestingly or authoritatively nor (worse) smart enough to conduct impromptu interviews with any degree of dash or resource. If he was cast as the Richard Dimbleby of the 1990s, he failed completely.

And who should be the twentieth candidate? How about Nick Ordinary, the man who brought blokeishness (and lists!) to the hitherto literary book? At one point in his highly-regarded novel High Fidelity, the hero describes the other guests at a dinner party vis-à-vis himself thus: “they have smart jobs and I have a scruffy job, they are rich and I am poor, they are self-confident and I am incontinent, they do not smoke and I do, they have opinions and I have lists”. This must be what commends these books to the kind of bloke who follows football, still has all his old vinyl albums and regularly throws beer down his neck in the pub, but who is sufficiently conscious that the nature of this life-style is unattractive to most desirable women that he actually reads books. Presumably, this too intrigues the women who seek to comprehend such a bloke. None of them has opinions but they do have lists. That the relationship between writer and reader should have dwindled so low makes me despair for the future of the novel. We want the legacy of Trollope and the Brontës, Arnold Bennett and Elizabeth Bowen, Ian McEwan and Beryl Bainbridge built on, not demolished. My edition of High Fidelity quotes that celebrated taste-maker for blokes, Tony Parsons: “Made me laugh out loud more than any book I can remember”. He’s not read Tristram Shandy, then.


Titchmarsh among fans

Or Alan Titchycock, the obsequious cardigan who virtually singlehanded invented the lingua franca of modern broadcasting – banter – and who slithers easily from gardening programmes to writing potboiler novels to conducting interviews with unchallenging guests while (so it is said) driving a certain kind of middle aged, myopic, housebound woman wild with lust?

Or Marathon Dimblebore, the longest-serving chair of Any Questions? I listen in spite of him. His style is highly interventionist (“hold on a second”). His verbal formulae are often curious; for instance, he ends his introduction of the guests, having summarised the last, with: “He’s the fourth member of our panel”. If it were me thus described, I would say, when first called upon: “I hardly have the temerity to open my mouth, having been firmly put in my place as the fourth member of the panel”. As is his wont, Dimbleby would then launch into a long-winded explanation as to why I should not feel less than an equal member of the panel and I should respond: “All that being said, the fourth is certainly not the first in any language or culture that I have encountered”. And Dimblebore would be off again.

There it is, a pretty persuasive list of dim stars, I’m sure you will agree. But do not, I beg you, feel that you are browbeaten into agreeing. Put in your twopenn’orth, do, by clicking on the Comment button just above the labels list that attaches itself to this particular posting, which requires the merest of scrolls downwards. In the few days after The Guardian’s teledrama list, there was a thread of some 1500 comments on the on-line version. I feel sure we can match that, maybe even trump it. Go for it.

And, while we do this, let’s remember good people – like Kate McGarrigle who died yesterday – and remember them for all the joy they have brought to the world.