- Fri Dec 11, 2020 11:24 am
#632418
My dad, bless him, was an admirable man in many ways, but he had a tendency to mutter when watching, say, university Challenge, "And who scored the bloody goal?" after a contestant had got a particularly tricky/obscure question right. That or "Ask them one on sport".
However, he respected people who were experts in their field. Littlejohn has always struck me as the sort of guy who was fine at school until about age 13, when rote learning begins to be replaced by actual thinking, and the swots begin to outstrip the toughs. And given a choice between which group to belong to, he chooses the toughs (actually borne out by his autobiography).
Experts, in his view, are only qualified if they're in a suitably macho occupation - military, heavy labour, and the blunt end of the police. There's a sort of proxy machismo going on there too, hoping their manliness rubs off on him, one of the lads, not a lightweight, not a pooftah. See also his love of pub rock, albeit with seemingly little idea of what they're singing. He's just there to thump the table in time with the beat.
More detailed assessments are available, but I think he can be summed up as follows: cunt.
"There ain't nothing you fear more than a bad headline, is there? You'd rather live in shit than let the world see you work a shovel."