TS: Giles Coren vs AA Gill

He is the son of the British writer and humourist Alan Coren, and the brother of journalist Victoria Coren. Giles is mentioned in his father's work as being a particularly 'evil child', as Alan Coren describes him trying to kill a cat. He was educated at Westminster School before going on to Keble College, Oxford, where he achieved a first in English.

He also contributes an irregular and irreverent column to The Times, ranging from curious events in his personal life to political satire. Under the pseudonym Professor Gideon Carter he writes The Intellectual's Guide to Fashion in The Sunday Times, satirizing the pretensions of modern critical theory and cultural commentary. He ghost-wrote the autobiography of James Dyson, inventor of the famous vacuum cleaner, and has recently sold his first novel, Winkler.

Coren writes unorthodox reviews that are sometimes surprising in a paper owned by the conservative Rupert Murdoch: 'Food: 0; Just bloody being there: 7'. When asked. 'In your opinion, who is the most influential chef of our time?', Coren replied, 'Ronald McDonald, the poisonous criminal bastard.'

In the autumn of 2005, Coren appeared as a regular correspondent on Gordon Ramsay's The F-Word. In 2005, Coren's novel "Winkler" won the Bad Sex in Fiction Award for the most inappropriate description of sex. The passage he was awarded for ended with the sentence fragment "Like Zorro" which seems to be gaining a status as an internet meme. He is the host of the program Film Review on Channel 4.

On the 6th of June, 2006, he presented a programme on the digital channel More4, entitled Tax the Fat, a semi-serious look at the cost of clinical obesity and the cost it presents to the NHS.

He was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, and studied at the Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design and the Slade School of Art. He has a long-term relationship with Nicola Formby, who appears in his columns as "The Blonde".

He was once famously ejected from Gordon Ramsay's restaurant along with his dining partner Joan Collins. Ramsay's reason was that Gill had written a review of his restaurant that covered his personal life more than the food.

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Quotes

Gill is notorious for his acerbic, provocative style, on one occasion in 1997 damaging his career by describing the Welsh as:

"loquacious dissemblers, immoral liars, stunted, bigoted, dark, ugly, pugnacious little trolls,"

While two years later he angered Germans with an article called "Hunforgiven" [2], making numerous references to their Nazi past. In 2004, when writing about the ITV drama Island at War, based on the German occupation of Jersey and Guernsey, he asked:

"What have the Channel Islands ever done for us? A couple of really expensive potatoes, a few flowers and fatty milk."

His comments were widely condemned in the islands as offensive and inaccurate [3].

On being mistaken for an Englishman he stated:

I don’t like the English. One at a time, I don’t mind them. I’ve loved some of them. It’s their collective persona I can’t warm to: the lumpen and louty, coarse, unsubtle, beady-eyed, beefy-bummed herd of England.

The truth is — and perhaps this is a little unworthy, a bit shameful — I find England and the English embarrassing. Fundamentally toe-curlingly embarrassing. And even though I look like one, sound like one, can imitate the social/mating behaviour of one, I’m not one. I always bridle with irritation when taken for an Englishman, and fill in those disembarkation cards by pedantically writing “Scots” in the appropriate box (The Angry Island).

Again on the July 23, 2006 edition of the Sunday Times, Gill wrote a very offensive article about the country of Albania. In his article he calls Albanians "the worst dressed teenagers in Europe" and the girls as "gangster bitches" and moreover he states that "to everyone's suprise Albanians are fair skin". He points out historical data on Albania throughout the article that are true lies with no facts. This may very well cost him his career as many organisations in Albania and abroad are calling for an apology from Sunday Times.

Many of his articles can be found on the travel writing and hotel revewing website he founded in 2000, http://www.travelintelligence.net - see http://www.travelintelligence.net/php/writers/writ.php?id=22

Case closed

Meritocracy - don't you just love it?

He's better without the Clarkson baggage, though.

but coren really is egregious.

actually gill is too, but he wasn't always *this* bad.

Well, I quite like Giles, but it's all about Victoria.

AA Gill is a fantastically good writer. I think his digressional restaurant reviews are often entertaining and witty (moreso than Jonathan Meades'), but it's his travel writing where Gill excells really. His pieces on Greece, Iceland, California, Bethlehem, Kalingrad and the Royal Agriculteral Show are standouts (and his article on Albania in last Sunday's Times wasn't bad), but his stuff on Africa is knockout. In particular the piece about pharmacutical company greed in Uganda was properly heartbreaking and angry.

He has a weakness for taking silly potshots at cetain places (Wales, Cheshire, Jersey) just to wind people up, it seems (fair enough, I think, but still)(though his critical pieces on Japan and Germany have real wieght. On Buchenwald: "Unbelievable, though, there is a restaurant here, set in the woods, rustic and jolly, with a view and a children's plastic slide. I've always thought that professionally I could eat anything anywhere. But I found my limit. I couldn't eat German food in a concentration camp").

Also search: his review of the Millenium Dome, his spat with Robert Killroy Silk (who tried to have a punch-up with him during a chance encounter in a bookshop after Gill tore into him in a column. "What do you think is going to happen now?" said Gill, and, sure enough, tore into him again in print the following week), his programme on Shakespeare, his bespoke tailored suits.

Destroy: the novels, his 'trendy' gear.

