How Chris Sutton became the king of football’s cinematic miserablists | Barney Ronay

BT Sport’s former Blackburn Rovers striker is continuing in a rich tradition of television miserablism pioneered by Alan Hansen and Jimmy Hill

I’ve always liked Will Self, one-time literary enfant terrible, TV talking head and all-round perspicacious hypersesquipedalianist. I know it’s probably not alright to like Will Self any more. He’s almost certainly not cool. It’s likely he’s said things on Twitter I can’t be bothered to Google that have angered people or displayed incorrect ways of thinking, sparking one of those wild sprawling waves of self-nourishing social media rage, the smartphone generation’s equivalent of going to a massive rave in a field.

I still like Will Self, though. Not so much the recent Will Self, who has wise, weary opinions about politics. But old Will Self from the 1990s who, in a strange time of plastic prosperity and glossy consensus, when everyone seemed happy to be brayingly cool and British and pleased with themselves, still managed to be wild and censorious about everything in a way that looking back now seems about right. That was a great Will Self. I don’t want him to do podcasts and have opinions about Trident. I want him to smoke crack on Newsnight and tell Evan Davis he’s a refulgent ganglion of the news‑argument ziggurat, or do poppers and kidnap Nigel Farage as part of an art happening.

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