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Paxo: ‘Brits watch too much TV’
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Newsnight Rottweiler Jeremy Paxman is never one to shy away from speaking his mind, but his latest outburst has seen him lashing out at the very people who pay his ample wages. Speaking at the highbrow Hay festival at the weekend, Paxo laid into the Great British Public, calling them “a bunch of barbarians” for watching too much telly.
Paxman, who picks up around £1m a year for presenting Newsnight and University Challenge, made his remarks while promoting a book he’s written to coincide with his, ahem, TV series The Victorians, telling the audience: “I think the basic problem is that we are a bunch of barbarians really. Watching TV is the most popular leisure activity in this country now. I find this very depressing. Very depressing indeed. I think that is a real problem.
“While people apparently have leisure time in greater quantities and book leisure time to go on holiday and so on, they have less time just to drop into an art gallery or museum,” trilled Paxo to an assorted audience of woolly liberals at the annual literary festival in the well-to-do Welsh town.
The 59-year-old newshunk also told audiences that he visits art galleries wherever he travels and was dismayed to encounter just six other art-lovers on a recent visit to the Walker Gallery in Liverpool. He contrasted this with the Victorians, who would go to see art exhibitions in their thousands.
Well yeah, but they didn’t have tellies back then, Jeremy.
by Stewart Turner, Monday 1 June 2009
Source: Daily Mail
