5 Celebs I'd Like To Smack In The Mouth

This is the meme blogging was invented for. This is the meme that needs no invitation to participate. Since my first encounter with this meme on Friday over at Very Bored In Catalunya, I have since seen it spread like virtual smallpox through the blogging community. I knew it would only be a matter of time before I'd get infected and would need to scratch myself free of it online.

I was tempted to tone down the sentiments of the title. 5 Celebrities I'd Like To Punch / Hit / Twat sounded... well. A bit too violent. A bit too close to the tick boxes on the Government's anti terrorism laws. But 5 Celebrities I Don't Like Very Much sounded a bit weak. A bit wishy-washy. And at the end of the day a downright lie. 'Cos the celebrities I've named below do actually make me want to hit them. Repeatedly. And with an assortment of tools ranging from a tee iron to a Moulinex hand blender.

Sadly, coming to this party late some of the best celebs have already been named. So if you're wondering why Ricky Gervais isn't on my list it's because he's doing the rounds elsewhere. But just for the record: yes The Office was genius. So was Extras. But Ricky, your ego has bloated to the point where you are now just a cheap 'n' nasty, ungrateful, puerile little starfucker. You're an embarrassment.

Right. On with my official top 5 celebrities that make me gnash my teeth into rock salt.

Number 1) Eamonn Holmes.

I have been known to turn the telly off / over or just walk out of the room when this man appears on it. Eamonn is such a big cock that if someone one day was to bump him off the police would refer to it as spermicide. He oils himself over every show that he presents like a BP slick. His well of sparmy, self righteous, opinionated outpourings is totally uncappable. What annoys me most is the careful way he modulates his brogue so that he always appears right-on and "aren't you with me, boys and girls at home?" even when he is mouthing the most trite, absurd, chauvenist claptrap ever to infect UK daytime telly. How his wife doesn't stove his Frankenstein head in with a boom mic is beyond me. That woman needs a medal. Or a gun. Or a padded cell. Possibly all three.

Number 2) Glllian McKeith.

I have always maintained that this woman is a nasty piece of work. Recently she made a complete fool out of herself by appearing on I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here and screaming at absolutely everything. Comedy central. But she then appeared on daytime TV to try and defend her appalling performance. I have phobias, she wailed, phobias about insects, dirty water, mud, fish, oxygen, plimsoles, Australian accents, clean hair, body fat and I just didn't know anything at all about the show before I agreed to go on it because I live in an ivory tower made out of pure Actimel, please pity me, for I was brave... Bollocks. This woman has humiliated countless men and women on her so-called "health shows" before Channel 4 pulled the plug on them (round about the same time it was revealed that her so-called medical qualifications had been printed in the Church of Elvis Presley in Las Vegas). She forced morbidly obese people to stand in baths full of lard, forced them to confront a week's worth of food all in one go just to shame them into adopting her celery and nettle smoothies. These poor people who genuinely needed counselling before Gillian got her skeletal hands on them were reduced to sobbing wrecks. Sorry Gillian, but when encouraging people to adopt a healthier lifestyle I fail to see how destroying their self esteem can be of any benefit. And here is the argument to end all arguments. Gillian McKeith and Nigella Lawson are of a similar age. Who looks the healthiest to you? Enough said.

Number 3) Richard Madeley.

The Tim Nice But Dim of daytime telly. Though I suspect the Nice part is possibly not true. Richard is that creature commonly known as the "embarrassing dad". He tries to maintain his cool. He tries to maintain his street cred. He never acts his age. And like Eamonn above he always presents his verbal hiccups as being the height of reasonability, innit, and totally metrosexual new man-ish and I is in touch with me feminine side, innit, cos Judy won't let me anywhere near hers now the HRT is beginning to fail. Judy annoys me too but less so; precisely because she has a cross to bear in the shape of Richard. I have seen her cast plainly murderous glances his way on live telly. Looks that say, "for God's sake Richard, stop being a complete and utter dick and just shut the eff up before I knife you in the gizzard with a whale bone from my corset." But she never does. She holds back. And thus we all suffer. All of us. And that is damned annoying.

Number 4) Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.

