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No love, no joy
Helen Chamberlain’s former sidekick has celebrated leaving Soccer AM for 6.06 with a book. Taylor Parkes wants to know why anyone – anyone – thought it was a good idea to expose the presenter’s ego and prejudices across 288 smugly written pages

Soccer AM is a bad memory: hungover mornings in other people’s flats, disturbed by a crew of whooping simpletons, the slurping of pro and ex-pro rectums, cobbled-together comedy that made me long for the glory days of Skinner and Baddiel’s old shit. Yet Tim Lovejoy himself, with his fashionably receding hair and voice oddly reminiscent of Rod Hull’s, I remember only as an averagely blokey TV presenter – in fact, one of the few averagely blokey TV presenters to make me clack my tongue in irritation, rather than buff my Gurkha knife. Other than as a namesake of The Simpsons’ self-serving man of the cloth, he barely registered; just a bland, blond ringmaster in a cocky circus of crap. Almost a surprise, then, to find that his new book is not just tedious in the extreme, it is utterly vile.

Chopped into “chapters” that barely fill a page, in a font size usually associated with books for the partially sighted, Lovejoy on Football is part autobiography, part witless musing, and one more triumph for the crass stupidity rapidly replacing culture in this country. Hopelessly banal and nauseatingly self-assured, smirkingly unfunny, it’s a £300 T-shirt, a piss-you-off ringtone, a YouTube clip of someone drinking their mate’s vomit. Its smugness is a corollary of its vacuity. I hope it makes you sick.

First, it’s clear that being Tim Lovejoy requires a very special blend of arrogance and ignorance. When he’s not listing his media achievements with a breathtaking lack of guile, he’s sneering at those “sad” enough to take an interest in football history, revealing his utter cluelessness about life outside the Premier League (in a section called “Know Your Silverware”, he refers to “League Three”) and making sundry gaffes, major and minor. He names Johan Cruyff as his all-time favourite player, then admits he’s only seen that five-second World Cup clip of the Cruyff turn. Grumbling about footballers’ musical tastes, he complains that “all you’ll hear blasting out of the team dressing room is R&B, rather than what the rest of the country is listening to” – by which he means indie bands. Everywhere there are jaw-dropping illustrations of insularity, self-satisfaction and a startlingly small mind.

There’s something sinister here, too: beamingly positive, thrilled by wealth, too pleased with himself to ask awkward questions, Tim Lovejoy is the football fan Sepp Blatter has been waiting for. Roman Abramovich’s darling young one. Not least for his complacency: his lack of understanding of how football works (and doesn’t work) is best illustrated in a section called “Give Your Chairman A Break”, in which he defends “that Thai bloke at Man City”, and implores us to “look at the Glazers... you would have thought they were nothing but a bunch of Americans intent on buying the club and selling off Old Trafford to Tesco judging by the howl of protests from the fans. Within two seasons though, they had won the title and built a squad the envy of Europe.” Bang your head off the wall at such unreviewable stupidity – Tim’s infantile ideas of shunning “negativity” prod him into precisely the kind of thinking that has had such hugely negative influence on the game. “Look across our national team” – he means England, by the way – “and there isn’t one player who wouldn’t walk into any side in Europe... why is it, before every tournament, we start believing we’re overrated?”

And, surprise: Lovejoy is as wretched a starfucker as could be inferred from his television shows. Everyone in football is Tim’s mate (and here we have pictures to prove it, stars looking confused in his grinning, over-familiar presence, frozen by an arm around the shoulders). He’ll “even watch the occasional game of rugby now, because I’m friends with a lot of the players like Will Greenwood, Matt Dawson, Lawrence Dallaglio and Austin Healy”.

It’s perhaps telling that among the many anecdotes offered here, the most heartwarming (and least surprising) involves Tim getting clattered hard by Neil Ruddock in a charity game; even in this version of the story, there’s nothing to suggest Razor meant it affectionately. Still, our man is blinded by quite astonishing hubris, reprinting a photo of a banner at Anfield reading “LOVEJOY SUCKS BIG FAT COCKS” with a glee that is nothing like self-deprecation. “The hardest thing about leaving Soccer AM,” he says regretfully, “is the thought that I might no longer be influencing the game.” True, it’ll be tough. But who knows? Perhaps the game will struggle on.

It’s not that there was ever a time when football on telly wasn’t in the hands of dimwits, poseurs and blowhards. It’s not that Lovejoy is significantly more objectionable than TV shits of ages past. The point is, in his own mind and that of the powers that be, he’s one of us. He is us. Savour that. God help us.

Lovejoy on Football is published by Century at £16.99
 
Me too.

And I thought that pitchfork takedown of Sheeran was good. Easy target I know but... more of this please.
 
And I thought that pitchfork takedown of Sheeran was good. Easy target I know but... more of this please.

Perhaps it is me who is the joyless shite.
I still hate this kind of writing though...I regret having read it, except in that it did get the blood circulating a bit.
 
It's rare enough for Pitchfork to do a hit piece in 2017 in fairness, not since joining Condé Nast.

Live Report: St. Vincent - Brixton Academy, London

looking forward to the gig tonight!

So am I, I think she's great and the new record is my favourite of hers since at least the second one, possibly even the debut; but it seems like she's walking a real tightrope with the current format of the show.
 
So am I, I think she's great and the new record is my favourite of hers since at least the second one, possibly even the debut; but it seems like she's walking a real tightrope with the current format of the show.
It'll be interesting all right, i'm expecting some walkouts.

If I was to rate her albums meself i'd go:

1. Actor
2. St Vincent
3. The new one
4. Debut
5. Strange Mercy
6. That album with David Byrne that out of politeness everyone pretended they enjoyed at the time but haven't in reality listened to since 2012
 
i'm expecting some walkouts.

Some of my friends were in the pit and told me that they saw walkouts tonight, so you'd imagine some people who'd consider themselves big fans weren't taken with it.

Not me though, I thought it was fucking great. She's brilliant.

Her movie sucked however.
 
Yeah. It was brilliant. I was a bit dubious at the start about whether this would carry the whole show but was totally won over by the end. The video stuff was brilliantly done. Her singing was amazing (I'm just casually familiar with her music but could still make out every word ... this is really rare ...... with most live singers you don't have a hope of making out anything but she manages to do it without sounding clipped and forced ..... really adds to it). Super guitar playing (obviously). Loved the whole theatrical nature of the presentation. Was it just me or did everyone else get serious Black Lodge vibe off it? Maybe that was just the curtains and the red colours.

I liked the film! Though only caught it from about halfway through ....
 

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