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Whenever I write something about Marina Hyde I remember the start of Slaughterhouse-Five where Kurt Vonnegut says he's writing an anti-war book and his mate says why don't you write an anti-iceberg book instead. https://twitter.com/pressgazette/status/1336672785612099586
This is a good joke, and therefore a better one than any Hyde has come up with by herself in the last decade or so.
Anyway, related to this I was discussing Simon Hoggart earlier and of course I only *ended up* hating his stuff: I enjoyed it when I first came across it, when it wasn't any different to what it was when I'd come to loathe it. Which is most of the point. https://twitter.com/ejhchess/status/1336698120927842313
Most of these people are good, or good enough, for a while. None of them are good enough to go on for decades - who is? - but their fanbase does, getting older and thinking what they're getting is still fresh and funny, when material and fanbase alike have been stale for years.
Everyboy ends up like this if they're successful, I guess, winning awards and cranking out the same old numbers and the audience singing along and life being one long series of back-slapping events with one's peers.
So I was particularly struck when Hyde tweeted this the other day, because an "excellent and necessary" article is an attack on a guy who's dead, isn't it? https://twitter.com/MarinaHyde/status/1333281565305155584
I mean why not attack some of your preening colleagues, instead? Maybe Tom Newton-Dunn or Carole Cadwalladr or Lee Harpin or any one of any number of others. That's what an actual satirist would do. That would be "necessary". That would burst some balloons.
She's a smug and lazy writer whose appeal is to smug and lazy people and is exalted by her smug and lazy colleagues.
All these people, chortling with one another and telling one another how great they are, congratulating one another on how they tell truth to power when they barely even tickle it enough for anybody to notice.
And here's everybody else, on the brink of the abyss that's Brexit and the virus and yet another crisis on top of all the others, and we have this fucking circus of backslapping clowns wetting themselves over every tenth-rate zinger,
And you'll know when a proper writer comes along, because they'll know Hyde and her circus for what they are and hate them for it. And Hyde and her circus will hate them back.
