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don't want to see Jordan over me breakfast,

rolling out of a pub with the tits

out.

Who is Jordan?

Who is he?

I thought he was a country.

What does become a little bit of a

pisser is at 8 o'clock at night,

you can't find anything you want to watch.

Lesbian, three in a bed, S&M action.

I don't watch this shit.

There's a strange man on CNF who talks

as though he's gargling his own sick.

Silly little twat, right, little bigoted nit.

Fucking never want to read that again.

It's ugly, it's vicious, it's spiteful.

But do I read it?

Of course I read it.

The 35 to 54 year old group of

grumpy old men grew up when the Times

had no pictures on the front page and

the Guardian was printed in Manchester and had

proper writers.

The sun was something celestial and illuminating and

the mirror reflected real life.

Then there was the BBC with a mission

to inform, educate and entertain us.

Whatever happened to that idea?

Today we've got hundreds of TV channels and

thousands of radio stations.

We've got way too many newspapers and magazines

with too many pages full of too many

air-headed columnists spouting off with their endless

empty-headed drivel.

My car's been broken into, hence a thousand

words on the state of the criminal justice

system and the ineptitude of the police.

My experience as being a father for the

first time and watching the miracle of birth.

Fucking never want to read that again.

And my wobbly shopping trolley.

And now for the average grumpy old man.

The first thing you'll probably hear in the

morning is John Humphreys ripping the heart and

lungs out of some hapless politician who'd prefer

to be able to ruin our lives without

the inconvenience of having to account for their

actions.

He's the Home Secretary.

You're not entitled to do that.

But he's also representative of the people too.

And just when there's a risk that you

might start feeling sorry for the politician you're

interrupted by the newspapers dropping through the letterbox.

Now time was your daily newspaper used to

include news.

Quaint thought, isn't it?

But now with all that constant radio news

and 24-hour TV news and online news

and newsflashes on your mobile the papers don't

stand a chance.

Printed six hours earlier they're always out of

date.

But ever resourceful they can usually find something

the broadcasters have overlooked.

I mean I do love the tabloids.

I mean just a few months ago there

was that Australian man and I've only read

this in the tabloids blew his nose and

shot two thirds of his frontal lobes out

of his brain.

That's fantastic and that's why I just...

He had hay fever.

And his last thought was, fuck.

Nobody knows what to believe anymore because they

make so much up.

They do so many things that I'm sure

they were, well we'll print this.

How many more copies are we going to

sell?

Does that justify what we're going to get

sued for?

If it does we'll print it.

They're all trying to generate sensation.

They're trying to generate an emotional reaction.

So they have to mix it.

They have to make it as horrifying, as

amusing, as titillating, whatever, as they possibly can.

Now time was, if you were a grumpy,

you could at least buy the top people's

newspaper and remain loftily detached from all that

sleaze.

Nowadays it seems there's no place to hide.

People can have the superficial choice between the

Daily Prat or the Daily Tat, but actually

they get in the same rubbish.

Often if you look at page three of

the Daily Telegraph and the inside page of

The Sun, they're the same stories.

Most of them appear to me to want

a very, very simple, lazy story.

That means they write about two things, nationalism

in one form or another, introversion, Brits are

best, all that stuff.

And the other one is sex.

Yes, this is what passes for journalism these

days.

The bilious outpourings of venomous tosh from editors

with extremist views, or half-literate journalists hyping

up the sex lives of anyone making the

mistake of passing in front of the public's

attention for a nanosecond.

If you read on the front of that

paper that so-and-so has done it

eight times, was absolutely insatiable, you know that

they're either on extraordinary drugs, some of them

might be coloured blue from what I hear,

or that they've done a deal with the

paper to be made to look as though

they're naughty boys, but at least they're great

lovers.

So you take that constellation out of it.

And all you know is that if that

paper then prints a story about someone being

hung like a hamster and useless in bed,

well, they were bang to rights anyway and

the paper didn't care.

I woke up the other day and tried

to remember if maybe I have actually had

sex with David Beckham, because there's so much

in the papers about it, everything is about

it, I thought, well, maybe I must have

done as well then.

And no-one is exempt from the fearless

investigations by Fleet Street's finest, not even people

as endearing and inoffensive as our grumpies.

I had one occasion way back in the

80s when a girl sold a story of

one of the typical My Mad Nights of

Passion sort of thing.

I mean, I had, like, press camping outside

my house and it was a total non

-story.

How it ever came, however they took up

so much space in the paper, I could

never understand it.

