You may have spotted him on the telly on Wednesday evening, in the unlikely event that you were drawn from that rare modern-day event of two decent competing shows, MasterChef and Location, Location, Location. There, on stage, stood Gary Lineker, holding an award, celebrating the triumph of winning TV Presenter of the Year at the National Television Awards, knocking Ant and Dec off their familiar perch.
On the face of it Lineker was displaying a modest, bashful almost, stance.
But actually, he was posing as a freedom fighter for our times, clasping a curved, abstract, metallic trophy instead of a machine gun, albeit with a spiky top that could do damage to an irritant.
The Che Guevara of prime-time telly, just he’s rather better dressed and with neater hair, and brandishing causes that were less revolutionary, more statements of the obvious. For him, the low-hanging fruit of modern discourse, the easiest targets and thus, like a pop star wailing about injustice, he could posture his views without having to trouble the mind with the practical issues that tax the actual decision-makers; affordability, political consensus and international law.
In the end, it cost him. Lineker was finally relieved, four months ago, of the £1.3m salary he received for his able presenting of Match of the Day, a job he held for 26 years, and could then focus on his very lucrative podcasting business, Goalhanger Productions, which made a reported £1.4m profit in the year ending May 2024.
The BBC tired, finally, of his contributions to the nation’s political conversation. Over the years he compared the Tories to Nazis, attacked them over the Rwanda migrant scheme, defended Just Stop Oil and criticised Brexit. Then, sensing the end of his contract was in sight, he upped the venom, attacking the BBC for withdrawing a film on Gaza whose narrator was found to have links to Hamas, and, as a final flourish, shared a social media post about Zionism that featured an illustration of a rat.
His unreserved apology echoing through the building as he was shown the door, he has been missing from our TV screens ever since. Until Wednesday night when the National Television Awards, ironically the concept quite out of date these days what with the kids not watching telly anymore, heralded him as TV Presenter of the Year.
The prize, he claimed, “demonstrates that it is OK to use your platform to speak up on behalf of those who have no voice”. And the room of sycophantic acolytes and fans cheered him to the rafters. Which, in such circumstances, TV folk at the front, grovelling TV viewers at the back, is no great feat. Anyone taking the stage and going “yah, boo, sucks” on anything from the recent rain to Trump could raise the roof.
As for Lineker’s assertion that he is a noble warrior giving a voice to those who have none, I thought the people of Palestine had Hamas, who (until such a time Palestinians disown them) make a tidy job of wishing for the extinction of Jewish people. Just Stop Oil had plenty of high-profile idiots to do their bidding until their leaders went to prison and they folded, and the people of Britain, foolhardy though they were, spoke of their antipathy for the Tories clearly enough at the last general election.
And Lineker was wrong, of course. His prize was for presenter, not political hustler. He broke the run of Ant and Dec in recognition for his quarter century of convening trite conversations about football.
His sacking by the BBC in May was a clear message from his bosses that it is not ok to use such a platform to speak up.
TV presenters should be just that, anchors of television uniting viewers in their comely ways, directing our attention to the matter in hand and, crucially, doing this in an unbiased way so that we are neither attracted nor repelled by their otherwise irrelevant political views. Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen drew our attention to the décor of people’s houses via his camp charm, assisted by his facial hair, suits and large cuffs. We were not distracted by any knowledge that he might have been vexed by the loss judicial sovereignty that arises from the UK’s subjection to the EU’s European Arrest Warrant.
Yet Lineker’s example appears not to be heeded by some, perhaps among those cheering him on Wednesday night.
There was, for example, Beth Rigby, Sky News political editor, reporting on the resignation of Angela Rayner last week referring to her, on a live broadcast, as “Angie”.
This mateyness (Will Badenoch be Kem? Davey, Eduaordo?) is not appropriate, for a supposed apolitical reporter. Similarly, it was foolish of her colleague Sophy Ridge to issue a gushing tribute on X revelling in the former Labour deputy for “vaping and DJ-ing and laughing…she’s a risk-taker, the perfect foil to Keir Starmer… etc etc”. This grovelling diminishes the otherwise mighty broadcaster that Ridge is.
And there’s Rylan Clark, of course. He may have very sensible views on cross-Channel illegal migrants, as espoused recently on ITV1’s This Morning when he compared the Government’s apparent attitude of “Welcome, come on in…Here’s the iPad… Here’s three meals a day. Here’s a games room in the hotel”, with the plight of the nation’s struggling homeless. But if you want to play records on Radio 2, chat about the glories of Ibiza, interview your mum on whether she’s been out shopping and quiz TV couch potatoes, you need to keep schtum about politics. Lineker is wrong. It’s not for presenters to be divisive. Leave that to the politicians. And me.
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