A man whom the devil surely created out of an old welly, a smidgen of old bathroom tile grout and the face of a monkfish. Hugh extols the virtues of the 'back to nature' lifestyle. The good life. Grow your own. The fact that Hugh has undoubtedly grown his own and is now looking for people to insert them into is something that gives me nightmares. Farmers and smallholders should be grubby. I know this. But the grubbiness that Hugh exudes is unhealthy. There is something deeply unsavoury about this man. His piggy little eyes blaze with a furious belief in his own superiority. I don't buy all that "I'm chummy with the locals" on his damned River Cottage shows. I bet he tries to Lord it over all of them with his smarmy city ways and his rare breed sheep. My only hope is that the locals are building a big Wicker Man in which Hugh and his sheep can be ritually sacrificed purely for my televisual entertainment. That is a show I'd gladly watch.

Number 5) Ross Noble.

Yeah. A bit left field this one. Normally I'm OK with comedians. Even if I don't find them particularly funny they don't tend to annoy me to the point of explosive hemorrhoids. But Ross does. Because he won't shut up. I've seen him on TV countless times - Jonathan Ross, QI, Have I Got News For You - and he does the same thing every time. I'll jus kip talkin' like til I come oot with summat funny and that meks yus all laff even if that means I kip talkin' absoloot bollux fer aboot half a frigging hour. On and on and on. I mean Johnny Vegas is bad enough but Ross Noble can run a marathon of mediocrity with his tongue just to reach a lame, exhausted punchline at the finish point. That isn't humour. That isn't wit. Wit is to the point and sharp. A quick jab to the ribs and out again. Not month after month of beating someone with a tripe casserole until they fake their laughter just to get you to shut up and go away. Ross, you'd be funny if it wasn't for your personality and the way you tell your jokes. The only cure is to let someone else do it for you. Honest.

OK guys, now it's over to you. I won't name names to pass this meme onto. Merely feel free to help yourselves and have a ball.

I know I have.

Am I An Old Perv? No, Don’t Answer That

So it’s Saturday and I’ve been sucked into kid’s telly and I’m watching Dani’s House with my boys and I’m marvelling at how the girl that used to play Tracey Beaker has (seemingly overnight) blossomed into a hot young chicklet and the TV gets turned over because other household members (how dare they usurp my ownership of the remote control) have decided that 3 back-to-back episodes of Dani’s House is 2 episodes too many (hey not my fault if the BBC resorts to lazy scheduling at the weekends).

“Hey, I was watching that!” I cry.

“I’m sure you were, you old perv!” Comes the reply.

What? Old perv? Me?

I’m about to spew out the kind of retort that would have had Oscar Wilde creaming his fustian trousers when I stop short.

Am I an old pervert? Is the accusation well based?

Because suddenly I’m aware of a whole body of evidence stacked up against me, most of it (it has to be said) penned by my own hand. This here blog.

Post after post extolling the virtues of various TV stars. Katie McGrath, Alice Roberts, Lucy Griffiths, Cheryl Ladd, Emma Watson, Julia Sawalha... the list goes on and on.

The trouble is, right from a young age, I had an eye for eye candy. At 9 years of age I was heartily in love with Charlie’s Angels. All of them though Cheryl Ladd was definitely my queen bitch.

And this penchant for giving the glad eye to TV babes continued through my teen years and my lonely twenties. But it was fine back then. Acceptable. It’s what lonely guys who can’t get a girlfriend do. Er, so I’ve been told.

And then I hit my thirties and, gulp, despite getting myself all-girled-up I’m still casting a roving fantasy eye over the TV and the cinema. But hey. That’s us men for you. And, by Jove, you women too ‘cos I know from reading around the blogosphere that you lassies are also prone to a bit of butch visual confectionary.

It’s normal. And I’m at pains to point this out because it is my only defence.

But now I’ve just tiptoed into my 40s. And suddenly the balance has shifted. It’s starting to feel uncomfortable. Back when I was younger fancying a young bit of stuff on the telly was acceptable. Hell, Juliet was only a teenager and Romeo (so I’m led to believe) only in his twenties. And when I hit my thirties, well, if old goats and young lambs were acceptable to Jane Austen why should it bother me?

But now I’m in my 40’s and my 50’s are beckoning from the other side of the hill the fantasy element is beginning to become untenable. It’s beginning to verge on socially unacceptable.

