The Sunday Times: Sometimes

Even two drunken cocks tell the right time once a day...

Andy West: Vs Tyson Fury

Daily Mail.

Fagburn is trying to confirm why Andy West was 'suspended'.

It could be because he's a complete loon, it seems somewhat unlikely that the BBC would suspend a member of staff for signing an online petition - I can't recall anyone being suspended for saying Jeremy Clarkson should be sacked, for example - but until we get clarification, it's probably best not to comment.

Note that BBC News presenter, Clive Myrie, said Fury 'cannot be a dickhead and win Sports Personality Of The Year' live on air, with no problems, it appears.

Good day.

PS This story appears to have originated with Patrick Strudwick, a man who would shout 'HOMOPHOBE!' at a shower curtain.

Jeremy Corbyn: Vote

A definite need to win this one.

Here's JC interviewed by grinning schoolboy, Owen Jones!

PS But wait til Patrick Smugtwit finds out about this obvious anti-gay dog-whistle!!!

Will Young: Power Bottom Gear (Geddit!!?)

From the dead hand of Dan Wootton at the Sun.

It's Bank Holiday Monday, I might just go back to bed...

Oh, and for the record, I think this is the first time Miss Wootton has said he's a big ole gay in his Sun pages.

PS Will Yah was in the Independent on Saturday. If you can find one interesting quote in this, you're a better man than I.

Top Gear: This Country!

And yellow stars for the mentally ill!

Sam Smith: April Fool

Guys I have some news... I'm straight
— SAM SMITH (@samsmithworld) April 1, 2015

April Fools always fill Fagburn with such hysterical mirth, he fears he may not able to post again today.

I mean, just look at this one. Fucking hilarious!

And in other papers; 'Jeremy Clarkson is going to do something incongruous'. LOLZ!!!

Thought For The Day: Clarkson

The Sun.

You're a whale, you posh racist, homophobic bullying bastard.

Fagburn: Cunt Of The Week

It was impossible to choose between these two reactionary right-wing multi-millionaire populist racist homophobic bigoted posh cunts, so this week we have two winners!

Congrats to both Nigel and Jeremy.

Your prize is a blokes' two week adventure holiday in northern Syria.

Tory scum.

PS Nigel has only got one ball, the other... etc etc.

Tweet Of The Day: Jeremy Clarkson

The good news is that Jeremy Clarkson has been suspended. The bad news is that it wasn't by his testicles.
— Mr Roger Quimbly (@RogerQuimbly) March 10, 2015

No-one on Twitter makes Fagburn laugh more often and louder than Mr Quimbly.
x

PS Oh, he's loving all this, the over-entitled posh cunt.

Clarkson: Nice One Argentina!

Can we give this bigoted posh right-wing twanker a similarly warm welcome when he arrives back on our shores, please?

Style: Straight Camp

Camp, in its original conception, has nothing intrinsically to do with effeminacy or show tunes or doting on one’s mother or having really great hair. It’s not strictly about sexuality, homo- or otherwise. Camp, according to Susan Sontag’s famous and still definitive Notes on the subject, of 1964, is a sensibility concerned with artifice. It prizes style over content. It sees everything in quotation marks. Camp is about performance, pretence — “Being-as-Playing-a-Role” is how Sontag 

It’s Sontag’s definition of camp that the Canadian writer Stephen Marche used recently to describe a new male phenomenon, the one that encompasses Clarkson, Ramsay, Putin and the rest. Writing in American Esquire earlier this year, he named this new masculine subcategory “straight camp”. By straight camp, he means fake manliness. Men who are not so much manly as “manly”, to borrow Sontag’s quotation marks again. Straight camp indicates an adopted, achieved masculinity, a masculinity worn much like a suit, or, more likely in this case, a pair of rugged outdoor boots, a chunky all-weather coat and a bushy beard, even though the wearer of all those manly accoutrements rarely leaves the comfort and safety of the city. Straight camp is the pose of unreconstructed masculinity struck by men who have been made timid and uncertain by a changing economic, social and sexual topography. But it is just that: a pose.

Hello Sailor, Alex Bilmes, Sunday Times Style.

Behind the Murdoch paywall - ask your library for free access.

Similar points have been made before, but this dude makes them rather well.

Ben Cohen: Gay Spokesman

Well done Newsnight!
Who better to get on the programme to talk about homophobia than... a straight man?!!
Might have been a bit better still if they could have found one a bit more coherent than Ben "You know, you know" Cohen.
Oh well, at least it made a change from seeing Saint Peter...

Thanks to How Upsetting who first showed up how absurd and insulting this was...