God, I read one of AA Gill novels. I forgot about that. I can remember nothing of it, which can't be a good sign. I quite like him, though. David Orton pretty much OTM throughout there.

I have no opinion whatsoever on Giles Coren. Sorry.

xpost

I do like how the Times employs, as its third restaurant critic after these two, Michael fucking Winner.

Restaurant critics definitely the most disgusting savages in the world.

Have always quite enjoyed watching Coren try to eat himself to death in the company of that lesbian.

Kinda repping for Winner just coz I like some of his films.

should've been a fatal threeway with jay rayner

I'm not too familiar with these guys but maybe Coren loves himself more? That would make me prefer him in any case as he seems more insulated from the glib cynicism and pithy self-loathing that characterises these sorts of lost Britannic folk. I can't think about Michael Winner, but he is a different animal.

coren is definitely worse.

Coren
I drive a Ford Fiesta. I am not ashamed of it in the least. I’ll have you know it is a Zetec, which means it is the same as a Ford Fiesta except with a cool, z-based word embossed on the back of the hatch in top-quality metal-coloured plastic. The last person to admire it (the funky z-based word, rather than the car) was a friend of mine in whose private jet I had just flown to Venice and back for lunch, and whose Ferrari was warming up next to it on the frosty gravel forecourt of his country estate, prior to a trip to buy the papers to see how much of the world he controlled on that particular morning.

Gill
Economists know nothing; politicians only know what economists tell them; bankers think economists are fantasists and politicians are idiots; bankers know less than nothing. If you want to really and truly understand what’s happening around you, what’s making the weather, look at the culture.

Coren by the country mile that is his fucking drive.

well, gill's bit there isn't super writing, but it's not a million miles from the truth... except the last bit, but he's paraphrasing shelley innit. coren's paragraph is repulsive, taki-esque bullshit.

Coren has a heavy awkward lit graduate fangirl base, right? I remember an ex-girlfriend casually mentioning once that she wanted to lick garlic mayonnaise off of him, although knowing my ex-girlfriends the thought of high calorie content gloop was more arousing to her than the thought of naked midget journos.

i dunno, but i hear girls like rich, successful, handsome guys in general so it's a fair bet.

i dunno, but i hear girls like rich, successful, handsome guys in general so it's a fair bet.

― special guest stars mark bronson, Wednesday, 4 February 2009 12:38 (26 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

So how come you're oh wait

Coren was fantastic as the time travelling gourmand on 'The Supersizers Go...' series, couldn't imagine Gill being anywhere as funny or enthusiastic if he was roped in to do that job.

beat giles coren in a pub quiz once, he was pretty ungracious about it. emily maitlis had to tell him to shut up.

what

remember when you wrote this? pretty weird right Giles? pic.twitter.com/rD3ZqShKcM

— James (@glassbreaking_) December 31, 2019

i know, what kind of monster gives coke to a three-year-old

Giles Coren made a fake Polish Twitter account to send antisemitic message to critics https://t.co/f4pdynGDoE

— The Trashies (@TheTrashiesUK) December 31, 2019

AA Gill wins by several parsecs.

Think I have said this on here before, but I spoke to aa gill when I was working in a call centre and he was very polite and respectful, also got the same impression when he died, that his awfulness was mostly a thing he did for money (which still makes him bad of course) - coren, otoh, seems like he would be awful to deal with in person, he always seems to be following one personal vendetta after another.

I see Ruby Tandoh has shared the thread

once more for the cheap, cowardly, uk food media personalities at the back 👏🏼 https://t.co/CXTPse1xkX

— Ruby Tandoh (@rubytandoh) December 31, 2019

Repulsive man.

There’s 0 repercussions to being racist in this country especially if you stick a few long words in.
Giles Coren is on TV all the time and can write this rubbish without any consequences. https://t.co/Q8g7d35QmS

— أنثيا (@__Anthea) January 16, 2022

He's such a piece of shit.

The tone of this ("The thrusting young economies of West Africa...") reminds me of the sort of condescending patrician shit Boris Johnson was peddling in his columns 20 yrs ago.

Repulsive man.

― Soup on my lanyard (Tom D.), Tuesday, 31 December 2019 15:39 (two years ago) bookmarkflaglink

Me OTM.

Not the toughest call you've made tbf

destroying Giles Coren's Jaguar, in Duke Nukem 3D pic.twitter.com/IUcaOvPSeT

— Dan Douglas (@dandouglas) January 18, 2022

Nothing new here I guess but good from Mic Wright: https://brokenbottleboy.substack.com/p/clarkson-and-coren-in-the-iron-bank

Thanks, that was v good

Roti Stop has a positive review from this cunt framed, it mentions the restaurant being out of the way, something along the lines of "just get quickly stabbed on the overground to get here" (review's from the 00's, so I guess pre-gentrification of this area). Makes me sad that even in a positive review of the place they have to deal with racist shit like this.

I've met Giles Coren a couple of times (acquaintance of a relative) and can confirm he's exactly the kind of condescending, self-regarding dick you'd imagine him to be from his journalism.

Just think, the son he fat shamed and daughter he gave a sexualised account of a holiday with will one day have their own newspaper columns.

A unbroken line of smugness stretching out endlessly into the future.

https://static.standard.co.uk/s3fs-public/thumbnails/image/2012/01/03/09/09b_19_coren_415x275_1.jpg