And yet TV and the media are geared up to sell us sexy young things. We’re hit with it every day. It’s hard to resist.

I mean take Hermione from Harry Potter. Even Jimmy Carr makes gags about when it became acceptable to admit that you fancied her.

So. My question is: does acknowledging the beauty of much younger women make me an old perv? Should I perhaps be retraining myself to tune into eye candy of a different, much more mature sort? Should I be composing paeans to Thora Hird, Anne Widdicombe and Gillian McKeith? If I start mooning over them will that make me less of a pervert?

Or one that is far less easily understood?

Answers on the back of a lad’s mag to the usual address please...

Nigella Espresso

Baptitious kitchen chatelaine, Nigella Lawson, kicked off her new “good food fast” cookery TV series last night – “Nigella Express” and not, as I’d hoped, “Nigella Espresso”. Hmm. It seems that my idea for a raunchy bedroom-based dessert focused TV pilot has been turned down flat by the bosses of Channel 4... I can’t understand why. I mean if they’re happy to invest money in Gillian McKeith intimately examining other people’s poo why not fling a few tenners my way to buy a spatula and an industrial barrel of whipped cream?

Anyway, gripes aside, it was good to see the dusky voiced one back on the telly and doing her damnedest to insist that her plainly glamorous life is anything but and is, in fact, as humdrum as that of the rest of us. Hmm. I don’t think so Nigella. My entire family could live in your walk-in pantry and never have to go to the supermarket again. Ever.

But I think that’s part of Nigella’s appeal. The slightly embarrassed and guilty glamour-puss seductress coupled with the “oh I’m so dowdy really” yummy-mummy modesty. That and the cow-eyed looks over the garlic grater and the coquettish lip moistening as she manhandles the biggest sweet potato I’ve ever seen in my life. No wonder Nigella has one of the biggest male fan bases of all the TV chefs.

Apparently she’s horrified by accusations that she deliberately sexes up her cooking performances but I’m sure she’s also clever enough to not mess with a schtick that plainly works. Besides which the sensual element definitely adds an essential layer to the recipes and is an integral part of the Nigella ethos – whether it’s there deliberately or not. Nigella is all about pleasure: the pleasure of food and the pleasure of life. And it would be a sad individual indeed who objected to that.

The main thing though (as has been pointed out by a reader of this blog, Lucy) Nigella is smokin’ hot. At 47 she’s looking damn good. If that’s what big puddings do for you then I’ll take double helpings please.

Talking of which, last night saw Nigella tenderizing a couple of pork chops with a rolling pin. The way she moved was, ahem, mesmerizing to say the least.

Anthony Worrall Thompson – though he could easily emulate the upper body motion – would not have had quite the same effect...

Movements

Rumours abound this week that Dominatrix of Dieting, Gillian McKeith has been dropped from Channel 4 like a lead jockstrap. Apparently her Third Reich tactics and blitzkrieg nutritional regime have appalled even the most iron stomached of Channel 4’s TV executives who are now of the opinion that Ms McKeith is simply just too cruel and needlessly harsh in her patented weight loss techniques to be allowed onto the nation’s tellies.

About time too. I can hear Gillian’s shrivelled bones circling the S-bend of television world even as I type.

Not that I’m taking credit, you understand, but this here blog has thrown a couple of good slaggings her way in the past; notably here, here and here...

And now for a movement of a different sort: I actually heard from Mr Chauffeur man yesterday. A very polite and respectful email promising to get payment to me ASAP. I was pleasantly gobsmacked.

About time too yet again.

Though I’m very aware that it might be wise not to count this particular chicken until it’s hatched...

Stick Witch

Feeling in a malevolent mood I deliberately watched Gillian McKeith’s new show – Three Fat Brides One Thin Dress – yesterday evening with the sole intention of taking it to task on my blog today.

Am I a sad git or what?

Anyway, as always Ms McKeith didn’t disappoint…

The thing with Gillian is… she might do health food. She might do dieting. She might do nutrition. But she sure as hell doesn’t do people. Not unless it’s to do over somebody’s already crumbling self-esteem that is.

