Wednesday, March 21, 2001

I hate Brian Sewell. Hardly a controversial statement. Everybody hates Brian Sewell. I'm sure even Brian Sewell can't actually like Brian Sewell. I picked up a copy of the Standard on the tube last night, and his column reduced me to the kind of pompous, apoplectic bluster he specialises in. What was he waffling on about this time? The Sun:
How can a responsible newspaper, witness to so much wind and waffle these past four years, to so much aspiration suddenly deflated, to so much evidence of ignorance and inexperience, to so much pusillanimity masquerading as pragmatism, to so much double-counting, dissembling and duplicity, claim that Blair has done enough to deserve a second term?
That's a 55-word sentence. Has he never heard of a full-stop, or as the Americans call it, a period. Oh for something that could staunch his bloody haemorrhaging.
In my broadsheets I read nothing of such things, nothing of the girl whose breasts expand to match the lager she consumes, nothing of the dad savaged by a randy owl as he wended his way to the local pub, and nothing of the wretched young man who bought a haunted suit from Oxfam and had to have it exorcised - but such tales are small beer to The Sun, for the real core of the paper's interest is sex, sex, sex, as Tony Blair might put it in one of his more rhetorical moments.
It must be galling for Mr Sewell to realise that he doesn't work for a broadsheet, but for the bloody Standard. The sentence above was ninety-five words. But he was just warming up, doing vocal exercises, building up to his grand ululating 133-word aria:
Tracys and Sharons from Walsall and Widnes, knowing in their nudity, are undisguised pornography and so are the tales the paper tells - an oral sex orgy by 14-year-olds while Miss marks books, a bonk in the Crown Court loo while waiting for a case to be called, the man wearing nothing but his bobble hat when interrupted by a WPc, the girl who thought her boyfriend a successful lawyer until she discovered him on video doing "disgusting things" with a hundred other women - two whole pages of this salacious trivia illustrated by Steve's "barefaced right cheek" and, in a special supplement for women, many more such bottom cheeks, with codpieces and boots, all to be seen in Streatham by "hunk-hungry hordes of women" screaming for a glimpse of the full Monty.
Shut it, fat boy.

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