Dogwash

The usual suspects are working themselves into a yummy froth of righteous indignation about the off-colour — but not quite as off-air as they had believed them to be — comments by Richard "Smug Bastard" Keys and Andy "Gadgets" Gray about referette Sian Massey.

(Not to be confused with gorgeous pouting sofa totty Sian Williams, of course. Apparently, careful counts are made by the relevant subtribe of vidcapping otaku of the number of times Sian recrosses her legs on the Breakfast programme, illustrated with lovingly recorded and spliced video evidence. Who cares? Keeps the bleeders off the streets.)

As one brave commenter to an inevitably sniffy Guardian piece reminds us, a panel of pushy tarts is actively encouraged to make all sorts of unpleasant jibes about men, on air, every weekday on the Loose Women prog. And nobody makes a fuss.

Television advertising aimed at women routinely portrays men as lovable incompetents kept on the straight and narrow by their indulgent wife-mothers. And we put up with it.

And wasn't there a series of ads a few years ago which depicted men so distracted by the allure of some woman whose beauty had been transformed by the product being promoted that they had inadvertently placed themselves in the way of fatal danger? One of the ads depicted an entranced male in imminent danger of being decapitated by an approaching tube train. Even I, faithful acolyte of the "water off a duck's arse" attitude to life that I aspire to, thought that one was a bit near the knuckle. Some chap complained to the ASA. He was told not to be silly.

Not that I have much time for Keys and Gray, who both strike me as completely up their own arses. Not indeed that I am much of an aficionado of the beautiful game — 20 nancy boys running round trying to flick the ball out from under each other's feet. I've said it before: if the opposing man's got the ball, knock him to the ground and lamp the bugger hard until he lets go of it. That's how to play football!

But get a grip, folks, and, yes, don't be silly. (Perhaps Jeremy Cunt, the Hulture Secretary, could have a quiet word with Sky's management. This is on his patch, isn't it?)

Let's hope this doesn't go the way of the Big Ron Atkinson fiasco. Big Ron, you may recall, was overheard referring to Marcel de Sailly as "what some people would call a fucking lazy thick nigger" (or some permutation thereof). In consequence of his choice of word, he had his commentator's epaulettes ritually ripped off and his microphone ceremonially broken over the producer's knee in front of a baying crowd of the Righteous. Last I saw of Big Ron, he was on the most cringeworthy Channel Four programme I have ever seen, desperately trying to rehabilitate himself by verbally sucking Darcus Howe's cock. To have performed the physical act would, frankly, have been a less obscene spectacle. (Has Big Ron been forgiven yet? As I say, I don't really follow the futébol, except by accident.)

Ironically, had Big Ron referred to de Sailly as "a fucking lazy thick cunt", we would have tut-tutted lubriciously while secretly admiring his robust manly language and applauding his perfectly reasonable opinion, namely that de Sailly, approaching the end of his final season at the elite level, was deliberately coasting and not pulling his weight for his team, and that this was despicably unprofessional behaviour.

Let's not go down that road, chaps and chappesses.

Rant ends. Off down the boozer for a couple of schooners of Old Dog Fart.