I mean, the worst thing I remember, I

was just walking up the hill from the

cookery school and this guy jumped out of

a car with a telephoto lens, started taking

pictures of me, you know, and you just

feel like you're on the run.

I cannot imagine that a tabloid newspaper sells

one extra copy because on page two is

a really nasty, totally untrue story about me.

Who the hell buys a newspaper because there's

a story about Kinnock?

The tabloids largely leave me very much alone

because they haven't got a fucking clue who

I am.

Gary Bushall once said that I was a

disease and the only cure for it was

amputation at the neck.

And he said that I should be stuffed

with gelignite and ignited.

Gary Bushall.

The only time I'll ever appear on anything,

he'll slag me off.

But then I'll get my own back.

I've got a feud with him.

I've slagged him off in a number of

publications.

Silly little twat, right, little bigoted nit.

You know, he's one of those people, one

of those people who are reporting on TV

but really want to be in it, want

to be on TV themselves.

And he was always writing about comedians and

he wanted to be a comedian.

And I saw his act, he was absolutely

bloody awful, you know, he was shit.

There's no doubt that British tabloid newspapers are

world-class when it comes to personality destruction.

When they get someone in their sights and

they go for them, believe me, they get

them.

And it's not nice to watch.

It's ugly, it's vicious, it's spiteful.

But do I read it?

Of course I read it.

I love it.

And since these days the weekend papers come

in 16 sections and weigh about three and

three quarter hundredweight, there's a lot of space

to fill.

Thereby providing a decent living for all those

very talented wordsmiths of whom nothing would otherwise

ever have been heard.

If you're a columnist, 52 weeks of the

year, well, 38 in this case, cos 80

is usually away, but some of us who

work for a living, 52 weeks of the

year, you have to come up with something

that's happened.

Sometimes you wake up and think, I haven't

got out of bed all week, I've done

absolutely jack shit.

So you've got to come up with something,

and then you notice that your daughter's bought

something from the Argos catalogue and there's a

thousand words.

And it doesn't really matter whether you're talking

about your garden or your children or your

dog or whatever.

All of which, I have to say, in

my time as a columnist, I went on

about all the fucking time, cos what else

do you write about?

I was just amazed that anybody had ever

bothered to pay me to do it.

People assume that their lives are interesting merely

by having written them down, and they're not.

Tom Stoppard, the playwright, I think he got

it just right.

He said that journalists think that the most

important and most interesting aspect of a story

is the fact that they've turned up to

cover it.

And, unfortunately, I think most of us in

the media suffer from that.

Meanwhile, back at the breakfast table, our grumpies

get to choose between two very well-turned

-out but far too wholesome and well-scrubbed

people on a red sofa.

Or then there's Penny Smith, this morning wearing

a nightie.

As mad as a box of frogs, but

nice to wake up to.

Chance would be a fine thing.

Looks warm and cosy, doesn't it?

All those potted flowers.

So why on earth does this poor woman

have to stand outside in a blizzard?

Smack bang in the middle of nowhere because

traffic's being held up on roads like the

one behind her.

Where on earth is this woman?

She could be anywhere.

And is.

And, believe it or not, this bloke is

standing outside Heathrow Airport.

What does he know, standing there, that he

wouldn't know just as well indoors?

And what's he doing standing outside the Prime

Minister's house?

Apart from having a very bad hair day.

Nothing's happened here for eight hours and nothing's

going to happen for the next three.

Or could it be because otherwise we viewers

might be too stupid to realise that this

is a story about politics?

Well, the key point here is that they're

outside number ten.

I'm outside number ten.

We're all outside number ten.

We want to hear from somebody who's inside

number ten.

And since these days we can't apparently wait

five minutes to learn that the Edinburgh bin

men might be planning to strike in three

months' time, we have to have rolling news.

The only trouble is that mostly the news

doesn't so much roll as dribble.

Quite often there isn't enough news to roll

with.

So you've got large spells where nothing's going

on and you're listening to an interview with

some geezer that means nothing, has nothing to

say and you don't care about.

But unfortunately if you're called News 24 or

Sky News and everybody knows it's round the

clock, you've got to be on.

Rolling news about bugger all is just a

complete waste of time, really.

News does not happen, interesting news does not

happen regularly every ten minutes around the world.

There's a strange man on CNF who talks

as though he's gargling his own sick.

But if you just sit back and let

it wash over you, you know, you can

watch people being murdered and butchered and blown

up and all that and it's somehow a

distance from you and the more stuff you

get, the more you don't really participate in

it.

So lest we should realise that every day

reporting is, well, every day, everything has to

be hyped up to make it seem unusual

so that every day when a tragedy happens

is that fateful day.

