Tyson Fury has been a personal hero of mine ever since he told an interviewer that “a woman’s best place is in the kitchen and on her back….making me a good cup of tea.”
I also was also quite entertained by his remarks about homosexuality, which he thinks should be banned and which he equates with paedophilia.
It’s not so much that I necessarily agree with every last word of his sentiments. (I wouldn’t dare. My wife would kill me. Also, I personally think I’m a better cook and tea-maker than her so she’s better off doing the washing). Rather, what I admire is his sheer, bloody-minded, fuck-you, Trump-style outspokenness.
Sure it took skill and strength to take the world heavyweight boxing title from Wladimir Klitschko.
But for a public figure to express such marvellously robust, old fashioned views in the age of gay marriage and women-in-the-frontline-infantry strikes me as courageous and heroic beyond measure.
This is why, obviously, I wanted Tyson Fury to win the BBC Personality of the Year last night.
And why it’s such an outrage that the prize went instead to, of all people, Andy Murray.
All over Britain, on the shelves of WH Smith and Ryman stationers, there are boxes of paper clips with more personality than Andy Murray. There are reams of printer paper with more personality than Andy Murray.
Andy Murray is so personality-free that, like all personality-free people – including previous BBC Sports Personality of the Year winners Nigel “Boring” Mansell and Steve “Interesting” Davies – he has developed a completely unhilarious line in jokes about how incredibly personality-free he is.
“Somebody sent me a newspaper article that I was duller than a wet weekend in Worthing. That seemed pretty harsh – on Worthing.”
Tyson Fury would have a word for jokes as crap as that. Gay.