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| Memoirs of a 'Nasty Brit' |
| Kanika Datta / New Delhi Sep 18, 2009, 00:51 IST |
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Piers Morgan is the British celeb the Americans absolutely love to hate thanks to his studied malice as a judge on the hugely popular America’s Got Talent TV talent show. It’s a persona he’s cultivated with fiendish delight, just like this good pal Simon Cowell (the sneering Brit judge on American Idol, and Morgan’s far nastier co-judge on Britain’s Got Talent).
Morgan, of course, is happy to be thus branded. He never fails to deeply appreciate the obligatory boos that accompany any public appearance. After all, being America’s best-known “Nasty Brit” has given him a whole new career after he was sacked as editor of the Daily Mirror in 2004 for authorising the publication of photographs showing British soldiers supposedly torturing Iraqi prisoners. Those photos subsequently turned out to be crude forgeries, forcing the tabloid to publish a suitably cheeky all-caps apology: “SORRY…WE WERE HOAXED”.
Not that such contretemps cramped Morgan’s style — controversy has been his closest companion right from the time he became the youngest editor, at age 28, of Murdoch’s News of the World. In 1996, he was famously lambasted for his tasteless headline “Achtung! Surrender” — again in the Mirror — a day before the England-Germany soccer semi-final in the Euro 1996 tournament. And in 2000, after George W was elected President, Morgan front-paged his penchant for dispensing the death penalty as Governor of Texas under the suitably sensational title: “LETHAL”. As he writes in an apologetic caption in this book: “I tried to warn everyone…” What he doesn’t say, of course, is all the antics didn’t stop the steady slide of Mirror’s circulation, which must have played a part in his sacking.
This book, written in diary form from 2006 through 2008, is his discovery of America and Americans as much as America’s discovery of him. As he writes in the prologue, although he initially enjoyed visiting America he found “a few days was usually quite enough. For both of us.”
Like most Britons, it was distaste at first sight. Americans, he wrote, “didn’t get my jokes, finding my typically British brand of sarcasm, irony, cheerful cynicism and downright abuse, both weird and obnoxious. …I, in turn, thought they were fairly ghastly, too. A bunch of swaggering, self-interested isolationists.”
Of course Morgan modified his views the longer he lived and travelled in the US and plugged into its culture, not least because he saw hope in the rise and rise of Barack Obama through the tortuous Democratic primaries and the exit of Tony Blair from prime ministership.
On the latter development, over which Morgan gloats at some length, it is unclear whether he was exulting because he despised Blair’s proximity to Bush, or because of his unabashed and well-documented aversion for Blair’s wife Cherie (a sentiment returned with interest) or the elevation of his good friend Gordon Brown as prime minister.
The book can be read at two levels. One, as an irreverent, frothy celebrity hop given Morgan’s access to them via America’s Got Talent, his role as an occasional interviewer for GQ magazine and his unexpected victory in Celebrity Apprentice, the celeb version of Donald (‘You’re Fired!’) Trump’s reality show. So we get in-your-face interviews with a variety of celebs from Naomi Campbell, Donald Trump, Dame Helen Mirren, Richard Branson, Boris Johnson and scores of others, all just this side of the legal limits.
Here’s an excerpt from the Branson interview:
“‘Have you ever taken Viagra?”
‘Um…er...As my wife says, I don’t need it!’ (Bursts out laughing)
‘Sorry, the pause was too long. You have, haven’t you?’
‘Yes, to be honest I’ve tried just about everything in my life!’”
Morgan’s views of most of those he meets conform to their public persona, with some surprising exceptions. For instance, he thinks Naomi Campbell, who is usually portrayed as the ultimate in diva bitchiness, a “lot of fun”, he rather likes humourless, self-obsessed Victoria Beckham but thinks Michelle Obama “beady-eyed” and “calculating”.
At another level, the book can be read as a miscellaneous and not uninteresting collection of thoughts of a committed liberal on world politics, economics (not his strong point, though), values and cultures (including attending a Playboy party with girlfriend in tow). Morgan is the kind that loves Brown and heaps opprobrium, unprovoked or otherwise, on Tory leader David Cameron, George Bush, Sarah Palin and those of similar ilk.
Either way, the book is a great read — at once rambunctious, in-your-face, self-deprecating, hysterically funny and ultimately quite thought-provoking. A pity we don’t have a Morgan equivalent in India.
GOD BLESS AMERICA
MISADVENTURES OF A BIG MOUTH BRIT
Piers Morgan
Ebury Press,
437pp; £17.99
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