They Call Him Gaunty

Jon Gaunt (an ironic surname given his appearance) appears yet again on the current incarnation of BBC’s Sunday morning anaemic hot air balloon, Sunday Morning Live (the only three words with any veracity involved). This man angers me to a level beyond any of his ghastly contemporaries. These people (it was David Vance last week) seem to occupy a special place in the BBC booking team’s little black book.

Somehow they managed to squeeze him into a chair, but that never stops him leaking out to bear down on whoever has the misfortune of sitting next to him. It’s like watching a loaf of bread rise in an oven, except instead of dough you have ignorance and hate. The reason he angers me most is his boorish discussion tactic of shouting down anyone who dares to disagree with him, while claiming to represent the ‘ordinary working people’, and of huffing and sighing under anyone else if they do manage to get more than a couple of words in.

Every single interview or debate in which he participates ends up like this. Yet they still invite him on. It is clear then, from the moribund nature of these programmes and BBC ‘debate’ in general, that the BBC isn’t interested in any real progression of ideas and simply serves as an echo chamber for ‘controversial’ discussion – more often than not at the expense of the proles. It is an elitist organisation where media snobs use ‘robuist’ contributors as cattleprods to wind up the poor. It is a real shame that public money is wasted in this way as a tiny minority of their output is worthwhile; they ought to stick to the science and nature stuff. But even that is marketed to the chattering classes.

If you give ‘Gaunty’ (because adding a y to the end of your surname makes you one of the lads!) enough rope, metaphorically speaking, he enthusiastically hangs himself. He gets lost in his own bluster and ends up in hypocrisy or even, as he found out during this infamous interview, breaks the rules. It seems that freedom of speech comes with responsibilities; who knew eh Gaunty!

Despite losing his job there, he ended up hitting what might be described as the motherlode. As if TalkSport wasn’t bad enough, the Sun itself briefly had a radio station. God knows what kind of cesspit that must have been if the movitation to create it was that TalkSport wasn’t ‘working class’ enough. Hilariously it was broadcast to the expat community in Spain! You can imagine the tick like old wrinklies decrying the state of Britain while living in their eggs and bacon enclaves afraid to integrate and moaning about the heat. Sun Talk indeed.

I used to listen to TalkSport, even after Talk Radio, the original station, was rebranded by Kelvin MacKenzie, turning it into the arse end of the daily redtops. Even then I was ignorant and kept listening as the actual current affairs (ie non sport) discussions were marginalised in favour of almost wall to wall football banter. I kept listening to daily outrages over predictable right wing hot button 'stories'; somewhere a British Legion hospital was to be demolished in favour of a statute called Mohammed depicting a black lesbian giving birth to a puppy. The usual garbled nonsense were expats, retired curtain twitchers and people too angry or insane for 5 Live would be welcome to comment. In the end I woke up.

Best of all though, Gaunty’s not done yet: he’s just joined UKiP to stand, I gather, as a major candidate in the West Midlands. I guess that's democracy in Farage Farage Land: where all it takes is some media notoriety and instantly, upon joining the party, you get a well paid top job. What does that represent Jon? Is that how things work in your view of the 'working class'? I wonder how long it will be before he and they come to blows; both entities have a track record for bluster and tactless broadcasting. I bet there's only room for one Godfrey Bloom level bigot (or perhaps he regenerated like the Doctor into Guanty - "ooh teeth, no, FUCK I'M FAT!"). The irony of a UKip member calling someone a nazi pig. He's only joined because he got his arse handed to him by the high courts (the very courts he's complained about constantly) when he whined to them about being sacked.

Somewhere a dark circle has been made complete… I can smell the sulphur now. Talking to Gaunt is, I imagine, like having a conversation with the sweatiest, hairiest, skankiest builder’s arse crack going. Enjoy that stench of weak tea and shit wafting on a breeze of bigotry and working class scandal.