to not understand appeal of Caitlin Moran writing for The Times?

[ARealDame]

She always has at least a couple of articles in The Times on Saturday, including her TV reviews, and seems to be heavily promoted there at the moment.

But I often find her writing cringeworthy e.g. this Saturday TV reviewing The White Queen headlines "She Makes Ingrid Bergman look like Someone Stuck Tits on a Turnip". Last Saturday, reviewing exactly the same programme (did anyone at The Times notice ?) the review headlined Battles, Castles and Tons of Fruity Historical Humping. Is she just being crass/offensive for the sake of it? And I find so much of her writing self-adulating plus impossible to make any sense of, a jumble of thoughtless sentences stuck together ... almost like a teenager on speed.

It seems a shame when The Times on Saturday has some enjoyable journalism e.g. the often brilliant Janice Turner, Matthew Paris, Giles Coran, plus some great review stuff of the Arts.

My heart just sinks when I see her bylines and picture. AIBU ?

I never read TV reviews. I do not see the point of them when a straightforward description would be just as useful. Why would I trust the judgement of the likes of A A Gimp, CM, Victor Lewis Smith and that odious Grace Dent? What on earth qualifies them as arbiters of taste good or bad?

But the people who do get paid for it, such as Wollaston and Moran, for example, are in the wrong job.

I couldn't get past the first half of' How To Be A Woman.'
I I expected to like it after people on here raved about it but I just didn't give a shit about what she thought about anything really.

OK, I was being facetious in saying the work experience should do the TV reviews. TV reviews are great with a good critical writer and i def enjoy TV shows more when i have read some reviews and given some food for thiught by someone whose literary / culturla knowledge is wider than mine. I would however rather hear "Opinion" writers writing a truly "opinion" piece and not shoehorning their views into a TV review, same goes for Giles Coren and his ramblings in his restaurant column. Write about the frickng restaurant and food and relevant related topics, not shit for 15 paras then passing refernece to the resto for 5 paras. If you want to write opinion pieces.

God, sorry for all the typos, I am not, as it would appear above, illiterate!

Oh, mignonetteI can get a description from the studio listings or from reviews from people who don't understand that a review isn't a recap.

But I love good TV reviews and film, radio, book and play reviews, for that matter.

It doesn't matter whether I know the work or not. It might inspire me to look it up.

I can agree or disagree, have my view challenged, or as Gosh said, just have something discussed that I might have missed because I either wasn't paying attention or didn't know enough about the subject.

There are good and bad reviewers. Mostly bad, these days, because people think if you haven't got anything nice to say, you shouldn't say anything, which is anathema to proper criticism.

I love Ally Ross and Nancy Banks Smith - I forgot about her. I mostly like AA Gill and Clive James.

I used to like Charlie Brooker, but not for a long time now. I think that by making TV programmes as well as commenting on them he's gone native.

Recently, people on here were saying Camilla Long had won Hatchet Job of the Year like it was a bad thing. The award is for reviewers who've made an accurate assessment of a bad work - in that case it was Rachel Cusk's extraordinarily self-obsessed memoir of her divorce.

It was not only a well-deserved review and award, it might have helped Cusk to shift a few more copies. People should have looked beyond the cheeky title of the award.

hand I agree. I like AA Gill's restaurant reviews now I've understood that out of 800 words 550 of them are devoted to general rambling and the rest devoted to whether I might like the restaurant.

What I like about him is that his view isn't to do with cost, but more to do with value for money. Value for money does not equal cheapness.

Somewhere that charges you squillions could be justified on the grounds of the ingredients, standards of cooking or service. Alternatively, somewhere could fail on all or some of those things but could be a nice place to go when you don't fancy cooking your own dinner that night.

I hate it when restaurant reviewers tell me what they ate and how much it cost. I don't care because I can read menus. I want to know whether it's the kind of place I'd want to go.

She's nowhere near as clever as she thinks she is.

I think she is fabulous. Really enjoyed her books and started to get the Times just to read her and Melanie (? Can't remember her sir name) columns at the weekend.

