AIBU to feel really annoyed after seeing the trailer for Giles Coren’s new series on BBC2

[FlirtyKirti]

Here is the trailer: m.youtube.com/watch?v=KQrphDomnLk

Last year Giles mocked the death of Dawn Foster, a disabled journalist from a working class background, which caused additional distress to her grieving family. He has never apologised. It is possible to cancel your Times subscription or to not buy the newspaper, but we all pay our TV license fee and the idea of it funding the salary of such a spiteful silver spooner and for him to go partying around five star hotels really, really irks me. Why has he faced absolutely no consequences? Why is he still in print and on TV? Piers Morgan was forced to resign for saying he didn’t believe Megan Markle saying she was suicidal. Surely laughing at someone’s premature death and hoping that they go to hell is much worse than that?

Is there some sort of BBC forum I can complain to? I’m not even going to mention his terrible sex scene writing.

@TooBigForMyBoots
For someone who you you despise and have no time for, you seem to have gone to a lot of effort to read about him.
Why do you want to spend so much of your time engaging about a 'cowardly wee cunt'?

Because he is the reasoning no longer buy the Times and I miss it. And I enjoy exposing the talentless twerp for the cowardly wee cunt that he is.

Why are you going to the effort of defending him?

@madisonbridges Yes, why do you defend him?

What would people think if Holly Willoughby or Dermot O’Leary or Nigella Lawson publicly celebrated the death of a working, class disabled woman who they disagreed with? Would everyone be ok with that?

Very bland writer, desperately trying to be edgy.

Even my dearly-missed late FIL gave up his Times subscription towards the end of his life. Utter drivel. You're not missing much, @toobigformyboots

I'm not defending him. I've criticised him for what he said. But I don't think he started it and I don't think he should be sacked. I was just curious why you wanted to talk so much about someone you held in such disdain. Doesn't that just make you think of him more and therefore make you unhappier?

Yanbu. And that wholly indulgent "most expensive hotels in the world" series is just trashy and also very off tune when most of the world is locked down living a small life.

I always think the "gawp at these rich people being fucking indulgent" programmes - such as Real Housewives Of - belong on the independent channels which are funded by adverts every 10 minutes, not on a tax payer funded outlet.

[quote FlirtyKirti]@madisonbridges Yes, why do you defend him?

What would people think if Holly Willoughby or Dermot O’Leary or Nigella Lawson publicly celebrated the death of a working, class disabled woman who they disagreed with? Would everyone be ok with that?[/quote]
I don't understand why you keep going on about sex, class and disability. What has that got to do with the argument? None of those were an issue to DF when she made the tweet and none were an issue when he replied. The only person who has narrowed her life to those three attributes are you. Is that the prism through which you judge everyone? I think that's quite judgemental.

Doesn't that just make you think of him more and therefore make you unhappier?

On the contrary, every insult I lob his way makes me happier.

@TooBigForMyBoots

Doesn't that just make you think of him more and therefore make you unhappier?

On the contrary, every insult I lob his way makes me happier.

In that case, crack on.

What Giles did tell me, and that I can repeat, is that he will be forever loyal to Michael Gove who gave him his first job at The Times.

He is a bitter little man. He doesn’t have the same talent or drive as someone like Dawn had and it irks him every time anyone mentions his family connections have helped him. I would put him in the same bracket as India Knight, it’s who you know.

@madison I think people who are privileged and particularly public school educated white males should wear it lightly and be gracious about the advantages it has afforded them. I don’t think they should brandish their privilege in order to mock other people, as Giles so clearly does. So I does think it matters that Dawn was a working class, disabled woman who achieved everything herself. And Giles still danced on her grave at the first moment he could and when she couldn’t reply.

*I do think it matters

Revolting, odious man. I wouldn’t give him the ratings

He is one seriously disturbed person judging by his writing, posting and comments to others. Pretty warped mind.
Wonder what redeeming features he has?

In September 2018, Coren became involved in a back and forth with The Guardian’s Michael White. Quote-tweeting a message which included White, Coren wrote:

Anyone know who this old cunt is? He looks like the top half of Davros

White replied:

"This old cunt” knew your dad, Giles. Clever, funny man. What went wrong?"

To which Coren replied with a string of libellous tweets falsely accusing White of being an abuser of children:

My dad said you fiddle with kids. Is that true?