Gillian’s emotional blitzkrieg approach gets my goat right on it’s belligerently hairy nelly. I honestly think she is rude, nasty and bitchy for the sheer hell of it. “Being cruel to be kind” is really no kind of excuse at all. Not when you are attacking someone on such a personal level in front of the entire nation. There is no need for it. It is unjustifiable. I bet Gok Wan pulls out his carefully dyed two-tone hair in absolute horror at Gillian’s Cruella antics.

I know that at the end of the day these women have agreed to appear on the programme but I’m sure a lot of their willingness to be televised is down to transient gratitude and inordinate relief when, at the end of Gillian’s 8-week regime, they find they are at last 2 stone and (more importantly) one sabre-toothed Scottish battleaxe lighter. When Gillian disappears back up her drainpipe they must all cheer and break out the stotty cakes in celebration. Awful woman!

She dares to tell them off for not loving themselves enough right after she’s landed the mother of all guilt trips upon them! I need her to see the full horror of what she’s doing to herself, says Gillian, as she presents one of the women with a coffin freshly engraved with her name. Into this she pours trifles, take-away curries and a host of other victual-based crimes that the poor woman has committed. How classy. Next she’s presenting the terrified women with beautifully wrapped mock wedding presents which, when opened, turn out to be diseased livers and clotted up hearts, etc… manky offal fresh from the butcher’s shop. Cue much heaving and gagging. But it’s all for their own good of course…

Surely there are better ways of getting someone to change their way of life than by scaring them and brow beating them into it? Gillian plainly sees herself as a God and these poor overweight women as her unworthy acolytes with which she may do anything in order to achieve the end result. What I see is a megalomaniacal dictator stomping over everybody’s feelings just to score points and ensure that her programme achieves its only selling point…

Weight loss.

Pure and simple.

It’s not about the women accepting themselves or undergoing counselling to deal with the issues that have possibly lead to their unhealthy eating. The goal is weight loss. Nothing more nothing less. Oh look. They’ve all lost 5 inches from their waists in a mere 8 weeks. Job done. Mission achieved. And off Gillian trots like one of those freaky automatons from Bladerunner… onto the next fat target that needs taking down a peg or two as well as a dress size.

What annoys me most about Gillian’s programmes is that the over weight people featured on them stand no chance whatsoever. They’re set up to look fat, gormless, contemptible and infantile. Last night saw three overweight brides-in-waiting struggling to get into wedding dresses that were deliberately chosen to be too small for them. Of course they looked awful. They looked dreadful and were naturally mortified. But if I tried to get into an outfit three sizes too small for me I’d look pretty horrible too! As my wife, Karen, pointed out: if these women had been put into dresses that actually fitted them every one of them would have looked gorgeous. But that, of course, is the Gok Wan approach.

Unfortunately this was Gillian’s show. So instead of beautiful Buddha we got bombastic Beelzebub.

One last thing. Gillian smugly pointed out that obese people live 9 years less than their thinner counterparts. Hmm. But if I have to look like Gillian McKeith to gain an extra 9 years on my lifespan then I’m breaking open the lardy cakes right now…

What’s the difference between Gillian McKeith and a walking corpse?

No. I couldn’t think of anything either.

Gillian’s Nipples

This is not the first time I’ve written about Madame Gillian McKeith (read my previous post here) but I am compelled to write about her again today because of two undeniable spurs.

One is a post about Gillian M and healthy eating in general on Flaming Nora’s fab blog – read it here.

Two (fittingly) is the novel spectacle of nipples appearing for the first (and hopefully last) time on this week’s edition of You Are What You Eat broadcast by Channel 4 on Wednesday evening.

Before you turn away with sickening visions of Gillian McKeith pole dancing around a twiglet swirling around your mind I must add that the nipples were not Gillian’s and weren’t even attached to a body...

In an attempt to plumb new depths of revulsion Gillian this week presented some poor hapless student with a round of drinks that would make a pig throw up. It seems that this pleasantly buxom student had a penchant for cider and cocktails – and in particular Slippery Nipples (well, don’t we all?). All of this quaffing had had rather a ballooning effect on the poor girl’s waistline. This was all the excuse Gillian needed to line up a selection of drinks that could only have been mixed at the nearest abattoir or A & E department:

1) Cider with lumps of brain matter in it – cos cider rots the brain, don’t you know.

