To my unoffendable sensibilities (just don’t say toilet, moist, perfume, vomit, diarrhoea, lounge or couch) John Torode’s alleged crime, for which he was sacked from MasterChef where we worked together, appears to be that he was in a bar singing along to a Kanye West hit.
The tune in question by the US rapper features the actor Jamie Foxx singing a refrain (“I got a woman”) originally written by Ray Charles in 1954. It’s a clever, mesmerising record and rather than discuss its provenance (which may have been more sensible), Torode is said to have been singing along. The song is called Gold Digger so you can see why its rhyming nature might have got him into trouble.
I say “singing” but it’s actually rapping. And, to my mind, the idea of a middle-aged man in a bar rapping along to Kanye West is a crime worth a sacking. Get your quote-hungry teeth into that one, Downing Street.
The likes of near-60-something Torode should be safely at home after work with some Puccini playing in the background. Or, if he insists, doing karaoke in his shed with headphones on.
And don’t I know it, because some of us middle-aged blokes grew up with the greatest, most violently lyrical rappers in history. And God forbid they pop up in the queue at the karaoke when it’s our turn. NWA long being one of my favourite late Eighties and Nineties hip-hop groups. The lyrics are tricky stepping stones across the fruitiest nuggets of the English language and don’t ask what their name stands for.
But their songs aren’t my fault. Someone put them out into the ether in Compton, south Los Angeles. Perhaps it was the contrast that partly excited me, lying in the spring sunshine on the south front of my grandfather Sacheverell’s home of Weston Hall, Towcester, Northamptonshire, my headphones filled with the verbiage of Dr Dre, Eazy-E, Ice Cube and MC Ren spoken from some of the most violent streets in America.
“It’s a treatise on excessive policing, Mother,” was how I dealt with inquiries. But little did I know of the dangerous end that this path could bring.
The genre of hip-hop practically celebrates the use of foul, culturally sensitive language yet spoken from the mouths of artists this parlance is par for the course. From the lips of a middle-aged bloke, a TV presenter no less, and it becomes a crime for which the penalty is the loss of a job and a very public rinsing. And it’s a very clear example of cultural two-tier policing. Which was once highlighted, brilliantly, in 2020 by the US comedian Tom Cotter who contrasted the cultural cancelling of the 1940s song Baby It’s Cold Outside (offending, toxic masculinity-soaked lyrics include “My mother will start to worry/Beautiful, what’s your hurry?”) with the then number-one hit WAP (Wet-A– P—y).
Now these songs, and those by NWA, Kanye West, 50 Cent and thousands more, are not banned. We don’t do that anymore. Broadcasters and governments know that if you want to see a song race up the charts you just need to ban it. Which, famously, was the case in 1984 when Radio One DJ Mike Read persuaded the BBC to ban Relax by Frankie Goes to Hollywood and it promptly became one of the biggest-selling singles in the UK.
So bars, pubs and clubs pump this stuff out, wooing the after-work crowd and the likes of John Torode and TV crew looking for distraction after another day of tasting parfaits of venison liver and self-saucing chocolate fondants.
As the music thumps and pulsates, drinks are sipped, the feet start to tap and the middle-aged chap attempts to impress the young folk around him as he sings along to the purposefully confrontational lyrics.
The hangover is bad enough, but imagine waking up to discover – or being alerted to the fact some seven years later – that the undercover lyrics police were patrolling that night and noting down which dastardly fools had the temerity to sing along to Gold Digger.