A very funny example of journalist ego gone mad is zooming around media circles at the moment. And at the centre of it, designer-stubble dork Giles Coren.
Coren’s not a bad writer and he used to write very funny pieces, but over the past year/two years it was clear his ego was getting out of control and I stopped bothering looking up his work. Well, the Guardian has gone hold of a furious email he sent to the Times’ sub-editors excoriating them for changing his copy in an April restaurant review.
What is so terrificly funny about the email is that the abusive rant is over a single letter. The letter “a” in fact. It’s so ridiculous you could mistake it for sensational satire.
This is an excerpt – but I encourage you to read the full letter:
I’m really hoping it wasn’t you that fucked up my review on saturday. It was the final sentence. Final sentences are very, very important. A piece builds to them, they are the little jingle that the reader takes with him into the weekend.
I wrote: “I can’t think of a nicer place to sit this spring over a glass of rosé and watch the boys and girls in the street outside smiling gaily to each other, and wondering where to go for a nosh.”
It appeared as: “I can’t think of a nicer place to sit this spring over a glass of rosé and watch the boys and girls in the street outside smiling gaily to each other, and wondering where to go for nosh.”
There is no length issue. This is someone thinking “I’ll just remove this indefinite article because Coren is an illiterate cunt and i know best.
What I particularly love about this is that he is actually right – at least if you look at it from his ego-gone-mad perspective where every word he writes is pure unadulterated genius. If you actually look at it from the reader’s perspective, a really quite uninteresting ending of a quite uninteresting review (of Cafe Boheme in, of course, London and, just as tedious, Soho) has got some idiot writer into a right ole lather.
If you look closely, you can also see that even as he writes his crazed rant, something is jiggling in his mind telling him that for some inexplicable reason it is not a good idea to send this email. (“I am sorry if this looks petty (last time i mailed a Times sub about the change of a single word i got in all sorts of trouble) but i care deeply about my work…”)
Well send it he did. Giles Coren, you are officially a fantastic twat.
P.S. It may be worth pointing out that the first 450 words of the 1400-word restaurant review are about Coren and don’t even mention the restaurant. Just in case you wondered what ego-gone-mad journalism looks like.
Gareth Keenan
July 27, 2008 at 3:22 amThese days, I find reviewers largely irrelevant in any case. Look at the mass culling of movie and restaurant critics in the US press. Even worse, though, are nepotistic lo-talent staffers like Giles and Victoria, who would never have got near a publication had it not been for Dad.
Rachel
August 1, 2008 at 9:20 pmHe is such a collossal asshole. I got really angry reading his email – so fucking rude. The best part is that the “joke” he’s ranting about is (a) based on something very, very obscure, so very few people would have even got it, and (b) not funny.
Squinty-eyed little twat.