Every insight is profound.

No investigation can be anything less than special.

Every fire is an inferno, every rescue heroic,

every death from cancer follows a brave fight

and every crisis is serious.

What other sort of crisis is there for

heaven's sake?

And we'll be back a little later.

I wish Hugh Edwards would say, right, we're

going live now to newsrooms in your area

and I'd love him to be sitting with

his feet on his desk and just go,

nothing, absolutely nothing's happened.

Nothing that you'd be interested in has happened

here today.

But instead of which, there's always a garden

fence that's blown over and always an old

lady who has to be made to be

angrier about it than she really is.

How angry are you about this, that they're

closing the community centre?

I'm very angry!

Old sow, come on.

Everything we hear on the media is hyped

up beyond recognition and so everybody around you

is talking like they've just fallen out of

the cast of an American soap.

Young people now, you hear them say, oh,

my God, what's happened?

Has someone attacked you?

Has someone shot you?

Oh, my God, this mask is the wrong

colour.

People over-emphasise now, they sort of lose

the capacity to express genuine emotion.

Where does I'm so not happy come from?

It makes me weak to even think about

it.

This so thing, which people use and think

of as a kind of wit, it started

out, I believe, with Roseanne Barr who said

to a writer, you are so fired.

I'm at it 24-7, 24 hours a

day, seven days a week.

You think, oh, you did the abbreviation, don't

then do the whole thing.

No, sir, that's not going to be possible.

I'm going to need for you to sit

down.

I'm going to need for you to sit

down.

That's the bastardisation of the English language and

they're responsible.

I'm going to...

Sir, you're going to need...

I'm going...

Just stop using words where you don't need

to.

Time your deliverables.

What does time your deliverables mean?

I have no idea.

What about heroes?

The use of the word hero to describe

a footballer, doesn't that drive you mad?

Some bloke who's been on Emmerdale Farm, it

turns out, is a superstar.

Or even a star is, frankly, going a

bit too far for some of these people.

I mean, you know, someone who's read the

news on Balder TV is down as a

star and they've got their picture in Hello

magazine, you know, and let's go and look

round their house.

These nothing people, why, I'm not interested.

Superstar, megastar.

How many megastars are there in the world?

Robert Redford, David Bowie, Madonna, the Queen...

You're making a list now.

See, I hate lists.

I hate lists more than I hate heroes,

superstars and megastars.

Robert Redford.

They're megastars and yet somebody scores, kicks an

inflated sheep's pancreas...

Why is Robert Redford more of a megastar

than David Beckham?

Yes, where once our heroes were Kennedy or

Gandhi or Neil Armstrong, today, well, let's just

say the currency is slightly devalued.

David Beckham quite clearly is a celebrity.

I mean, he is at the peak of

celebrity-dom, isn't he?

Because he can kick a football quite well.

And his wife, because she can't sing very

well, is also at the peak of celebrity

-dom.

What is it?

What is celebrity-ness?

The star is somebody who's on daytime television

doing, you know...

He's the host of...

Whose turd is this?

We photograph celebrity lavatories and you have to

guess whose faeces this is, you know.

I mean, if that exists already, that programme,

then I'm really sorry I didn't realise it.

If it doesn't exist, I'd like to copyright

it and have it on Sky 52 as

soon as possible.

And they said, do you know the name

of any other celebrities?

I said, look, there's just one thing I

should tell you.

I am not a celebrity.

There's considerable doubt about whether I'm a writer.

I'm certainly not, I repeat, not a celebrity.

And please don't call me a celebrity, because

it's a sort of offensive term in my

eyes, because it doesn't mean anything.

Tomorrow, people will look at you and they'll

go, oh, Jeremy, I saw you last night.

Who's that funny little bloke you were on

with?

Yeah, that little Indian bloke.

And they'll have no idea.

And nobody will stop me in a shop

and go, all right, all right, it's you,

isn't it?

I know, but when Operation Orr catches up

with you, then you've really had it.

In fact, so uninterested are our grumpies in

celebrity that sometimes a whole cultural phenomenon can

pass them by entirely.

Who is Jordan?

Who is he?

What?

Who is he?

Sorry?

Who the hell is Katie Price?

Jordan with the breasts.

Right.

I thought it was a country.

When you say Jordan to me, I think

of a tourist in Petra with bloody great

big tits.

I mean, I don't want to see Jordan

over me breakfast in the gossip column rolling

out of a pub with her tits out.

Being an empty-headed, big-titted fool, that's

her job.

And, you know, she's prepared to do that

job.

Whereas other people are that but pretend otherwise.

