I’ve always liked Tracy Grimshaw. She seems very nice. She does this thing sometimes with her eyes when she’s saying good night at the end of the show, it’s a little squint, it’s like she’s trying to make friends with an animal.
She’s into horses, and I’ve often wondered if hers watch her when she’s on, if they hear her voice and immediately start paying attention to the television, so that’s why she gives her reassuring blinking message. Unless they don’t watch A Current Affair. Horses are very smart.
So I can’t tell you how disappointed I was when Tracy said she’d agreed in advance not to ask Gordon Ramsay anything about his marriage, and whether he’d been shagging that other woman behind his wife’s back for all those years, meeting in hotels and sneaking around.
It would’ve been kind of interesting to find out how someone so famous, with such a recognisable face – even if, I’m sorry, that face resembles the top of a creme brulee after it’s been whacked really hard with the back of a spoon – manages to have a secret affair for some seven years. Allegedly.
And whether he felt at all like - as he would put it - a total a***hole for going on about his deep love for his wife while he was at it with another woman, and whether he ever had a pang of sadness that his children had such a dog for a father.
If in fact all those stories about Sarah Symonds are true. But when Gordon Ramsay said Tracy Grimshaw couldn’t ask him any ``personal’’ questions, Tracy agreed.
``Last week,’’ she announced on A Current Affair Monday night, ``his publicists stipulated incessantly the interviews on this trip not include questions about his marriage and private life. We all know why. I respected that request, but it appears with Ramsay that respect is a one-way street.’‘
What the hell is that about? She’s a journalist. The only job description she should stick to is the one that says she asks questions. Who cares whether Ramsay still respected her in the morning? She could’ve still put statements to him and he could’ve opted to respond or not respond, but that’s what she’s there for. To ask questions. Not to sit there like they’re best friends. Or like she works for Ramsay, or for Ramsay’s publicists.
And it doesn’t say much for what kind of lame-arse he is, that he has to be protected from a soft and cosy television interview by PR people.
Of course, in one way, Tracy’s livelihood does depend on Ramsay, and on every other famous person who goes on A Current Affair with something to sell.
Access to those big names soon dries up when they discover they’re not allowed to just sit in the studio and deliver their own press release. But what would’ve happened had Tracy decided, bugger it, I’m going to ask him whatever I feel like, whatever I think the Current Affair audience might be keen to hear about? What’s the worst that could’ve happened then? That Ramsay got irate and called her a pig?
I thought Ramsay liked pigs anyway. Pigs with roasted apple sauce, pig sausages with gravy ... And he was very upset when his pigs Trinny and Susannah were murdered.
Can I just ask at this point, is it really that much of an insult calling somebody a lesbian? Lots of guys love nothing more than a lesbian. Or two lesbians anyway. Maybe Gordon means he’s opposed to lesbians who look like Andrea Dworkin but not to ones who look like hot cheerleaders. I have no idea, and it’s hard to care very deeply what Gordon Ramsay says about anything anymore.
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