Monday 14 September 2009

Dick Littlejohn

The Mail have decided that Richard Littlejohn's columns are now so important and valuable, they have stopped running them in full on the website so you just have to buy the paper to read the rubbish in full.

That seems to be quite positive news - his ignorant, repetitive, feeble rantings are now going to be seen by far fewer people. Good job Daily Mail!

After the blog post here about his inability to spot some 'babies' were actually puppies, he issued a 'correction' on 11 September. But only in the print version, and under the headline 'How the Times readers were sold a pup', thus implying it's the Times' fault he got it wrong. Nothing to do with the fact he's an idiot who can't do basic journalistic research.

(If anyone has the full text, please do send it over).

His 'PC gone mad' fiction of the week was about the renaming of Spotted Dick, which has been covered by Jonathan and Uponnothing. Littlejohn says:

killjoy canteen chiefs at Flintshire council have banned Spotted Dick.

These Welsh puritans have ordered the name of the popular pudding changed to Spotted Richard. If they knew anything about cockney rhyming slang, they'd have given that a miss, too.

Because, in cockney rhyming slang, it means turd.

Who could have possibly imagined that 'Richard' means 'shit'?

Anyway, was it another ghastly plot by politically correct council chiefs? Well, umm, no. A spokesman said:

"The correct title for this dish is 'Spotted Dick.' However because of several immature comments from a few customers, catering staff renamed the dish 'Spotted Richard' or 'Sultana Sponge'.

"This was not a policy decision, canteen staff simply acted as they thought best to put an end to unwelcome and childish comments, albeit from a very small number of customers."

So canteen staff changed the name because they were sick of childish jokes, rather than any sinister plot to destroy Britain's heritage etc. And how does Littlejohn continue his article? With lots more childish jokes:

Where does this leave cock-a-leekie, let alone coq au vin?

And woe betide anyone who asks for a knob of butter or meat and two veg.

Laugh? I nearly did.

The main focus of his column is the Michael Shields case, which includes this gem:

Louise Ellman, LibDem MP for Liverpool Riverside

The name and constituency are right. But she's a Labour MP, not a Lib Dem. Oopsy. Again.

So that's mixing up Devon and Cornwall, thinking dogs are humans, and confusing Labour with the Lib Dems. All in the space of a couple of weeks.

He really is trying his best to make it up.

4 comments:

  1. Actually, Richard (Richard the Third) is rhyming slang for Bird, as demonstrated by the late Ronnie Barker in his Rhyming Slang Sermon, which played on the suggestion that it might mean turd, but concluded " ... and the small brown Richard the Third got better, and flew away".

    More research not done by Littlejohn.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Full text:

    " 'How The Times readers were really sold a pup...'
    Finally got to the bottom of that bizarre births announcemet in The Times, which I brought you last week. The news that a single mother called Kate Pong had qiven birth to quins called Beyonce, Tyra, Bobbi, Barack and Earl just had to be a wind up, even though the paper's advertising deopartment insisted the entry was genuine.

    Now I discover that it is kosher. Kate Pong is a dog. A real one. She belongs to Fiona Wallace, who runs a show-jumping team in Shropshire.

    The two-and-a-half-year old chocolate labrador is quite a character in horsey circles and one of Fiona's friends paid for the announcement to let people around the country know she'd had pups.

    Apparently, there was no deliberate intention to mislead. Fiona explained: 'She didn't say they were human, she just didn't say they were dogs.'

    Still, I'm amazed it slipped under the radar. I wasn't aware The Times register ran to animals. Even in this celebrity-obsessed age, it's unlikely any reader of The Times would call their child Beyonce. Barking and Dagenham Recorder, maybe..."

    ReplyDelete
  3. Who the hell goes into a canteen and asks for a knob of butter???

    ReplyDelete
  4. This story was coming from a mile off. I predicted it, boasted about it and now we've set up a game with a prize and everything.

    Join in! Jamie Sport and Eric the Fish have already.

    ReplyDelete

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