Tuesday, November 03, 2009

Is Gyles Brandreth nothing more than a dandified Pecksniff?

Did anyone else read Robert Harris giving Gyles Brandreth an absolute kicking in The Sunday Times, and think, Woah, steady on, Bob. What’s Gyles ever done to you? This is like punching Paddington Bear, or strangling Sooty. Surely there are more worthy candidates for a coldblooded character assassination than this harmless old hack, whose sole and modest ambition in life has been to give people who like doilies and macaroons a gentle chuckle?

The harshest you could say of Brandreth, surely, is that he is a bit of a name-dropping old ham. Perhaps a soporific milksop. You might even call him a namby-pamby flimflammer or a flummering fop, but surely no reasonable person would want to go so far as to suggest that he was a preening pansy or a simpering poltroon?

And yet in his review Harris calls Brandreth ‘tedious’ and ‘a creep’ and furthermore implies that the Countdown stalwart is a canting prig, a humbugging punchinello, a coxcomical poetaster and even a pontificating soi-disant.

This all strikes me as being a somewhat over-egged evisceration of a man who is, at the very worst, a waffling old creampuff.

***

Meanwhile, in a rather kinder review of Gyles’s diaries, Camilla Long extracts a typical anecdote in which Brandreth lunches with the Great Blogger himself, and which ends with the immortal line:

“I am never early. I am never late. I am Jeffrey Archer.”


Jeffrey Archer – now there’s a real c***.

7 comments:

  1. Willard11:46 am

    LOL. Straight out of Gyles Brandreth's 'Big Book of Comic Insults'.

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  2. Yes, I read it and assumed that at some point in the past bumbling old Gyles must have done a real hatchet job on Harris or, worse still, failed to recognise him at a party. I particularly enjoyed the line, "He is what, in my university days, we used to call “a hack”". Dripping with disdain and yet somehow protesting far too much.

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  3. Close, Willard, I actually lifted it out of Gyles Brandreth's Bumper Book of Chuckles, Gaffes and Titbits to Read While on the Lavatory.

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  4. In a very descriptive mood this morning Brit, obviously you haven't spent the last two days at the wrong end of a vertical tsunami.
    Good set of initials the old lad has, and the closest thing yet to a real life pantomime dame, or a balding Boris or Miss Jean Brodie, he and Chiles make an excellent pair of bookends for that ravishing beauty on the very odd One 'Show'.
    Well past his sell by date.

    I simply detest name dropping, as I said to The Sultan last week "so middle class"

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  5. As a child I remember him on GMTV, and all I can recall was being revolted by his stupid jumpers, and totally baffled as why a grown man would be interested in such stupid things as teddy bears

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  6. He is the idol of idiot worshipers...
    I don't actually believe that, I just enjoy an opportunity to trot out my favourite insult...

    O.S.M.

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  7. He's merely a flagrant poseur. (And even Pol Pot looks reasonably acceptable when compared against Jeffrey Archer.)

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