Orange Girl World

This weekend we once again had to endure another festival co-hosted by the ubiquitous Lauren Laverne.  She is on telly nearly more than John Barrowman, and that is saying quite a lot.  I make no secret that I don’t like the woman.  I have never met her personally.  I can’t say if she might actually be okay in real life.  All I know is that her appearance on my television screen greatly diminishes my enjoyment of the programme.

I first noticed it when she took over as host of “The Culture Show”.  Admittedly the first incarnation of “The Culture Show” was a bit boring and straight laced, but the producers retooled it and re-jigged it, and it should have been great.  It was a heady mix of high and low culture.  There were film reviews, art reviews, pieces on fashion and things about architecture, TV and pop music.  It was great.  It covered a lot of the things I care about.  There was only one problem: Lauren Laverne was the host and it became blatantly obvious she didn’t really know what she was talking about.  How can someone host “The Culture Show” if they know absolutely nothing about art?  It’s an idea too stupid to comprehend, but it was one the BBC went through with.  They have now dumbed down “The Culture Show” greatly, it barely covers anything that’s genuinely cultural now, no doubt to make Lauren feel more at ease with its content.

The next thing that made me hate Lauren Laverne was last year’s Mercury Prize.  It should have gone to Amy Winehouse for Back in Black.  Besides being a great album, Amy was already on her way to becoming one of the most iconic British stars of our era and “Rehab” was the zeitgeist defining record of 2006/07.  How could she not win?  She didn’t win because Lauren Laverne was the head of the judging panel.  Her favourite album of the year was whatever those nu-rave snake-oil salesmen the Klaxons had put out.  They won, of course, because of Lauren’s support.

Then there was her appearance on “Have I Got News for You”.  Lauren had recently given birth, and this was a fact she was not going to let anyone forgot.  She shoe-horned anecdotes about her child, giving birth and breastfeeding at any opportunity.  As the show is meant to be a topical game about current events, her baby stories were met with bemused faces from the rest of the panel.  Lauren appeared oblivious to this and continued on with the baby talk.  I realise that as a new parent she was probably still reeling over the miracle of birth, but the rest of us who aren’t new parents don’t care and don’t find it particularly wonderful.

However, it was her festival coverage that was the true nail-in-the-coffin for me.  She seems to spew simply the most banal, irritating and stupid things imagineable.  Things such as she likes Americans because they pronounce Glastonbury as Glas-ton-bear-ry.  As an American I find that particularly condescending.  There are many reasons to like Americans (great TV programmes, the best junk food on the planet, our Constitution) but our inability to pronounce foreign place names is not one of them.  Besides, I don’t know why she’s so smug, it’s not like the English are any better.  I heard the host of “Eggheads” call the Schuylkill River the Shoey-keel.  How stupid is that?  And when she isn’t making daft comments about my countrymen, she tends to mumble and ramble off on illogical musings.

Basically, I hate her because she is a lazy television presenter and a lazy music critic.  Everything she says and does is based on her own personal interests and tastes and betrays absolutely no concern about what the greater public might think.  I know she is not the only media personality to do this.  It is common in British TV and radio for an entire show to hang on whether you find the host interesting and find their interests interesting.  Chris Moyles, Russell Brand and Jeremy Clarkson are all guilty of this.  The problem with Lauren is, I don’t find her entertaining, interesting or intelligent.  She should get some new anecdotes before inflicting herself upon the nation again.