It's Raining Men

Now that homophobia is a hate crime, we live in a thrilling new age where you have to take a different approach to mockery and humiliation of gay men. Ooooh ahhhh missus.

Take for instance columist Rod Liddle on weathermen
: "It’s going to be sunny all day!” my local TV weatherman yelped at me on Friday, before singing Follow the Yellow Brick Road and pouting at a depression heading west from Ukraine."

What Rod has learned is that it is now Bad to have a go at people for being gay, but to it is fine to accuse someone of being camp. That's not homophobia - that's just joshing and funny hahaha. "Tomasz tells us about the awful storms and high winds approaching from the Baltic and I could swear he’s about to pirouette and break into I Will Survive" etc etc etc.

And then, after filling your column with 1970s backs-to-the-wall pillorying of a weatherman ("lascivious flourish", "flamboyance", "that little bit overfamiliar") you then say "camp... I don’t mind — nothing against it." Welcome to the new "and some of my best friends" argument. No, of course you've got nothing against it - you've just devoted your column to mocking a broadcaster for perceived effeminacy. Well done you.

For the record, he's having a pop at Tomasz Schafernaker, a man whose name i'd have tattooed on a bicep if I could be certain it would be spelt properly. Rod clearly sees in the Schaff all that is wrong with modern telly ("I never thought that with Bill Giles" he sighs wistfully). But what Rod objects to as overfamiliar and camp, I see as a brilliant stroke of genius - the BBC have appointed a good-looking Polish weatherman who spends a lot of time at the gym. Instead of the weather being "bad news from the headmaster", I now have no idea what it's about at all, but come away from a forecast feeling reassured and just a little dizzy.

But hey, Rod, maybe that's just cos I'm camp.