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.”