Phwoar! This isn’t what you were expecting, was it? This isn’t your ordinary pud. This is a hot, fresh, sweet, salty, lip-licking gobful of comeuppance. You just can’t stop sticking your spoon in it, digging deeper and deeper, despite the PR team desperately windmilling their arms just out of shot. It’s quite something, isn’t it? We’re going to have to take you straight through to the final two. HR meetings, that is.
You just can’t say anything any more, can you? Not without some uppity middle-aged woman of a certain age running off to the complaints department. Why is it always the more world-weary and financially secure ones that get offended? Why is it only the ones with established careers – who have been dealing with tedious men in the workplace for years – that are always so keen to take you down a peg or two?
It’s never the junior freelancers, or the terrified members of the public stood in front of a TV camera for the first time in their lives, melting down as they mangle a quenelle under the pressure. You distinctly remember nearly all of them laughing. So hard, in fact, that some of them still had tears in their eyes an hour later. Keep going with that pattern recognition, Gregg. You’re so close to actually getting it.
Nope, it’s gone. This isn’t the time for quiet self-reflection about your own conduct! There’s just one thing this situation calls for, and it’s to film a video blaming the women. That’ll deal with those nasty accusations of misogyny. It should also put to bed this silly idea that you might not know just how offensively you come across. Who needs experts in defensive comms, when you can just manifest and self-actualise your own victory in this Total PR War?
Who’d have thought it could come to this? Well, apart from Popbitch that is, who have been recording examples of your ad-libbed comic genius for posterity dating back years. It’s almost as if everyone around you has been sick of your shit for ages, quietly seething with resentment for how desperately uncomfortable you made them feel. Why not tell Popbitch, when all you want is for someone – anyone – to actually challenge the creeps on their bullshit? It’s not like BBC management were taking any of them seriously.
Every off-colour joke you’ve ever told, each of them leaping straight over that firmly established line of cheeky British daytime TV innuendo. Why go for wit, when you can leap straight into ‘every woman who hears this joke suddenly craving a scalding hot shower’ territory? So many of them, quoted in Typewriter in that double-spaced newsletter. I mean really, where’s the harm? It’s just ‘banter,’ isn’t it? A bit of slap and tickle, cheeky wink, Yakety-Sax themed cheekiness.
What does that dish remind me of? I know, it’s my aunt’s c**t! An apparent quote from you there. One that inexplicably ended up on the cutting room floor. Why, I have no idea – it’s an expertly written bit of harmlessly suggestive wordplay that could have been lifted directly out of any of the Carry On films.
I’m sure everybody on set roared with laughter that day, particularly the women. Like the time you told another contestant in front of Ulrika Johnsson that they were handling a fish ‘like a rapist attempting foreplay.’ I can’t think of a single reason why as many as one in four women wouldn’t have roared with laughter at that one.
Wasn’t that the day Monica completely coincidentally snapped a knife sharpener, the corner of one of her eyes twitching? Oh how we laughed, as that jagged spar of steel bounced and twanged across the studio floor before embedding itself in the door of a microwave. It was all just harmless fun!
But why stop there? What’s the difference between jam and jelly, Gregg? You don’t present Masterchef for twenty years just to get more than a dozen complaints of workplace harassment jellied up your arse! Wait, what do you mean I’m ‘suspended with pay pending an investigation?’ This is political correctness gone mad! Didn’t you read my column? I’m just a normal bloke!
No wonder you’re so ruffled. It’s an injustice, isn’t it? It’s classism, that’s what it is – they can’t stand the working boy for having done good. You’re being persecuted by the middle-class liberal elites, the humourless ones who can’t take a bit of harmless banter. It’s definitely not narcissism that causes you to instantly recast yourself as the wronged hero of this story. I can practically hear the word “woke” bubbling up in your throat from here.
I can feel it rising through your convulsing body, a throttled battle cry of frustrated anger that will soon erupt forth like Caesar first learning to speak. I give it a week, max, before you finally snap and grab that cattle prod, roaring “WOOOOOOKE!” across social media like every other grotesque boor that thinks it’s a magic word for excusing their bullshit.
Actually thinking about it, maybe we should drop the Caesar analogy. You shouldn’t grab the cattle prod. You’ll only end up windmilling it at an intern.
