Glendas To Bitching Stations!

[Update at end of post]

The long weekend of Diamond Jubilee celebrations continues, and after the cold and wet Thames river Pageant yesterday, given the lack of other news from around the UK, has come the posse of pundits in Phil Space mode giving anyone who will listen a right Royal shed load of earache. Nowhere is this more apparent than at the empire of the legendarily foul mouthed Paul Dacre.

Oi c***, don't call my f***ing pundits Glendas

Here, with military precision, a twin pincer movement of bitching scratchiness has been executed by two of Dacre’s foremost Glendas: step forward queen of the gratuitous hatchet job Jan Moir and antipodean irritant Amanda Bloody Platell. These two fine examples of the kind of journalism right thinking people could well do without were dispatched to deal with dress code infringement – and the hated BBC.

And it’s clear that La Platell, who goes after Kate for wearing a red dress – what? – has drawn the short straw. Not even invoking the names of Tulisa Contostavlos and Kim Kardashian could save her catty outburst. Poor Mandy is in a minority of one: almost everyone else who offered up an opinion had only praise for the newest Royal, more correctly the Duchess of Cambridge.

Kate shouldn't wear red - that's my job!

Ms Moir on the other hand is batting on a far firmer track, as the Mail’s readership has been conditioned over the years to despise anything coming out of the hated Beeb. Her job – of suggesting that David Dimbleby should have been wheeled out for the occasion – was made easier by the presence in the Corporation’s studio of unbriefed and unrehearsed sundry idiot Matt Baker.

Or should that  be Matt Baaaaaiiker? Hell’s teeth, I’m all for allowing the full range of UK regional accents on to the screen, but his grated – or perhaps that should be graaaited – badly. Was he just trying too hard? I mean, I’ve worked in York, where they say “Ur nur”, “Purstal vurting” and “Curstal erursion”, so mistakenly thought I’d taken on board a relatively high accent pain threshold.

Misery Moir not cheering up any time soon

But Ms Moir is mistaken on the Dimbleby argument. Yesterday wasn’t a Royal wedding, and certainly not a funeral – it was something for everyone to supposedly enjoy (although that enjoyment was not always easy to find, as Diamond Geezer found out). Yes, as I noted yesterday, there were gaps in the BBC coverage – inevitable with a live broadcast – and there were with anyone else’s.

And not everyone got their facts straight, but again, for the Daily Mail to whine about others not doing their research when they employ so many for whom fact checking is something for which they’d first put traps down really is coming it. Jan Moir accuses the Corporation of sycophancy while missing the minor problem with her argument: that her paper did rather more of it.

Still, what’s a little hypocrisy between Glendas? Claws away, girls!


[UPDATE 6 June 1650 hours: having carped incessantly at the BBC since the weekend, the Mail's knocking copy has borne fruit, with 2,400 complaints about its coverage. That compares to the 38,000 that the Dacre press scored after they went after Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand over Sachsgate. Many of the complaints will have been from the Mail's more gullible readers.

Still, the numbers are used to justify such ridiculous headlines as "Twitter user writes BBC should find the person responsible and 'sack them'", and carping about running the credits over the end of the Diamond Jubilee Concert (no doubt had the Corporation stayed with the broadcast, the Mail would have kicked them for running the main evening news bulletin late - it was more than five minutes over, anyway).

And there has been an imaginary "snub to Rolf". Did anyone notice? Well, two Twitter users did. Veteran presenter Rolf Harris "filled in" while Stevie Wonder was setting up, but then had to stop his "filling in" so that the main event could go on. These things happen, and, again, Dacre and his goons would have been first to whinge about late running.

The dredging up of Twitter content from the general public really is desperate. More than 17 million watched the concert. The idea that the BBC should possess powers so magical that every one of them would go away totally happy, and that nobody would find something to quibble about, is absurd. But that is what the Mail wants to happen. Such is Paul Dacre's inner anger and resentment. Perhaps they turned him down for a job once]