A rant which might drive away what's left of my readership

One thing I really hate about weekends is the Sunday papers. Because the broadsheet arm of our national press really is atrocious. Written by a bunch of smug Londoners for a bunch of smug Londoners they are a coalition of the conceited and deranged filing the same desperately pointless copy week in, week out.

One of my pet hates, for instance, is football writers who think they’re Shakespeare. Gents, Newcastle getting relegated is not a “tragedy” in either the classical or colloquial sense, it’s just one bunch of overpaid foreigners in Bentleys being less bothered than another bunch of overpaid foreigners in Bentleys. Build a bridge and get over it.

Then you have the news commentators. In many respects they are viler still. The recent scandals around MP’s expenses have brought out all sorts of hyperbole. You get pompous columnists claiming that this Parliament will live in infamy which shows a remarkable lack of perspective given that many of the tired hacks involved have been commentating on these events for decades. It’s a soap like any other – just as nobody nowadays says “phew! How about Willmott-Brown raping that poor Kathy, it’s an outrage”. I wouldn’t be surprised if people have forgotten about most of the expenses fiddling in no time.

Of course we’ll remember snippets – a Tory MP with a moat is too good to miss, just as we all remember David Mellor allegedly having sex in a Chelsea strip. (Actually, that proves my point as well as anything because that actually isn’t true – it was made up by Max Clifford and it stuck). But most people don’t remember the ins and outs of Tory sleaze in the early 90s and nor do they care. But of course journalists still live to try and make you think that whatever has happened is the most earth shatteringly significant event of modern times. Another ho hum day in Kabul is never going to be a headline of the foreign news section, however much it would make me guffaw.

The hype gets worse when you get to the culture section of newspapers. Obsequious puff interviews with the new stars du jour (if I had a fiver for every “hot new British actor” the Sunday papers have raved on about I could give up work tomorrow), book reviews where person X says that person Y’s book is excellent and nobody tells you that person Y recently did exactly the same for person X, the list goes on and on.

Then you get the style section which consists of the same rehashed articles year after year after year. You know perfectly well that the hacks pull them out of a filing cabinet, blow off the dust, change a couple of words and publish them again and again. “New year, new you”, “50 things to do this summer”, “50 ideal summer holidays”, “The A to Z of surviving festivals”, “Dos and don’t for the Christmas party”, I could continue but I need to save some material so I myself don’t end up rehashing this blog post in a year’s time (if I’m still blogging by then).

Everyone seems to want to be something else, too, as if being vacuous and ill informed about one subject isn’t enough. Theatre critics want to write about football. Political correspondents want to review restaurants. Because of course, if you’re a good enough writer who cares whether you know what you’re talking about, right? The Sunday Times has a restaurant reviewer (who, proving my point, also reviews the TV) called Adrian Gill who goes by the moniker of A.A. Gill. That double initial aims to add credibility – think T.S. Eliot or G.K. Chesterton – but really it is to genuine gravitas what a quick spritz of Lynx is to Eau Sauvage. Nobody is fooled.

His restaurant reviews are generally two pages long and the last one or two paragraphs are usually devoted (though that’s clearly the wrong word in this context) to getting round to mentioning the food. He does so as if it’s an inconvenience when he’d sooner continue finding himself fascinating on a topic which generally has about as much to do with the restaurant in question as this blog post has to do with the Hubble Telescope. But of course, as long as the writer is having fun that’s all that really matters.

Finally we get to the columnists. I am not a very good citizen in the blogosphere and I know it. I don’t big up enough of the blogs I read and I am quite remiss at commenting on other people’s posts. But I can honestly say that I read dozens of blogs with more entertainment and insight than the average newspaper columnist every single day. And I reckon this is why the press likes to sneer about blogs. If you took a halfwit like the Sunday Times’ Rod Liddle or the unbelievably pisspoor John Walsh from the Independent and published their musings in blogland under a pseudonym nobody would read them, and they know it.

They are threatened by a large number of skilled and entertaining writers flooding the internet with original content and I imagine it scares them. You can get your news from the BBC website, opinion from your friends, make your mind up about music on metacritic.com and one day you won’t need these people any more. Maybe this is why they are enjoying kicking our MPs right now because, deep down, they have a pretty good idea that they are almost as much of a waste of money as the politicians are.

On the plus side yesterday’s paper had a voucher in it for money off at Waitrose - £5 off if you spent over £50. So we took it with us and headed off to do the weekly shop. As we were trundling dutifully towards the checkout Kelly suddenly seemed worried.

“What’s up?” I asked, showing a rather uncharacteristic ability to read Kelly’s mood.

“I don’t think we’ve spent £50 today. You might have to dash off and grab a bottle of wine or something if it looks like we’re under the threshold.”

“Nah, we’ve definitely spent £50.”

“I really think we haven’t.”

“Do you want to bet on it?”

Kelly and I do occasionally bet. Normally we disagree about a minor fact and decide to put some money on it. And I usually win because my memory collects tiny pieces of trivia the same way a tumble dryer filter collects aubergine coloured fluff and Kelly’s doesn’t. But this kind of betting is a different matter.

“Sure, let’s put a pound on it.” she said.

“I’ve got a better idea. If it’s under £50 I’ll give you the difference and if it’s over £50 you have to give me the difference.”

“You’re on.”

So we pretended to spit into our palms, Deadwood style and the die was cast. The checkout at Waitrose lets you see the running total as it builds up. And I think the spotty teenager on the till must have thought she was serving some care in the community cases because Kelly and I went through the full gamut of emotions during the two minutes it took to run up our shopping. It was like watching an epic football match compressed into those 120 nailbiting seconds. I grinned as my chargrilled artichoke hearts in olive oil pinged up on the display (£3.65, read it and weep), Kelly virtually punched the air when her Innocent fresh orange juice was rung up reduced to 29p. At the end of extra time the total was just over £53 but there was still stoppage time to play – Waitrose adds on all the discounts at the end. The cashier pressed the button and the crowd (by which I mean the metaphorical crowd in my head which has heckled so many of the romantic disasters in my life) went wild. Kelly paid me there and then in the middle of the supermarket, rather ungraciously I thought.

So say what you like about the Sunday Times but I made – count them – one pound and two English pennies from it today. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, A.A. fucking Gill.