In my piece on the Guardian's Aditya Chakrabortty the other day I wondered aloud why the paper should keep its hapless chief economic leader writer yet get rid of the wonderful Martin Kelner, author of a weekly semi-humorous column on TV sport. After all the Graun's readers couldn't care less about economics, but they do love their darts, in a post-modernist kind of way.
I now learn that another Guardian journo has taken the redundancy cheque and walked, namely Chief Sportswriter Richard Williams. I have mixed feelings about this. Leaving aside the sinking ship aspect of much relating to the Graun these days, Williams was one of its better writers, an intelligent guy in the long tradition of Neville Cardus and Hugh McIlvanney who recognised that sport was something worth taking seriously.
The flip side of this was that Williams was occasionally prone to taking himself too seriously. He once described, without irony, fellow hack Paddy Barclay as a "football critic". You could see in this something of Williams' view of himself: not the E.I.Addio of Private Eye fame, the reporter in the Ford Fiesta with a Yorkie bar and copy of Readers Wives, but an Albert Camus of the terraces, well-thumbed copy of Derrida in one pocket, When Saturday Comes in the other and Stone Roses T-shirt underneath his leather jacket.
There's taking it seriously, and taking it pretentiously. This ghastly tendency to try and think of fancy names for things to try and make them seem more important is not unique to Williams, and is I think one of the curses of modern society. A composer I know of describes on his website a favourite band - The Killers, let's say - as "cultural artists".
No they're not. They're a pop group. Anyway, can anyone think of an artist who isn't cultural in some way? The arts being, well, part of culture generally? No, thought not.
Our local primary school has Lunchtime Co-Ordinators now instead of Dinner Ladies. If he's looking for a job, Richard Williams would feel right at home.
