The Arena of Antagonism

Devotees of gladiatorial combat on television will have enjoyed the last few weeks, during which the red corner has been pitted against the blue corner with a regularity not seen since The Jerry Springer Show.

It all began with a warm-up: the Resident Intellectual vs. Mrs. Brown's Little Boy, during which Andrew Marr enquired about some health issue to which it would doubtless be legally hazardous to allude too specifically. This was the appetizer, however, to a discussion of the same on Question Time, during which overweening windbag David Starkey grappled to the mat Preening Coxcomb Ben Bradshaw. These two combatants (one blue rinse away from playing the ugly sisters in an exceptionally well-cast run of Cinderella at a seaside town) provided the most compelling man-on-man horseplay since Alan Bates and Oliver Reed went at one another in Women In Love.

Better was to come, however, for in the Main Event Ian Hislop was being oiled up for a round or two with Sordel's favourite Brownie, Yvette Cooper-Balls. I have alluded to the Stepford perfection of YC-B in previous blogs. She is like the youngest matron in a boarding school: an object of fascination to boys and masters alike yet given to a defensive frostiness only thawed in the communal imagination by suspicions of illicit liaison with one of the unattached housemasters. In an environment where personal attractiveness is a secondary consideration and gender itself barely a prohibitive one, YC-B is about as comely as Labour ladies come.

Hislop, however, is no respecter or of the fairer whatever. His career on Have I Got News For You? has been founded on the sneer of startled loathing with which he meets every guest on the show, as though the only way he would even tolerate their company is if he were well-paid beforehand. Evidently he holds the duo Balls in special contempt, because it was without a blush that he accused the distaff ball of riding to a political career on the coat-tails of her husband.

At which Stepford perfection - as it always will - short-circuited and YC-B have a look that could have only been more perfectly emoted had her eyes glowed red and a spring popped out of her left ear.

Shame on you, Mr. Hislop. A low blow indeed.

This, then, is an era in which hard thoughts are given voice, as when the Resident Intellectual put it to David Cameron that he was a bit of a toff.

Yet for all the political combat, the crowning unpleasantness of this purple patch comes not from a political programme but from The X Factor, for it was here on Saturday that Danii Minogue decided (and I forget whether the predominant metaphor here was wrestling or boxing) to take off the gloves completely.

It is difficult to see exactly what prompted Danii's animosity to Danyl Johnson, but it may have something to do with a proprietorial anger at someone else choosing to spell their name in a non-standard way. Whatever the reason, she chose to greet the 27-year old's first performance on live television by alluding to tabloid stories that he is ... well, I'm guessing bisexual or bi-curious.

(Sordel doesn't read tabloids ... and if that sounds snobbish, he doesn't read broadsheets either.)

So, this is what we've come to.

It seems a long way to travel in a short time to go from an entirely reasonable question as to whether the Prime Minister is healthy enough to do the job to an (at best) tangential reference to the sexual orientation of a virtual nobody who may at some future point wish to resume his regular career as a teacher.

Maybe, though, the British Public has grown tired of the bread and only a genuine circus will do.