Beyond Words | John Humphrys | Review by The Spectator

He’s weirdly sniffy about reality TV ‘celebrities’, and he won’t allow them in his book before they’ve been sealed in a suit of protective apostrophes. Humphrys is a veteran of reality TV himself, so he’s keen to fantastise about divisions of rank within his own class. To the viewer, of course, all celebs look pretty much the same as they swarm around the microphone like bees around candy-floss. But apart from being a celeb (or ‘sublebrity’ as he sometimes calls his fellow exhibitionists) Humphrys is also a writer and it’s faintly unedifying to watch him deriding the less privileged members of the trade. Imagine a professional athlete turning up on sports day to jeer at the egg-and-spoon race.

Not that Humphrys is particularly professional. Lamenting the rebranding of traffic wardens as ‘civil enforcement officers’, he wonders what their extended title may mean. ‘Apparently these new beings would be given greater discretion, including imposing variable fines.’ Anything wrong there? Well, apart from the clumsiness of ‘including imposing,’ and the strange use of ‘discretion’ to mean ‘powers’, the problem is that the words before the comma have a passive sense and the words after it have an active sense. If he’d had a good night’s sleep Humphrys would have have written, ‘Apparently these new beings would be given wider powers, including the authority to impose variable fines.’ He goes on to quote an email from a student begging for help with an essay. ‘As a senior broadcaster and vocal commentator on broadcasting issues,’ burbles the grammarless mendicant, ‘I feel you could offer some valuable general observations of the current broadcasting landscape.’ Humphrys pays homage to these inelegant flailings by adding a flourish of his own: ‘I shall spare the young man’s blushes by not printing his name but it raises a number of questions.’ What raises a number of questions? The email. But the subject of ‘it’ can only be ‘his name’. Should I bother pointing out these howlers? Probably not, but then he started it. The whole thing’s an embarrassment. A dreary attention-seeker appoints himself guardian of the language and then writes a book disqualifying himself from the post.