A lot of what Giles Coren says is unprintable. Listening to him talk I imagine myself spraying asterisks at the screen of my laptop like rubber bullets into a crowd of angry protesters. “I’ll say any old s*** in an interview just so they can write it down and f*** off”, he tells me toward the beginning of our conversation. He laughs at this. Coren says things with a sort of ironic sneer, including you in a private joke of which you may or may not be the butt. He seems to be an expert at making people think he doesn’t really mean it when he’s insulting you – you laugh when he does it. It’s a gift: charming and offensive. It reminds me of the way the upper sixth-formers would talk to the younger boys at school: you could tell there was no real malice because they had a smile on their face. With Giles Coren I’m less sure.
Coren is unapologetic about most things, though he confesses to a slight embarrassment about telling people where he studied: “You have to conceal your education. People ask where you went to university, and you sigh and say Oxford, and sort of mumble. Like you, though, I had the back-up of saying that I was at a s*** college [Keble], and I use ‘s***’ guardedly. But let’s face it, St Hugh’s is never going to bring anyone out in a sweat.”
I ask him about his degree, which he has described as “eye-wateringly impressive”. He is initially dismissive: “getting a first from Oxford doesn’t really mean very much. Practically everybody gets one.” He goes on to say how top degrees have been – to use his word – devalued: “You meet Oxford firsts now who are as thick as two short planks, and have never read anything. I meet them all the time, they do work experience at the Times. Twenty years ago it still carried a bit of cache, it was still quite hard to get the top first. Although you can’t really talk about it to other people, you can’t show off about it, deep down you know that you’re smarter than they are, and you feel quite relaxed about pissing your life away not doing very much. Although I have a job where I dress up in silly clothes and write a load of old bollocks, I know that when push comes to shove, they put the brightest and the best together in one year at Oxford and I beat them all in the exams, so they can all f*** off. I don’t really care if they do have jobs in banks.”
I read out a quote from an Interview Coren did for the Guardian: “I don’t really read magazines now that I can get porn online.” I was interested to know whether he thought he had bad taste: “I have excellent taste. My study is painted in three shades of green.” Defending the comment, he said he only did that interview because he was trying to sell his book (Anger Management for Beginners). He then said some things that I won’t record about redtube and youporn, and socks. Coren says he always agrees to give interviews to Oxford and Cambridge newspapers, “because they’re basically the only literate people left in England. There’s no one else. My girlfriend – I mean my wife, sorry – my wife and the mother of my child, was at Bristol. It’s meant to be the next rung down, and it’s just shocking. It’s shocking when you meet them. They’re like bus conductors, it’s scary.”
At this point I asked Coren whether he genuinely thinks some of the things he says, or is it all just a carefully constructed media persona. “I made a slight mistake – not a mistake” Coren is quick to correct himself: “I made a decision. I decided to call my book ‘Anger Management for Beginners’ and to make the unifying theme anger and ranting, and outbursts, In a slightly half-arsed imitation of Clarkson. Now, I’m a much better writer than Clarkson, I’m a much more educated, reasonable, and liberal human being than Clarkson. He’s a far more brilliant media personality than I am: he’s very funny, very accessible, he has all sorts of exciting opinions that the common man is likely to be terribly interested in. I don’t. I’m just an over-educated snob. I thought that if I could persuade people I’m a bit like Clarkson then maybe they’d buy my book. It worked up to a point.”
Coren says he had never written anything particularly controversial until about three years ago, when his father Alan died. He thinks that rudeness and controversy would have pained his father, who, as a hugely popular columnist, was famous for his charming wit and warm style. “I think it’s all harmless,” says Coren. “One of the reasons I like to swear is that all through my life people have said swearing just shows that you have a weak vocabulary. Sorry, but I have a stronger vocabulary than anyone I’ve ever met, and I say ‘f***ing c***’ all the time. Deliberately. I know every word, in every language that there possibly is on any planet in the solar system, and ‘f***’ is still probably the best one. There are thousands of ways of describing things, but in the end most people only understand f***. If people continue to find f*** funny, I’ll continue to use it. The lowest common denominator needs pandering to.”
I move the topic of conversation on to class, reading a quote by Giles’ sister Victoria taken from an interview she did for the Jewish Chronicle: “My brother is very comfortable spending an afternoon playing cricket on the private pitch at a stately home, then staying the weekend with the titled owners.” I suggest that Coren looked rather at home when dressing up as an 18th century aristocrat for his series ‘the Supersizers’. “If I know my sister, and if it’s the Jewish Chronicle, she will have gone on from saying that to tell the world how humble and modest she is, and how there’s nothing more pleasant to her than eating a salt-beef sandwich and drinking a cup of tea. That’s the dichotomy that exists in her mind. It’s partly true. I’m just sociable; I know loads of toffs because I went to Oxford. I went to Keble and was miserable because it was full of pikey rugby players from the north of England, so I made my friends at New College and hung out with posh people because the girls are prettier. My sister went to St John’s where she worked incredibly hard and met only nerds in the library. Actually, she’s wrong. I’ve never stayed the night at a stately home. I don’t know any really posh people. Class is a bit of a dead thing. I’m the Jew grandson of eastern European immigrants, my grandparents were hairdressers or something. I’m not posh, I just went to Westminster and Oxford. I’m a cringing middle-class twat like the next man.”
I can’t resist bringing up nosh-gate, the infamous episode where Coren sent a 1000-word email rant to Times sub-editors who had dared to remove a single indefinite article from the last sentence of one of his reviews. “When I meet useless cretins who f*** up the things I write it just makes me furious, because there are so many people out there who could do the job better.” Coren’s email contained the immortal phrase: “I have written 350 restaurant reviews for The Times and I have never ended on an unstressed syllable. F***, f***. F***, f***.” I mention that this probably counts as one of the most public defences of prosody in recent years, if not ever. This provokes a laugh from Coren: “I’d get in terrible trouble if I said anything like that. Prosody is important. I learned that from my dad.”