I mean, I think there's a kind of

refreshing honesty about Jordan.

What do I think of Jordan?

I think of a woman who's been extremely

clever at manipulating people and press brilliantly.

And I don't mean that in a nasty

way.

I think she's been really clever and good

luck to her.

Just as a personal preference, I like things

to be natural.

I mean, what do men really want?

I mean, do they?

I mean, it's that big.

I mean, what would you do with them?

You know, a decent handful.

Thank you very much.

Not so you've got to get a kind

of JCB to move them about.

A vivid image, Arthur, for which we're all

no doubt grateful.

So, of course, like everything else, it's all

the fault of the telly.

Acres and acres of programmes produced for halfwits

by halfwits celebrating ignorance.

And we wonder why the kids can't write

a letter or hold a conversation.

It's easy to slag off, you know, reality

TV and so I might as well do

it.

They have discovered they could spend 2 million

an hour producing a great Elizabethan drama and

get slightly less audience than they would do

if they did Big Brother, which involves pointing

a load of cameras at people farting, sleeping

and doing something really dramatic, eating a bowl

of cornflakes.

They'll do anything to get on the telly

and people will go out, rip all their

clothes off, wrestle with crocodiles, have sex with

gorillas, anything to draw attention to themselves on

telly.

You know, you put like a fishbowl over

their head and fill it up with centipedes

and insects and I think, how is this

real?

I mean, where's the reality?

Whose reality is this?

There's nothing about these programmes that seems to

reflect any reality that I've ever encountered.

The best way to punish the contestants on

Big Brother would be you do it all

for real, as normal, do everything as normal

but then just don't put it on the

television.

And when they come running out, there's an

empty car park and a bloke sweeping up

saying, they've all gone home, mate.

This may contain strong language and have scenes

of a sexual nature and you think, well,

that's...

So why don't they do it on every

programme, you know?

And now the weather forecast.

This may contain strong language and scenes of

a sexual nature.

Hang on, darling, let's watch the weather forecast.

If it's a choice between club reps show

their tits, I'd rather watch Hetty Hayrop Investigates

or whatever it is.

Oh, no, what's that one that's always on?

Murder, she wrote, yeah.

The Games, that was the one for me

when I sat with a mouth like a

guppy, when they said, and here she comes

now, the next contestant, and it's Victoria...

Oh, God, Victoria Harvey, they're really scraping the

barrel.

But no, Victoria Harvey's sister.

Someone who's not famous as sister was a

celebrity on a show to see if she

could jump over something.

Now they've all got the same haircut, the

same short skirt, the same attitude, that's the

one that gets me.

You've got to have attitude.

And all attitude means is just being a

bit snotty.

He's got no skill.

Oh, she's got attitude, yeah.

What does that mean?

She's rude.

Oh, right, great, that's a marvellous thing then.

All the programme makers have got to find

a way every few seconds to make it

exciting!

Like I did then, did you see what

I did?

And respect, you've got to have respect all

the time, you must be respected.

Or, you know, everyone's looking for respect above

all else.

You know, to be honest, I don't mind

if some people don't respect me.

Fuck them.

Yes, our grumpies remember the days when the

news was read by serious men sitting behind

desks who could scarcely keep their toupees on

straight.

Proper newsreaders.

Nowadays, these poor devils have to walk sideways

remembering to glance back and forth at pictures

you know they can't see so you can

get the most out of the, hey, wow,

graphics.

Poor old Sir Trevor.

Looks about as comfortable as he would if

they'd dressed him up as a Bay City

roller.

And you just...

What's happened?

What's this all about?

And you think...

Gradually it dawns on you that somebody must

have said, I've got an idea that will

really make the news, the news-viewing experience,

much improved.

We'll take your desk away.

And this is something that happens just across

the board, I mean, almost every experience in

some way or other is just puzzling and

you can't see how people thought this was

an improvement.

But that's enough complaining about the programmes.

Let's complain about the adverts.

These days, they cost more than the shows

they get in the way of.

And if we're lucky, we even get a

little story.

Four blokes playing squash.

And then one of them says, yes, I've

been headhunted by the bald.

I've doubled my turnover to up to 125

mil, you know.

And then they're all in the car after.

So one of them hasn't spoken, he says,

What did you say you did?

And I wish he'd say, I steal cars.

But he doesn't.

He says, I didn't.

And you think, well, why are you driving

this fucking cheap Japanese car then?

And lest we should be accused of sneering

only at commercial television, let's have a good

hard bite at the hand that feeds us.

The issue for the BBC is that they're

a load of bloody left-wing turds, right?

