BOOK OF THE DAY: God Bless America: Misadventures of a Big Mouth Brit By Piers MorganEbury Press 436pp, £17.99
JUST IN case you’ve been lucky enough to have never chanced upon Piers Morgan, we’d better introduce him.
He is a British former tabloid editor, who left the News of the World after getting into trouble for invasion of privacy and was then criticised by the Press Complaints Commission for insider share dealing when he was editor of the Daily Mirror. He was sacked from the Mirror in 2004 for publishing fake pictures of Iraqi prisoners being abused by British army personnel.
Once, public opinion would have obliged any editor presiding over such a catalogue of shame to slink off into richly deserved obscurity. But we live in strange times and this silly, vain and offensive man has instead become a fabulously wealthy television star in Britain and America through his participation in documentaries such as The Dark Side of Fame, as winner of a Celebrity Apprentice charity fundraiser hosted by Donald Trump, and as a judge on America’s Got Talent and Britain’s Got Talent.
A well-stocked contacts book helped him in his rise to fame, as did the patronage of Simon Cowell, who needed another “nasty Brit” to substitute for him on various shows he controlled.
But Cowell remains the top dog of reality TV, with Morgan merely his widdling puppy. Cowell, whether or not you like him, has to be acknowledged as a real player, owning the production companies that make the programmes on which he appears and franchising worldwide.
Morgan, in spite of his wealth (though he’s nowhere near the Cowell league), simply revels in his double-edged recognition as “the man you love to hate” and the opportunities for crass and bullying behaviour it has brought, and seems to be unburdened with any accurate sense of self-awareness.
If you want someone to mortify deluded wannabe entertainers, or mock the borderline mentally ill, or make starry-eyed little girls cry with disappointment, then Morgan’s your man, too blinded himself by fame and conceitedness to comprehend that judge and judged are on a par in terms of emotional neediness.
God Bless America is probably the stupidest book I have ever read and I’ve read some tripe in my time. A diary of Morgan’s adventures working in the States during the run-up to Obama’s election, the entries are variously obsequious, boastful, atrociously written (on page 371 two men “limped like limbless tortoises”), pompous, infantile and depressing.
Although the will to live began to seep from me around page 300, I persisted because of the book’s unintended humour and, frankly, the nuggets of envious and malicious star gossip to be found here and there.
God Bless America is just about readable if you approach it as a piece of comedy, a guide to the world of A, B, C and Z-list celebrity as compiled by a 21st century Mr Pooter, blissfully unaware of the ridiculous figure he cuts.
When Morgan actually tries to be funny, it seldom works.
One rancidly laddish anecdote concerns a “hilarious” e-mail Morgan received, showing two photographs, one of Heather Mills-McCartney, the other of disgraced New York governor Eliot Spitzer’s high-class hooker, Ashley Dupre.
“One of these women,” goes the e-mail, “is 38, very ugly and cost Sir Paul McCartney £25 million for four years of mental torture. The other is 22, very beautiful, and cost Eliot Spitzer just $2,000 for a night of pleasure, which works out at $2.9 million over four years. You do the maths.”
Hilarious, eh? If you find it so, then God Bless America’s undoubtedly the book for you, and you’re welcome to it.
Stephen Dixon is an artist and former Daily Mirror journalist – though not under the editorship of Piers Morgan.