Height, weight, hair colour, race, bum size: critics must be allowed to discuss how performers look

‘Dancer sees red at critic’s ginger jibes’ was the Times headline on Tuesday. You can call the Royal Ballet dancer Ed Watson many things, apparently, including awkward, freakishly flexible, melodramatic, but just don’t call him ginger.

Watson, who has brightened Covent Garden for 20 years in psychologically contorted acting roles and double-jointed dancing ones, is a favourite performer for many critics in many aspects (including me, quite often), but not at all to Alastair Macaulay, a distinguished figure who sharpened his teeth on the Financial Times before moving to the New York Times. Macaulay professes little time for Watson’s ‘problematic, weak’ dancing (‘He’s simply lovely when not dancing,’ he told the Times) but it was the frequent references to the dancer’s colouring that had particularly got his goat over the years, said Watson in a 40th birthday interview about his brilliant career.

The conflagration spread faster than the wildfires of Alberta. From the Times it leapt to Radio 4 Today, TV breakfast news, the Daily Mail and the Guardian, setting forums and BTL trolls ablaze.