BBC presenter Clare Balding has once again waded into a public
fight with journalist and television critic AA Gill.
The openly-gay television host was defending Mary Beard, presenter
of BBC Two series Meet The Romans.
Gill used his tongue-in-cheek column in The Sunday Times to imply
that Beard was too ugly for the cameras.
He wrote: "Mary Beard should be kept away from cameras altogether.
She's this far from being the subject of a Channel 4 dating
documentary."
His latter mark referred to Channel 4's show The Undateables,
which helps people with disfigurements find romance.
In response, Balding used micro-blogging site Twitter to say:
"Ah yes, the great t--- Gill. The bizarre thing about him being a
TV reviewer is that he hates television and most women on it."
But the spat is not the first time the two media
personalities have clashed. In 2010 she complained to the PCC after
Goill described her as "dyke on a bike".
But Balding's moral highground has also been greeted with cynicism
and claims of hypocrisy after she publicly humiliated Grand
National winning jockey Liam Treadwell in 2009.
Minutes after he won the race, she forced him to show his teeth to
the cameras before saying he should get them fixed with the prize
money.
One Daily Mail reader said: "I lost any respect for Balding when
she humiliated that poor jockey by making him show his bad teeth
off to camera and then saying that now he had won a race he could
afford to get them fixed. A man doing that to a woman would have
been sacked on the spot!"