He’s dead so you can’t sue him. But he did suggest you put your fingers in knickers without asking. In this new age, you may have to answer for this. Of course, you could always not invoke dead men to insult their children. But then you’re a mean old cunt, aren’t you? So you do

White, enjoying the abundant room on the high ground, replied calmly:

Anyone can read what happened here between us and work it out for themselves. Time for you to go to bed, I sense. Sleep well, wake up a better person

But Coren was not done. He continued:

You fucking bastard. I am going to find you and I am going to beat you TO A FUCKING PULP

You are fucking disgusting. You am [sic] going to come to your home tomorrow and fucking stab you you piece of shot. [sic]

A seriously sick in the head 'man'

Giles Coren has a tried and tested method for avoiding the fallout that comes after he says something appalling in his column or on Twitter. He just disappears. He’s the Keyser Söze of shitheads

Once the storm has dissipated he sneaks back acting as if nothing happened, safe in the knowledge that his friends in the media and his employers at The Times, Times Radio and the BBC will act as though they are wearing blinkers specifically designed to block out his arrant arseholery

Any regular person in a normal job would have found themselves tossed out of the last chance saloon years ago if they did just one of the many awful things he has done. But Coren nods to the landlord as he saunters in, takes up his familiar spot at the bar, and starts honking on, certain that he will never be thrown out for even a day, let alone barred for good

Sums it up really

@LadyLyndon

What Giles did tell me, and that I can repeat, is that he will be forever loyal to Michael Gove who gave him his first job at The Times.

😲

@DontBeCatty

OP, YANBU - he is a really odious, smug and nasty man. I can’t stand him. He isn’t talented at all and he only got where he has due to Dad. There are lots of examples of him saying awful things.

It seems once you are on the BBC gravy train then you are on it for life.

I agree. His sister, however, has talent and would have got on regardless.

In 2008, he called Polish immigrants ‘Polacks’ in The Times and told them that “if England is not the land of milk and honey it appeared to them three or four years ago, then, frankly they can clear off out of it.”

In 2010, he tweeted a rant about his neighbour’s child playing the drums, which read

“Next door have brought their 12-year-old son a drum kit. For fuck’s sake! Do I kill him then burn it? Or do I fuck him, then kill him then burn it?” He followed that up with the ‘punchline’: “Child for sale, charred and partially fucked. Has own drum kit.”

In 2011, he used his Twitter feed to break a privacy injunction and ended up facing the prospect of criminal prosecution for contempt of court.

In 2017, he wrote a column for Esquire about his then four-year-old son, in which he wrote that the boy was a ‘fat little bastard’ and a ‘chubby fucker’, going on to rant

Arse on him like Vanessa Feltz and a full-frontal presentation at bath time that puts one in mind of a Gavin and Stacey-era James Corden or a well-waxed Christopher Biggins, all giggly on too much rosé

He went on to write that he didn’t care what the boy grows up to be as long as he isn’t fat

So much of Coren reminds me of Boris Johnson.

[quote FlirtyKirti]@madison I think people who are privileged and particularly public school educated white males should wear it lightly and be gracious about the advantages it has afforded them. I don’t think they should brandish their privilege in order to mock other people, as Giles so clearly does. So I does think it matters that Dawn was a working class, disabled woman who achieved everything herself. And Giles still danced on her grave at the first moment he could and when she couldn’t reply.[/quote]
He never made a comment about her - unless you know differently. She decided to comment on him. Totally unsolicited she decided to go after him. It was not in reference to her being a woman, being disabled or being working class. Neither did he make a reference to that. She highlighted him. Not the other way round. How has he brandished his privilege? How did he use his white, publically educated privilege to hurt her. He never said anything about her background. She did the attacking. We're all, regardless of background, accountable for we say. DF is responsible for starting it and she shouldn't be given a pass because her target was a white man whose father was richer than hers.

But when Giles Coren jokes about killing and burning a child, threatens a fellow journalist with stabbing, or laughs at the untimely death of a brilliant young woman, well… that’s just banter, yeah?

Coren belongs in the strata of the media class that can be as cruel as it wants to anyone it wants without sanction but is entitled to turn its guns on anyone, however small their platform, who dares talk back to them

Giles Coren is in the Subtweet & Unsackable again, sipping a pint and smiling to himself, certain beyond doubt that he can say whatever he wants to whoever he wants. The Times pays him handsomely to be that cruel and it’s terribly impolite of you to mention it

Pretty good summary of the situation