Let’s relive the moment last night when Newsnight rather bewilderingly asked a straight man on to discuss a ‘homophobic tweet’. The discussion is asinine, with both Wark and Cohen resorting to hypothetical ‘gay sons’ to try and compensate for their lack of insight into this issue...

Update: Hilariously during Splash! on Saturday evening Peter Tatchell tweeted this old BBC News interview about Tom Daley's coming out with well-known expert on the sports... himself!

Jeremy Clarkson: Half Right

In perhaps the least shocking news ever, Jeremy Clarkson has been forced to apologise for offending an entire group of people.

The Top Gear presenter came under fire for posting an image of himself asleep on a plane next to a piece of white paper with the words ‘gay c**t’ scrawled onto it.'

The famously acerbic TV personality then shared the image on his Twitter account alongside the caption: "Sadly, I fell asleep on the plane."

After attracting a barrage of protesting tweets, the 53-year-old removed the message, posting instead: "I have deleted my last tweet and would like to apologise profusely to anyone who I upset while I was asleep."

The Independent.

Well done to all responsible media who put an asterix in the word 'cunt' and blurred the photo.

It's good to know some people still think of the children and any readers of a nervous disposition.

Mr Clarkson is 53. 

Thanks to @chris_billett x

BBC: Sorry For Laughing

The BBC has apologised unreservedly after a contestant on a radio panel show was asked to argue the proposition that: 'Give me 20 minutes with her and I'm pretty sure I could turn around Clare Balding'...

As part of a round on the BBC Radio 5 Live show 'Fighting Talk', Colin Murray, the show's presenter, asked a contestant to argue that they could 'cure' the award-winning sports commentator of lesbianism.
The controversial broadcast came during the final segment of the show in which guests are asked to 'defend the indefensible' and argue a difficult-to-support case.
Comedian Bob Mills responded to the challenge by saying that Balding was a "horse woman", who "appreciates power between her thighs", before adding: "And we all know, there is no woman that can't be cured."
A spokesman for the BBC said today: “The comments were made during a round called ‘Defend the Indefensible’, which asks panelists to comment on topics which, by their very nature, are blatantly indefensible.” 
“However, we would like to apologise unreservedly to anyone who was offended by the live broadcast."
The Independent.

It was a joke - in a very boringly blokey comedy show, by the sound of it.
Clue's in the name, 'Defending The Indefensible'.
Really lame and childish and in poor taste, but there you go.
Hope the BBC don't find out the crap Jeremy Clarkson comes out with on Top Gear.

Thought For The Day: Jeremy Clarkson

Twitter.

Good old Clarkson for seeing the funny side of sexual abuse.
He's such a card, isn't he?
And in-no-way is he obsessed with The Gays or having his sacred bumhole violated. 
Oh look! The Daily Mail et al are obediently pretending to be outraged about his "outrageous" tweet.
Snore.

Jeremy Clarkson: Fun Fun Fun!

Hi,
I am Jeremy Clarkson of Top Gear fame.
I am a millionaire old public school boy who makes jokes about people on the minimum wage and the gays.
I think they should be shot.
Terrific fun.
Toodlepip, oiks!
Parp parp.
yours

Jeremy

Thought For The Day: Jo Brand

"The BBC used to do this thing called Talent Dinners. They said, ‘we want to hear everyone’s ideas on how we can improve the BBC’. I turned to Jeremy Clarkson and said ‘you can fucking take him off for a start’."

Jo Brand, talking at the Hay Festival, quoted in the Telegraph.
Full disclosure: The Telegraph didn't print the f-word.

In Defence of Jeremy Clarkson

Oh crap.
One of Fagburn's most favourite people, David Quantick, has written a defence of one of Fagburn's least favourite people, Jeremy Clarkson.
Even worse, Mr Quantick, has mounted a rather convincing defence.
'The BBC Needs Jeremy Clarkson To Be Offensive' graces the pages of The Daily Telegraph today.
It's not a defence of Jeremy Clarkson's offensive comments - he's in the news again because he's just made a joke about a "special needs car."
It's more saying that's just what the posh oaf does - big deal - and he gets off on people taking offence.
And the BBC jumps into action mainly because he's given its critics another stick to beat it with.
At least I think that's what Quantick's saying, it's all a bit forked-tongue.
David Quantick - the funniest writer the NME ever had, now rather big in radio and TV, writing gags for Harry Hill's TV Burp and stuff - likens Top Gear to a family; "Where James May is the posh mum and Richard Hammond the cheeky kid – Clarkson is the dad who says silly things and of whom nobody takes any notice."
A bit like Alf Garnett, then David?
"In his fight against what he sees as the PC BBC, Clarkson will carry on making jokes about black lesbians and disabled people, in the hope of angering someone who cares. But nobody does any more, except – rightly – those who seek to speak for the disadvantaged, and – wrongly – the dead hand of compliance, a BBC process apparently instituted not out of compassion for society's less fortunate, but out of fear of the corporation's critics."
Intriguingly, Quantick - who knows how TV works - argues that Clarkson's offensiveness is an act, and perhaps his USP to the BBC.
"Clarkson is a man whose inability to cleave to a liberal agenda makes the Duke of Edinburgh look like – well, the Duke of Edinburgh. But he isn't some rabid, racist goon: he's a seasoned broadcaster who repeatedly signs up for shows where he is allowed a lot of leeway and only censored after the naughty event
"It's almost as if – surely not! – the BBC realises that a large part of the appeal of Top Gear lies in Clarkson's apparently untrammelled political incorrectness, which is as much part of his schtick as Gordon Ramsay's swearing, Graham Norton's outrageousness, or Alan Titchmarsh's jumpers."
Fagburn will have to have a jolly good think about this one...