Not paid very well, right?

They like the politics.

It's as though a television channel was being

produced at Oxford, right?

They enjoy the politics of it as much

as they enjoy what's actually produced at the

end of the bloody day.

The thing about working for the BBC that

really drives me crazy is that you have

to be so reasonable.

At all times, they expect you to be

fair and balanced.

And sometimes being fair and balanced is so

ludicrous that it just kills the story.

Ah, yes, the need for balance, which obliges

us, though otherwise, of course, we wouldn't, to

extend our ungenerous remarks to those purveyors of

elegant satellite dishes which now grace and enhance

just about every home in the land.

The message came back from the great beyond

It's 57 channels and nothing on 57 channels

and nothing on I must admit, I've got

the all-singing, all-dancing satellite with 496

channels.

What does become a little bit of a

pisser is at eight o'clock at night,

you can't find anything you want to watch.

I could never get the hang of it,

because when you've got that many choices, there's

always this feeling that there must be something

better than this somewhere else.

The Shopping Channel, it's bad for you.

I recommend, you know, that's worse than smoking,

in a way.

But, yeah, you get to know some of

these little people who appear to be obsessed

with their new egg-frying machine or something.

And they love it, don't they?

And there's a half-hour programme about it.

And people in the audience going, Wow!

This new knife can cut onions twice as

fast as the last.

Oh, wow!

My life is complete!

We have a programme about scorpions having it

off.

It's sex in the dust.

Next on National Geographic, sex, claw, fang, talon.

In the old days, it was Oxford Scientific

Films present the reproductive cycle of the higher

arachnids.

And they have auditions for new presenters on

cable TV.

And there's just all these kids who say,

Well, I've got loads of personality, whereas the

truth is that they just drink too much

Sunny Delight and think their navel will make

them popular.

And then the researchers will say to all

these kids, Kids, just get out there and

be yourselves, ignoring the fact that they wouldn't

be there if they didn't want to be

somebody else.

But the worst thing about the media, absolutely

the worst thing, is that it's so very

far up its own bottom, it can't get

enough of itself.

If it's not giving itself prizes and awards

for the best bit of grim and bloody

news in some country full of poor people,

it's the most excruciating moment in a badly

written soap or the most egregious rip-off

of an existing reality show.

Every award ceremony is hell.

And they're mostly hell because of you.

Because you turn up and they say, And

tonight, to present the awards, we have...

you, Jonathan Ross, Angus Deaton...

Frank Skinner, Stephen Fry...

Some other noddy off the telly.

I'll sit through two hours of an awards

ceremony just for that one wonderful moment when

a celeb falls flat on their face and

makes a total arse of themselves.

We love it when we win them.

Of course, when we don't win them, they're

meaningless trinkets and we wouldn't dignify the occasion

with our presence.

But when we're up for an award, we're

straight up there, black tie, grinning, top hole.

But you might think it odd that we

who work in TV should make a programme

about how bloody awful it is.

But don't think you out there in viewing

land escape criticism, sitting out there with your

feet up, feeling all smug and superior.

All we do is give you more of

the stuff you actually watch.

You read and watch rubbish, so you get

more rubbish.

We're like those supermarket shelf stackers.

You buy the stuff and we come out

at night and fill the shelves up again.

If you really watched those highbrow programmes, as

you say you do, we'd still be in

the golden age.

Or is that just our sad, sentimental and

fading memories?

There was no golden age.

Because what came on before Civilisation on BBC

Two was the black and white minstrel show.

There was no fucking golden age of television.

And that really is a nonsense.

If you take a whole decade and you

pick out The Likely Lads, Cathy Come Home,

The Ascent of Man and one other thing,

you've got five hours of television.

From a decade?

Out of a decade.

There's more good television made now and shown

now than there has ever been.

But there is also, consummately, a fuck of

a lot more dross, most of it presented

by him.

And probably an awful bit of it we're

now taking part in.

Why does everything have to be so quick

all the time, relentlessly fast-paced, in order

that you can sit down and watch TV

that's relentlessly fast and full of noise and

fury?

And it's all full of noise and fury

and it all does signify nothing.

And people are petrified of the idea of

one person just sitting down and doing nothing,

not eating, not talking, not watching the TV,

not listening to their iPod or their Walkman,

not looking at adverts, not hearing adverts that's

boomed out from somewhere else, not avoiding people

coming by with leaflets.

They hate the idea that someone could just

sit there quietly on their own.

The beast in me Is caged by frail

and fragile bars Restless by day and by

night Rants and rages at the stars God

help the beast in me Lovely.

The beast in me