Joe Queenan identified in his classic book, America: Red Lobster, White Trash and the Blue Lagoon, the modern trend of really bad books (eg anything by Tom Clancy) quoting better books (eg anything by William Shakespeare) in their opening pages as a way to make themselves seem better by association.
I’m sure there’s an equivalent phenomenon in television, so does it say something about Knight Rider‘s quality levels that it’s outright quoting Torchwood (and Heroes) in the opening minutes of its Halloween episode?
You might have heard of Giles Coren. He’s primarily a restaurant critic for The Times, but he’s done a few TV programmes now: he was on the first series of The F-Word, had a film review show on Five and does those historicalSupersize Mes for BBC Four.
In the world of journalism, though, he’s now best known for a series of abusive emails he’s sent to various sub-editors who have edited his work, as well as to a fellow critic. How we’ve all laughed at Giles’ outbursts – some have sided with him, wishing they’d written the emails themselves, while others have called him bad names and said he’s a rubbish writer who needs editing anyway.
I mention this all because of an exciting new trend. Remember the Torchwood/Hitler crossover video (which you can now find over here)? Well, now someone’s done it to Giles Coren, too (it’ll have helped to have read his emails first):
Coren’s response:
‘I’m fluent in German, so watching it with subtitles is not quite as funny for me as for everybody else. There was a time when an Englishman could speak fluent French and German, but I suppose the YouTube generation spends its time doing this instead. It would be funny for me if it was in Russian.’ But he went on to concede that he ‘laughed a lot’ at the video.
I think that tells you everything you need to know about him.
