Giles Coren, Fuck Off
Today, according to his Twitter feed, Giles Coren (or an oil painting of a man much more handsome) is coming to Liverpool. He has elicited much sweating and salivation from some in our city. He comes to dine. But, he has a caveat - it must be somewhere edgy, not ‘trad’ (apparently, the Italian Club Fish sounds a bit ‘trad’ “All all big pepper pots, red tablecloths and flabby lasagne” - incidentally, how hil-arious is that tweet? The man should be writing funnies for the News Hudlines) And it must be a short walk from the station - one assumes because he has no serviceable backbone.
Oh, talking of which…
Coren must eat in somewhere ‘Spunky, not poncy.’ Well, give him his due - he knows all about spunky - recall his spunky letter to the minions at the Times:
“I don’t really like people tinkering with my copy for the sake of tinkering. I do not enjoy the suggestion that you have a better ear or eye for how I want my words to read than I do… And the way you avoid this kind of fuck up is by not changing a word of my copy without asking me, okay? it’s easy. Not. A. Word. Ever.”
Giles was pissed off because the subs had changed ‘where to go for a nosh’ to ‘where to go for nosh’. He continued…
“And you’ve fucking stripped it out like a pissed Irish plasterer restoring a renaissance fresco and thinking jesus looks shit with a bear so plastering over it. You might as well have removed the whole paragraph. I mean, fucking christ, don’t you read the copy? (note nice, casual racist slur thrown in for good effect, readers? The plasterer is Irish. Not from Mr Coren’s tribe.)
“And, just out of interest, I’d like whoever made that change to email me and tell me why. Tell me the exact reasoning which led you to remove that word from my copy.”
The subs replied:
“Sub-editing is a noble profession. It is also a thankless one - particularly when your writers call you a “useless cunt”. None of this, however, can excuse your nasty, bullying, “know your place, you insignificant little fuckwit” e-mail. Yes, it’s funny, in a way that pieces that use “fuck”, “shit” and “cunt” so liberally often can be, but, please - someone made a mistake. They surely had no intention of sabotaging your deathless prose. So you don’t like what happened to your piece - have a word with your editor. The hapless sub will no doubt already have been soundly thrashed and had their dictionary privileges removed.”
The irony? The man’s about as funny as foie gras, and about 1/100th as witty as his father. And he’s coming here to give us, what, some crumbs of comfort? A future review in that tumbleweed connection of half-realised rejoinders, his flaccid column? Or is he en route to signing that book he’s mercilessly flogging around the remainder shops of the UK? Perhaps he’s up here because, well, it’s our turn. The nationals ‘do’ the north every couple of years, so we’re just gonna have to sit tight and brace. And if it’s found that, yes, we’re Northern, and are deserving of no more than flabby lasagna and big pepper pots (does he mean grinders?) then, dear readers, we must thank Mr Coren for being so kind as to let us know. If we’re lucky, we might glean some amusing Mise-en-scène from his journey up here. Surely to god he’ll get some mileage from an overweight family tucking into a Whopper before the train’s left Euston? He might even encounter a cheeky Scouser at Lime Street, to weave into comedy gold from his Kentish Town office.
What’s fascinating is the spectacle of many of our Twitter followers begging him to try this restaurant, or that restaurant: of course, many of them are PR types, who’d sell what little soul they had for a tepid review in the Times, but others, well, their unseemly scramble to buddy up to Coren - a man whose racist sloganeering (‘the Polacks’ can ‘clear off’ out of England is one of his milder anti-Polish tirades) falls somewhere between Richard Littlejohn and Nick Griffin. You can read more about his tiresome tirades, against women in a particularly insightful Daily Mail column, here.
What’s happening here is the awkward machinations of a posh boy trying to be spunky, not trad. But failing lamentably. Like the flabby lasagna-faced clown he is. For all his railing against lacklustre grub, his column is a tedious table d’hôte of half-baked constructs, served lazily lukewarm and lacking any real nutritional value. The format? A side order of self deprecation, a dollop of lazy observation and lashings of conceited coulis. It’s the journalistic equivalent of MSG. An hour later, and you’re famished.
So when he acts like a latter day Galloping Gourmet and plucks one lucky Liverpool twitterer out from obscurity to be his luncheon partner (“come if you’re an interesting woman, not if you’re a boring man. anything in between is fine” - oh LULZ Giles, stop, you’re killing us…) I sort of weep a little for humanity.
Coren’s a man who gets paid handsomely to put others down - that’s fair enough, the world needs more of this, please (and he’s bang on the money when he says blogging is an “…activity that requires no more skill or aptitude than you’d find in any weaned primate”).
Trouble is, the man’s got a skin thinner than a Tesco Value banger: say anything against his column on Twitter, or in response to his half-arsed prose, and he goes off like an over-zealously primed Krug at the Frontline Club. And, in his moody little paroxysms he conflates sweary words with wit, smart social observation with snobbery, atonement with bigotry and writing with wank.
Yet look at how giddy Liverpool gets at his arrival. Here’s a man, who swears, is employed to make Sue whatshername look even funnier on the telly (even when he’s wearing comedy trousers, the dolly grip still gets more laughs), and writes words for a proper paper, and we’re like hand-dived scallops, quivering in his clammy fist.
Let’s hope the city, or the waitress, doesn’t disappoint him, or the luncheon atmosphere might be ruined by his favourite lady put down: ‘go fuck yourself you barren old hag.’ You can read more of the man’s bon-mots here.
Yeah, fuck off Giles. We know where to eat. We know how to eat. We know what to eat. If we had to wait for instructions from the London frontline before we tucked in, we’d be as dead as artisan burgers are this year. How terribly trad.
Sorry, I’m a blogger, that’s all the wit I have at my disposal. And my cuppa soup (Parochial and Ham) is on the boil.