I love Caitlin Moran's articles. I subscribe to The Times iPad app and it is so terrible, taking forever to make its mind up whether to load or not. I recently decided to stop my subscription, but I would miss my dose of Caitlin Moran so am still with it for now.

Her article on families on benefits after the Philpott trial was especially good.

I loved The White Queen review, summed the series up so perfectly, I was quietly chortling to myself when I read it. Honestly, you can't take the series seriously as it's so ridiculous, and quite sensibly CM hasn't.

However I struggled with How to Be a Woman. Some of it resonated, like the episode where she discovered that the bloke she fancies thinks she is fat, and that she should know this already. I thought her description of her bravado hiding despair was excellent.

But I did not like all the graphical masturbation and sex related stuff. It reminded me a bit of The Vagina Monologues, which seemed to run on the one trick pony that it was terribly modern to say the word vagina all the time.

I also felt that her efforts to describe how women should act were somewhat puerile. She was lucky or clever enough to marry a decent bloke at a youngish age and has a job that allows her to avoid many of the unpleasant realities of being a working mother.

Also it felt very much like a random thread of what would probably be very entertaining in their own right columns, rather than a full blown book with narrative drive to bring it all the way through.

But hey what do I know. If a few young women read it and get their life lessons from it rather than the Kashardians then I suppose it can only be a good thing.

I like it when AA Gill goes on holiday, I find him so sniffy about most restaurants. Much better when they let the make up lady loose, or Kate Spicer who you can sense is ridiculously excited about having her restaurant meal paid for.

Still better than Giles Coren who seems to spend most of his time ascertaining the provenance of all of the restaurants meat for sustainability and general eco cred, rather than telling you very much at all about the food and if it's any good.

Who remembers when Sali Hughes (from the stabtastic link upthread) came on and had a pop at us for being rude about IK?!

I do remember and it was daft but so lovely to read.

If you can dish it out, you should be able to take it back.

I think Caitlin Moran has become a parody of herself.

What was funny and fresh a few years ago now seems too try hard and formulaic to me.

Just to clarify, someone came on to post that people should not be publicly mean to someone who makes their living, at least in part, out of publicly being mean to people?

I remember. It was the first time I realised who Silly Hughes was. She knows about make up, doesn't she?

I went in Superdrug yesterday and was umming and ahhing over a 3 for 2 offer on Bourgois. It ends tomorrow, so if you're reading, Silly, and can advise...

"She's a grown woman writing in the style of an over-excited teenager and I find her extremely annoying."

Even when she actually WAS an over-excited teenager her literary output was still extremely annoying.

Yes, I remember. I recall I.K had a book coming out that month...

Also remember that Sali said Alastair Campbell misquoted I.K about her mental health column in his tweet which was picked up by the Huffingon Post. Whether Sali hadn't checked or was brazen enough to think none of us would check, I don't know, but I went off her after that.

I ache for her columns - it's the random apercus about life now that I like the most, plus the odd laff. She can write dialogue like a dream, wasted as a columnist.

Just re-read my post and to clarify, Sali was wrong about the misquoting.

Giles Coren = prize wanker. If ever there was someone who'd be nowhere without his Dad, it's him. I almost feel sorry for his sister. On the other hand, I could probably say the same about her. At least CM didn't get to where she got today by having a famous (and genuinely funny) writer with loads of connections for a father.

I enjoy Giles Coren's writing.

That's not to say there aren't other people without famous parents whose writing I might also enjoy, had they been given columns in national newspapers.

But I generally enjoy reading what he writes.

I like her. I liked her book. I liked the MH article. And if she occasionally comes across as a bit try hard, aren't they all trying quite hard to occupy their 'character'?

Not a week goes by without AA Gill conspicuously hating something that we're all supposed to love (Oxford University, organic food, France, etc). It's always, always the opening of his column. Always.

I don't think the Times gives someone a job just because their dad worked there. They give them a job because their dad worked there AND they're talented.