No civilised person knows who John Humphrys is. I’ve looked into it and I discover he’s rather a sad case — an insomniac who telephones politicians at dawn and interrupts them while they’re still half asleep. This strange career has won him celebrity among the restless multitude who, like him, insist on getting up in the middle of the night. It has also won him a book contract. His last work was about sloppy English. So is the new one, but as he unfurls his endless series of hastily written gibberish it becomes clear that he’s less interested in inarticulacy than he is in his jumble sale of parochial antipathies. He mouths off about all kinds of things: advertising, the lottery, Liz Hurley, train announcements, meetings at the Beeb, leaflets that slither out of your newspaper, Blair wanting to be called ‘Tony’. On it goes. Humphrys is like a taxi-driver; he’s only sure of himself when he’s telling you what he hates. Flash a bit of optimism at him and he’ll tell you it’s bound to end in tears.
He’s weirdly sniffy about reality TV ‘celebrities’, and he won’t allow them in his book before they’ve been sealed in a suit of protective apostrophes. Humphrys is a veteran of reality TV himself, so he’s keen to fantastise about divisions of rank within his own class. To the viewer, of course, all celebs look pretty much the same as they swarm around the microphone like bees around candy-floss. But apart from being a celeb (or ‘sublebrity’ as he sometimes calls his fellow exhibitionists) Humphrys is also a writer and it’s faintly unedifying to watch him deriding the less privileged members of the trade. Imagine a professional athlete turning up on sports day to jeer at the egg-and-spoon race.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in