Grumpy old men will be the ruin of all of us
VOGUE WILLIAMS’S claim to fame may be tenuous but George Hook was completely out of order when he rudely told the reality television star that ‘nobody still has a clue who you are’. It went right over the balding head of the desiccated old codger... sorry, veteran broadcaster, but it’s likely that most people under the age of 50 could say more or less the same of him.
But then self-awareness is not exactly a trait of professional grumpy old men whose raison d’être seems to be to snort at any innovation, social change or attitude that has crept up on them since they shuffled past their prime.
Facebook? Online banking? Recycling waste and reality television? These facets of modernity strike them with a mixture of terror and bewilderment but rather than bemoan the decline of their physical and mental acuity, they turn it into a virtue under the pretence of a healthy scepticism about new-fangled things.
Ranting about feminism is fertile ground for old-timers like Hook who appear to hanker for the bad old days.
‘Feminists have lost the plot entirely,’ he charged at Vogue Williams, blasting the absence of mass protest at the recent release on bail of a serial rapist.
Hook thinks feminists a strange species, not ordinary working women who, if they took to the streets every time a rapist was returned to decent society, would lose their jobs through persistent absenteeism.
Probably the worst aspect of the stranglehold of political correctness on open debate is that it rewards with the oxygen of publicity any old opinionated bore willing to offend its bland strictures with their provocative utterances.
The shallow waters of reality television, where ‘stars’ like Vogue Williams with no outstanding attributes apart from vaulting ambition and a brass neck are spawned, is another familiar bugbear of dinosaurs who came of age in an era when fame was a by-product of talent rather than a goal in itself.
The irony of course is that outspoken controversialists are probably the precursors of reality stars.
The Brits have Jeremys Clarkson and Paxman, while we have Hook and Vincent Browne, admittedly a beacon of progressive views among his contemporaries, to divert us with their displays of impatience and bad humour as well as amnesia and brutal honesty.
Suddenly depleted hormone levels, the ego-sapping realisation that as friends and family drop like flies, they will not be spared a final reckoning and that their life’s work is almost over help explain what’s often called Irritable Male Syndrome.
It’s the natural way of things and understandably likely to make any man a bit grumpy.
But it’s still no excuse for George Hook’s using his trademark call-it-as-I-see-it style as a smokescreen to publicly insult the blameless Vogue Williams. It’s not a great leap from there to the ugly sweeping contempt that the ultimate poster boy for Grumpy Old Men – Donald Trump – has for women, disabled people, Muslims, Mexicans and anyone else who is not exactly like him.
In the US we are starting to see what unfolds when Grumpy Old Men get their hands on the levers of power.
Suffice to say it doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.
As the third anniversary of Peaches Geldof’s death approaches, her widower Thomas Cohen says his two sons have now lived longer than they knew their mother. ‘They were just one and two years,’ he says. ‘Now they are four and five.’ It may sounds heartless but losing their mother when they were too young to remember her may be a mercy. With any luck it may mean that their childhood will not be overshadowed by her absence and that history will not repeat itself as it did for Peaches, left, and her tragic mother, Paula Yates.