Today I’m bringing in a guest columnist, who is totally a real person and definitely not myself writing under an incredibly transparent pseudonym. As his views are out of step with what he terms ‘the mindlessly politically correct age’, he has asked to be able to hide his real name. Instead, I have assigned him a handle.

The Hateful Misanthrope’s Column

Recently, the masterfully wise AA Gill has pointed out the obvious fact that Mary Beard, presenter of Meet The Romans is too ugly to be on television, to which she, not knowing her place, has replied.
In case you’re not aware of AA Gill, think Jeremy Clarkson, only instead of cars, obsessed with being posh. And slightly more in love with himself, if that’s possible.
In the past he has described the Welsh as

“loquacious, dissemblers, immoral liars, stunted, bigoted, dark, ugly, pugnacious little trolls.”

Fantastic! That’s the kind of negative-minded vitriol I can get behind! What a man! What a mind!

Gill has said that Beard

“should be kept away from cameras altogether.”

And only right as well.
When I watch television, I don’t want to be educated. If you put something on the television which implies there are things out there that I don’t know, that makes me feel less intelligent. Instead, I prefer to assume that I know everything there is to know, and despise anyone who tries to tell me otherwise.

I don’t care if her face is warm and open, and helps convey her enthusiasm for her subject. That’s not what television’s for, and that’s not the point of women. Samantha Brick has got the right idea, she realises that the point of women is as decoration, and for us men to fantasise about. Television is about fantasies – the men and male characters on screen are for us to fantasise we are, and the women are there for us to fantasise about being with.
I often watch Bear Grylls, in order to fantasise about what it would be like to live in the wild. Mary Beard is not the kind of person I wish to be, and I certainly don’t wish to be WITH her, so why have her on television at all?

I’m now going to counter the obvious argument you’ll throw at me. You see, that’s how much cleverer than you I am – I can anticipate your argument and counter it before it’s even left your lips. I’m dead smart, I am – like Gill, Simon Cowell, or Piers Morgan.
Media types will talk about USPs, or Unique Selling Points. They will argue that being a Professor of Classics at Cambridge, or whatever that dreadful woman is, means she has access to a level of knowledge on her subject which very few can match.
Well, I say tosh.

I say that, regardless of how much knowledge and insight a person has to offer on a subject, they should be judged on their skin, hair, and clothing.
MEN run the world, and run it badly. That’s the natural order of things. Women are on this Earth to bear our children and keep the Human race going until our inevitable self-made annihilation.
Any woman who tries to learn things, (or any man who tries to run things competently) is going against the natural order of things, and should be knocked back.
Instead of having Beard wandering about the remnants of Rome’s Empire, perhaps they could have hired a reality TV star or daughter of a celebrity to ‘investigate’ something she knows nothing about, but which is obvious to the rest of us?
Maybe Amy Childs or Stacey Dooley ‘investigates’ Roman ruins, comes to realise that people must once have lived without central heating, and cries about how awful it must have been to always be cold.
She could go on a ‘journey’ that would be emotional and cathartic to the plebs, and would allow the rest of us to laugh at her and feel superior.

Samantha Brick, whose skin-deep obsessions fit her  into my ideal of how a woman should act, has argued that

“While there is no denying that Ms Beard is a supremely intelligent and fiercely ambitious woman, there is absolutely no chance of her becoming a successful broadcaster in prime-time slots on flagship TV channels.”

Exactly! There is absolutely no chance of her getting the sort of success she’s recently achieved.

She then compared viewing figures of Mary Beard’s Meet The Romans show to that of The Hairy Bikers’ Bakeathon and The 70s, which are completely fair, like for like comparisons.
I am hostile to learning, so I can’t be sure, but I assume that people will be alive who can look back fondly at Meet The Romans in the same way they do to nostalgia programmes like The 70s.
And any show which has the word ‘bakeathon’ in it’s title must be as intellectually challenging as a detailed historical programme. It certainly won’t the kind of personality driven tosh which often functions as background noise, which people drown out 55 minutes of the hour, before noticing a particularly beautiful looking meal and asking each other if they saw how it was made.

Ms Beard (I assume that no-one could marry her, for who could find her enthusiasm, intelligence, energy and warmth attractive enough to override the fact that she doesn’t wear nail varnish?) should be thrown off the air, and it is only right, in my brilliantly insightful and clearly correct opinion.