Charlie Brooker
The Guardian
When you're a man, you notice several things starting to grow as you get older. Your ears. Your waistline. Your right-wing views.
Yes, as the years yawn by, it's easy to find yourself getting all huffity-puffity about all kinds of issues, like an outraged asthmatic old colonel. Take women. You're not allowed to criticise women without being accused of bitter misogyny. I can write the most appalling generalised slurs on men in this column - they think with their dicks, they stink out the toilet, they start wars, etc - and no one will bat an eyelid, largely because they'll be too busy nodding in agreement.
Women, however, are protected by an invisible halo of notional innocence. Polite society seems to assume women are inherently in the right; therefore anyone lobbing criticism their way is inherently in the wrong. Women may not have won the battle of the sexes, but they captured the moral high ground years ago and have jealously guarded it ever since. The bitches.
Anyway, that's the sort of bilge you find yourself contemplating as you get older. And then you watch John McCririck on this week's Celebrity Wife Swap (Mon, 9pm, C4), shred your own argument into a million bits, throw up your hands and apologise politely to the ladies. Because if ever the term "chauvinist pig" deserved to be taken literally, McCririck's the man to apply it to.
He's a bona fide sexist monster, who spends his days wallowing half-naked in bed, spread across the sheets of his pit like a flabby pink squid, repeatedly barking orders at his long-suffering wife Jenny - who he continually refers to as "the booby".
When he's not bellowing commands or ignoring her every need, he's busy working on his own physical repugnance: sweating, picking his nose (and eating it), cultivating shuddersome thickets of gingery facial hair either side of his pasty, bloated face - or snoring face-down, bear-like, slumped on the bed in a voluminous pair of off-white Y-fronts. He's like Great Uncle Bulgaria with skidmarks. Mildew forms round the lens each time the camera lingers his way. It's fair to say Jenny pissed on her luck chips the day she married him.
Anyway, this being Wife Swap, it's not long before Jenny gets shipped off to a new home for five days and replaced with a substitute guaranteed to get on McCririck's tiny wick. And sure enough, that's exactly what happens. Edwina Currie moves in.
Currie, of course, is hardly the most likable character herself. In fact, if they carried out a survey to discover the 25,000 most popular public figures in Britain, chances are she'd finish somewhere near the bottom, a few steps below Dennis Nielsen. Put her on the receiving end of McCririck, however, and suddenly the woman's a saint.
"The Booby", meanwhile, enjoys a relaxing week in the company of Edwina's husband JJ, a genteel ex-policeman whose very existence seems to revolve around the pampering of ladies.
Back in McCririck towers, the moment Edwina walks through the door, Walrus Man turns the obnoxiousness up to 11. He grunts, sulks, demands perpetual servitude, repeatedly insults her, and disagrees with everything she says. Currie, for her part, seems detachedly amused by it all until somewhere around day two, where she snaps and throws a glass of wine in his face. He responds by cranking the obnoxiousness dial up to 20. At times his behaviour is so unpleasant, it surely borders on spousal abuse.
Before long McCririck has Currie in tears, but try as he might, he can't truly break her. Instead, he does something hitherto inconceivable: he imbues Edwina Currie with an air of stoic dignity. She enters the show as former Tory sodding minister Edwina sodding Currie, and looks set to end it as someone you actually respect and admire ... until spectacularly shooting herself in the foot at the last minute and becoming an arsehole again. But then that's women for you: hopeless to a man.
gaurdian
I would not allow the obnoxious McCririck get cheap laughs at my expence by making me argue the toss with him on the way he expects his house to be run I would go along with all his demands and show him up for the lazy, fat fool he his.
