On Sunday night, I tuned in to the Antiques Roadshow for my weekend fix of gentle eccentricity.
Instead, I was subjected to a ‘feminist special’, conceived to mark 100 years of votes for women.
In itself, it wasn’t such a bad idea — if only everyone hadn’t been so impossibly pleased with themselves.
A succession of worthy females interviewed another succession of worthy females about a variety of not terribly interesting but worthy subjects connected to the suffragette cause.
Meanwhile, on Twitter, a small storm was raging over an article by the American author Lionel Shriver accusing Penguin Random House of being ‘drunk on virtue’
It was the TV equivalent of a particularly tedious episode of Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour.
Meanwhile, on Twitter, a small storm was raging over an article by the American author Lionel Shriver accusing Penguin Random House of being ‘drunk on virtue’.
Penguin has undertaken to ensure that by 2025 their author list will be inclusive of ethnic minorities, working-class people, those with disabilities and, of course, the ever-expanding range of sexual proclivities operating under the LGBTQ etcetera banner.
The result, Shriver argued, was that a book ‘written by a gay transgender Caribbean who dropped out of school at seven’ would receive preferential treatment, regardless of ‘whether or not said manuscript is an incoherent, tedious, meandering and insensible pile of mixed-paper recycling’.
Ultimately, she concluded, ‘Penguin Random House no longer regards the company’s raison d’être as the acquisition and dissemination of good books’, putting box-ticking ahead of literary excellence.
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