The men who hate too much

EVEN if you don’t read The Sunday Times, you may have heard about the fuss caused by a throwaway paragraph of critic AA Gill’s TV review.

About the classicist Mary Beard, whose programme Meet The Romans is showing on BBC2, he wrote: “Mary Beard should be kept away from cameras altogether. She’s this far from being the subject of a Channel 4 dating documentary”. This is a reference to The Undateables, the Channel 4 programme about people with disabilities or facial disfigurements. Yikes.

Adrian Gill — let’s call him Adrian, because AA is pompous — is hung up on appearance. Last time he wrote about Beard, a professor of classics at Cambridge, he said, “For someone who looks this closely at the past, it is strange she hasn’t had a closer look at herself before stepping in front of a camera. The hair is a disaster, the outfit an embarrassment. If you are going to invite yourself into the front rooms of the living, then you need to make an effort.”

But Adrian, love, she had. She’d made a fascinating, thought-provoking, absorbing history programme. Oh, hang on. By ‘effort’, do you mean botox and boob implants? I suppose, if you watch telly for a living, this kind of thing is higher on your list of requirements than, say, brains.

That’s what Mary Beard thinks. “Even the greenest of my students would not present me with an essay as ill-argued and off-the-point as Gill’s critique. Possibly, this is where we reach the heart of AA Gill’s problem: maybe it’s precisely because he did not go to university that he never quite learned the rigour of intellectual argument and he thinks that he can pass off insults as wit.

“It may well be the reason why he feels the need to sneer at intelligent, educated women, like Clare and me, so repeatedly ... men like Gill … are frightened of smart women who speak their minds.”

The ‘Clare’ is BBC sports presenter Clare Balding, whom Gill last year referred to as ‘a dyke on a bike’. Balding was outraged and a complaint against Gill was upheld. But in 2009 the BBC had to apologise to Grand National winner Liam Treadwell after Balding made fun of his teeth. In a post-race interview, Balding urged the jockey to show his teeth and told him he could now afford to "get them done".

Mary Beard’s response about her appearance last week was positively punk rock.

“I’m every inch the 57-year-old wife, mum and academic,” she wrote. “Half-proud of her wrinkles, her crow’s feet, even her hunched shoulders from all those misspent years poring over a library desk.”

Trending on Twitter for two days as a result of his insults to Beard, Gill had his Wikipedia page hacked. The hacker wrote that he was a “pitiable little sexist” and “a 12-year-old playground bully” whose work is characterised by “shallow and insecure sniping at people whose success he finds intimidating.” Oh dear. He really does annoy people, doesn’t he?

Germaine Greer once said that “Women have very little idea of just how much men hate them,” but to call Gill a misogynist is to miss the point — he hates everyone.

The actor Sean Bean is “an angry tiddlywink”; Tony Robinson “Gollum”, Piers Morgan “skin crawling”, David Tennant “half Time Lord, half haddock”. The Welsh are “ugly pugnacious little trolls”, the English “a beefy bummed herd”, and the Isle of Man a place that managed “to slip through the crack of the space-time continuum.”

Gill hates fat people, vegetarians (“people who get pleasure from not eating things”), dinner parties, gastro-pubs, Greek food, Tex Mex, Starbucks (“asking Americans to make coffee is like asking them to draw a map of the world”), Christmas dinner, seasonal food, the organic movement and balsamic vinegar. His food reviews avoid using traditional restaurant-critic words like ‘succulent’ or ‘drizzled’, instead comparing food to “boiled Lego” and “compressed liposuction.”

Gill is a vivid, brilliant writer trapped in the body of a hopeless misanthrope. His writing is fuelled by hatred (“Hate is good. Hate is fine.”) My insurmountable problem with him is not his misanthropy, which is funny, and which is why he is The Sunday Times’s highest paid columnist, but his misozoony. This is a man who, in Tanzania in 2009, shot dead a baboon to experience the nearest thing to killing a person. He shot a primate for his pleasure. This is in a different league to being rude about someone’s hair, teeth or outfit. It is why I loathe him, despite his wondrous talent.

So now you have a picture of Adrian Gill — misogynist, misanthrope, misozoonist, monkey murderer, and, worst of all, close friend of Jeremy Clarkson. Of his appearance, and penchant for handmade suits lined with ladies’ silk scarves, his partner Nicola Formby (whom he refers to as ‘the blonde,’ without irony) told an interviewer, “He loves clothes … he goes off and sits with [his tailor] Doug Haywood and twinks and twanks about whether the stitching should go here, and the lining should be like this — that’s his kind of game of golf in the afternoon. I don’t think he’s obsessively vain, but he likes the business of looking well-turned-out.”

Unlike, say, Frankie Boyle, who is just dial-a-rant and offensive-by-numbers, Gill is more complex.

Until the age of 30, Gill was consumed, and nearly killed, by alcoholism (he used to drink Benylin and vodka through a straw because he shook so much). He is dyslexic, such that no computer spell check can decipher his spelling, and he has to phone his columns in to copy-takers.

His parents were lefty, and he went to a vegetarian boarding school. He had a terrible stammer. In 1998, his beloved brother Nick, a chef who was suffering from depression, said he was “going to disappear for a while” — and never came back.

These days, the middle-aged AA is in AA, identifies as a Christian (what — love thy neighbour? Thou shalt not kill?) and is the father of four kids. Those who know him personally — like journalist Lynne Barber, not famous for cutting people slack — say he is kind, funny, generous. Just not on the page. Nor to baboons.

This is not to excuse Gill’s horridness.

Perhaps when men insult the appearance of women, women become infuriated because we are judged so much more than men by how we look. Gill is a throwback. In the past, misogyny and racism as entertainment were routine, with the likes of comedian Jim Davidson trading on it. The ground-breaking US comedian Bill Hicks was horribly misanthropic, and especially vile to women. Hate is a big earner.

Ironically, both television and politics groan under the weight of seriously ugly men, but nobody (apart from Gill) seems to notice how so many men in the public eye are eyesores. Gill hates ugly, full stop, gender irrelevant.

But when it comes to serious, sustained misogyny about women’s appearances, the real culprit is not some over-groomed knob at The Sunday Times, but the racks and racks of glossy women-hating trash clogging up the lifestyle shelves in the newsagent.

You know, women’s gossip magazines. By women for women, and the most hateful of all. Never mind Gill commenting on Mary Beard’s hair — what about page after page of Sack The Stylist?