ONS Gay Survey: No idea. Anyone?

Here's Rod Liddle's take on the ONS survey in The Sunday Times.
Fagburn is posting it mainly to stick it to The Man in brazen defiance of Rupert Murdoch's News Corps paywall, but also as it's a textbook example of how to write a newspaper column if you're a liberal bigot.
Read it and see if you can tell what Mr Liddle's argument is.
No?
Me neither.
Do you think he was sober when he wrote this?
No?
Me neither.
Verily, Rod Liddle is the thinking man's Jeremy Clarkson.

Lesbian myth

I knew it. A census from the Office for National Statistics has at last proved that lesbians — like the Abominable Snowman, the unicorn and werewolves — do not actually exist, but are the creation of someone’s mischievous imagination.
The report out last week suggests that 0.6% of the British population are lesbian, and only 1.3% of men are gay. Given the usual margin of error on such studies, this could mean that minus 4.4% of British people are lesbian, a figure I would be inclined to believe.
For years, gay pressure groups have insisted that at least one in three of us is gay, or perhaps all of us but we don’t know it yet: all we need is a night out down Old Compton Street with some amyl nitrate. Just as disabled pressure groups insist that one in three of us is disabled and child abuse groups claim that almost every child in the country has been interfered with.
It is a shame that there are not more gay people in Britain, as they are responsible for very little crime, work hard and are high achievers.
If only the ONS was wrong and the gay pressure groups were right, we’d be the richest country on earth.

No idea. Anyone?

Clare Balding: "Dyke" Not On Bike - On Warpath

"Some time ago, I made a cheap and frankly unnecessary joke about Clare Balding looking like a big lesbian. And afterwards somebody tugged my sleeve to point out that she is a big lesbian, and I felt foolish and guilty. So I’d like to take this opportunity to apologise. Sorry.
"Now back to the dyke on a bike, puffing up the nooks and crannies at the bottom end of the nation..." AA Gill wrote in The Sunday Times last week.
The feminist blog, the f word, reports that Clare Balding complained to the editor, John Witherow, and received the following reply.
"In my view some members of the gay community need to stop regarding themselves as having a special victim status and behave like any other sensible group that is accepted by society. Not having a privileged status means, of course, one must accept occasionally being the butt of jokes. A person’’s sexuality should not give them a protected status. Jeremy Clarkson, perhaps the epitome of the heterosexual male, is constantly jeered at for his dress sense (lack of), adolescent mind-set and hair style. He puts up with it as a presenter’s lot and in this context I hardly think that AA Gill’’s remarks were particularly “cruel”, especially as he ended by so warmly endorsing you as a presenter."
Fagburn can imagine a PS to this letter reading; "Lighten up love - can't you people take a joke?"
Balding has replied; "When the day comes that people stop resigning from high office, being disowned by their families, getting beaten up and in some instances committing suicide because of their sexuality, you may have a point.
"This is not about me putting up with having the piss taken out of me, something I have been quite able to withstand, it is about you legitimising name calling. ‘Dyke’ is not shouted out in school playgrounds (or as I’ve had it at an airport) as a compliment, believe me.
"It may be your job to defend your writer and your editorial team but if you really think that homophobia does not exist and was not demonstrated beyond being ‘the butt of a joke’ then we have a problem."
Earlier today Balding tweeted that she has reported The Sunday Times to the Press Complaints Commission; "Complaint now registered. There's a first time for everything so here goes."
Good for her.
For the record, Fagburn wuld like to point out that AA Gill is "a friend of Jeremy"
Yes, Jeremy Clarkson.
I can think of no more damning description.