2) Lager with eyeballs floating on the top – too much alcohol ruins your sight, doh!

3) A Slippery Nipple with real nipples in it – cos alcohol plays havoc with yer erogenous zones.

Not only was this biology lab gimmick disgusting, abusive and offensive it was also bordering on the perverted. Where does Gillian get all this stuff from? I’m assuming (hoping) that they weren’t actually human nipples - but it still begs the question whose nipples were they?

Now that could be one helluva game show...

They certainly didn’t come from a cow or a dog or a cat. Anyway, musing on their origin led Karen and I to surmise that maybe Gillian had grabbed a pair of nail clippers and clipped off her own nips just to make a point (as it were) and I must admit that I did come up with the revolting (even by my standards) idea that Gillian’s aureoles were surely surrounded by wispy grey hair and crow’s feet... you can see how such a disgusting TV spectacle had canted our thinking, can’t you? Normally we’re very sanitary and aesthetically high-brow in our conversational topics.

Anyway, it was a joy to read on Flaming Nora’s blog that Gillian’s rightful ownership of the epithet “Doctor” is in some doubt as her qualifications apparently come from some unaccredited American college so strictly speaking she isn’t a real doctor at all...

Hmm.

Is that a duck I can hear calling in the background?

Madame McKeith

How can such a tiny, decrepit, bag of bones be so humongously scary?

Ok I’m being unfair here; I know that health food dictator, Gillian McKeith, has bounced back to health from a very serious illness to embrace the nuts-and vitamins perfect-poo lifestyle that she so brutally advocates on her TV programme, You Are What You Eat, but for all that she bullies her fat clients with demonic Caledonian energy I can’t help thinking that there is something extremely unhealthy about Gillian’s general pallor and demeanour. Is she really any healthier than the morbidly obese size-0-wannabes that she regularly tortures with her celery and spinach smoothies? She certainly doesn’t look it.

But what really disturbs me about The McKeith is the contemptuous, harsh attitude with which she treats all her "patients". She’s a bully. She’s absolutely vile to people whose self-respect and self-image is already at an all time low. Her dietary techniques seem to centre around unpalatable food combos, daily poo inspections and ritual public humiliation. I am not exaggerating.

Gillian never seems to be satisfied unless each week she has made her clients, both male and female, cry with guilt, heave with disgust at their own bodily produce and gag with horror at their regular weekly food intake.

I realize that this is the traditional shock tactic approach. Gillian is basing her whole modus operandi on old school army training techniques: totally demolish the soldier’s current belief system and then rebuild him/her anew with a whole brand new ethos. And certainly it seems to work.

But does the end ever justify the means?

She made one poor woman climb into a bath of cold processed food sludge in order to illustrate the kind of crap she was subjecting the inside of her body to. Dubious in itself but Gillian made the sobbing woman do it in the front garden of her London home – with curious passersby peering over the wrought iron fence – thus publicising the poor woman’s distress. That is just not on. For all Gillian is undoubtedly motivated by worthy ambitions – a real fire to save people from themselves – she nevertheless doesn’t give a fig (syrup of) for their emotional well-being or their feelings. Gillian seems to have a very machine-like approach to people. I’d go as far to say she’s a nutritional mechanic rather than a healthy lifestyle guru. As long as people are physically fixed what does it matter if Gillian has messed their minds up in the process?

Of course, these people subject themselves to Gillian’s regime willingly so maybe that’s all the justification that Gillian needs? These people are in extremis and I’m sure in some cases it literally is do or die. Such endeavours always make compelling but uncomfortable viewing.

As I watched last night’s show though it struck me that Gillian is much like a high class dominatrix. An endless stream of clients readily shuffle into her home each week to submit themselves to her elegant E. Coli cruelty and her clipped colonic punishments – every one of them doe-eyed and desperate for one word of praise from Gillian’s perennially curled lips as she forces them to produce "the perfect poo" and imbibe tofu and nettle-root miso soup in quantities that wouldn’t fill a gnat’s belly.

Oh Gillian, I’ve been a naughty boy – punish me with the stotty cake iron maiden face mask again!

You are what you eat? Eat the underside of my boots, worm!