Tue. Feb 18th, 2025
Goofy TV presenter

We need to talk about that Adrian Chiles. 

Do we have to? I don’t want to. 

I don’t want to either, so let’s make it quick.

Thing is, Adrian has had his fingers in the ink again. Adrian keeps getting his fingers in the ink. 

He has a regular column in The Guardian, a publication that is a bastion of fine journalism, pioneering, even. In its early days, The Guardian brought news of the Peterloo massacre to London and the rest of the country within hours of it happening. Since then, they have helped publish Chelsea Manning’s and Edward Snowden’s data dumps from the US government. They blew the lid on corporations and the mega rich hiding their wealth offshore through the Panama Papers. They exposed Cambridge Analytica’s attempts to subvert democracy by manipulating voters through online manipulation blah. Their routine journalism confronts corporate and political conniving and lawbreaking, injustice and inequality, the climate crisis. They publish George Monbiot. They were even shot dead in the Jason Bourne movie (which one was it?) which shows real commitment to investigative journalism. 

And they publish Adrian Chiles. 

Chiles’ recent fearless forays into this turbulent world, which is awash in urgent narratives, have given us essays about ham sandwiches, leaving his wallet in the fridge, the smell of his dad’s car, his own inclination to vomit in moving vehicles, the disastrous slippiness of glasses on noses, and the entirely original and insightful observation that over time, the world fills with fangled things and phrases. 

The world is boiling in its own fluids, Trump and Musk are dismantling both civilisation and reason, the jackbooted right are marching past your front door, we teeter on the brink of nuclear war but Chiles brings us impolite people shouting at him in passing from a car.

The cost of living crisis is bankrupting businesses, forcing people to choose between heating and food and to find strategies for boiling water without turning on the kettle while energy companies reap obscene profits, but Chiles swoops on our consciousness urging us to use mushrooms instead of bread when making sandwiches — sandwiches being a major theme of his writing, it would seem. 

Of course, we do not all want to face the imminent collapse of all we hold dear all the time and a little diversion into the shared experience of the everyday, leavened with a good splurg of humour is welcome. But you won’t find it in Chiles’ stuff which has all the wit and appeal of a dull old fuck listing the inconsequentialities of his day to a decorticated spouse while she unpacks the bags of Lidl groceries, putting the canned and imperishables in the freezer and the perishables in the airing cupboard. 

Interesting, Adrian is not. 

No stubbed toe is too profound for Mr Chiles.

We are not, in case you are not catching my drift, talking about a new Orwell with a twenty-first century ‘As I Please’. 

Then there’s the interminable whinging about his own drinking. Oh my gosh, I drink too much! I am self-indulgent to a self-pitying degree. If Chiles were an actual alcoholic with an actual drink problem, then he would be welcome to our sympathy and even our reading time. But he’s not. He’s a fucking whinger who sees his unremarkable appetite for booze as something, well, remarkable, as something worth writing a column about. 

Imagine being cornered in an old folks home by an old lady who talked incessantly about her degenerate tendency to eat more chocolate digestives with her tea than she considers reasonable. That’s Chiles going on about booze. 

I believe he even wrote a book about it called something like The Hell of Regularly Having Four Pints When I Thought that Three was Adequate and Indeed the Maximum Daily Intake of Alcohol as Defined by HMG, CDC, WHO and the Biscuit-Eating Lady in the Old Folks Home.

He must be a lot of fun in a pub, that bloke. 

So why does the Graun give him so many column inches?

Surely it has nothing to do with the fact that his wife NAME happens to be [managing check] editor of the same The Guardian that hosts his columns. 

Having said that, a couple has to make a living. Times are hard and all that. Last year, Viner received a 150000 (42 per cent) pay rise. In 2014 Chiles himself was the highest paid whatever on TV, his earnings for the year topping four million quid. I suppose it’s possible he has blown on all that money on chocolate digestive or stubbed toe therapy, but has hasn’t bothered us with a column about it, so I suspect not. 

Of course, you have, dear reader, the option of not reading Chiles. We have the option of ignoring all fuck out of him.

Yet. He exists. 

Every day the Graun asks me for money, tiresomely totalling the number of articles I have read since whenever, and when that money-begging pop-up appears it is often right next to Chiles’ gurning mush. I cannot separate the two images, I cannot undo that juxtaposition. I cannot pay to see that smug pudgy boat. 

Chiles is also taking up space that could be used by someone else. Someone who needs the money. Someone who is just starting out. Someone who has something to say and a style to say it in. 

By chris page

Magazine editor, writer of fiction and non-fiction; exile; cat person; red wine for blood and cheese in his soul. Chris Page is the author of the novels Weed, Sanctioned, Another Perfect Day in ****ing Paradise, King of the Undies World, and The Underpants Tree. He is also a freelance journalist, copywriter, editor, cartoonist, illustrator, graphic designer, and consultant in the use and abuse of false moustaches (don’t wear them — you’re welcome — the invoice is in the mail).

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