The Daily Mail’s turgid and talentless churnalist Richard Littlejohn may be trousering almost a million notes a year, but he is not a happy bunny. Lounging by the pool behind the gates of his secure Florida compound, Dick is missing something: it’s called the limelight. Yes, he’s no longer on the telly. So whose fault is this?
BBC, guv? Gays and lefties, innit?!?
Not his own, that’s for sure: after all, his legendarily foul mouthed editor still values this dubious talent, so the TV bods should do too. That means the dastardly BBC is to blame. And the gays. Dick has a problem with gays. So his overlong rant today has the Corporation in its sight. And anyone working for them. Because he isn’t.
And the first target, inevitably, is Doctor Who spin-off Torchwood, because it featured an intimate gay scene. Dick knows where the problem lies: “this is what you get when you hire a proselytising homosexual like Russell T Davies ... he comes with an agenda”. But he has already sold the pass: “what on earth has sex got to do with a science fiction show?” he protests.
That successive occupants of Doctor Who’s Tardis have had at least one young female “companion” has eluded Littlejohn, as has the thought that the plot was not what made Barbarella the stuff of sci-fi legend. And that’s before we get on to those early Star Trek uniforms. But go on, Dick, identify the culprits for us.
Yes, it’s the Guardian. They’re part of the conspiracy: “BBC drama, like its news output, is always refracted through the prism [looks like the thesaurus fell off the bookshelf and he read it before putting it back] of the metropolitan prejudices held by the people who work there and take their world view from the pages of the Guardian” he tells. A “metropolitan prejudice”? What that? Move on before anyone asks.
Welcome to Littlejohn country
And move on he does, quickly dismissing Life On Mars as “a condescending New Labour remake of The Sweeney”, before attacking the Beeb’s idea of “reality”: “If ‘reality’ was what they were after in EastEnders, the Queen Vic would have been put out of business by teetotal Islamic fundamentalists and all the women in the cast would be wearing the hijab”. Odd view of London you get from Florida.
But Dick’s got suggestions for the BBC: “insist that news and documentary programmes use both imperial and metric measurements ... weather forecasters should be forced to give temperatures in Fahrenheit as well as Sellotape [that’s intended to be hilariously funny]”. And he misses Question Time.
We know this because he wants the programme to have an audience “which doesn’t look as if it has been dragged out of a students’ union bar via a diversity czar’s wet dream”. But fortunately the rant ends there, as “it’s time for my nap”.
It’s good to see that Dick is still up to speed on his rhyming slang.
“what on earth has sex got to do with a science fiction show?”
ReplyDeleteTo be fair, I said the same thing about Matrix reloaded. In that respect I actually agree with him.
Though my own feelings on the subject aren't motivated by whether it was a gay or straight sex scene, which I suspect probably isn't the case with Littlejohn...