Harry's Blog

It’s a lovely sunny afternoon here in Essex, I’m enjoying a lunch of cheese and onion toasties and feeling all relaxed and happy. So what better time to stick the knife in to the various folks on TV that have been annoying the hell out of me recently.

There are some people whose very appearance on the TV screen not only has me reaching for the remote, but considering doing a Led Zeppelin and throwing the TV out of the window. But who are the most annoying people on TV at the moment?

Nicky Campbell continues to be an annoying git in almost everything he appears in. Whether on TV or the radio his tabloid journalism style can drag any serious discussion down into the gutter. His work on Watchdog is pretty annoying, pandering to the pointless whinging of Daily Mail readers who haven’t got everything 100 percent their way.

But he’s not the winner.

There’s a new TV personality that has recently appeared that has earned the wrath of myself and my mild-mannered fiancée. His name is Alan Carr and he is apparently a comedian. Carr is one of those irritating tosspots who think that just because he is gay he should adopt the voice and mannerisms of eighty-year-old northern washerwoman. If I was gay I think I’d go straight just so I couldn’t be identified as having something in common with the irritating camp little tosspot. We’ve only seen him twice on TV in the last week and both L and I are already agreed on turning the channel over if he appears in anything.

But he’s not the winner either.

The most irritating person on television at the moment is Gillian McKeith, the self-styled doctor and nutritional expert that has managed to con Channel 4 out of a production budget to help her sell her fake slimming products. She has to be the most irritating, patronising and thoroughly annoying person every to grace British TV screens. Her lack of compassion for people on her TV show is astounding, as is the way she bullies them to follow her misguided and unscientific diet regimes.

When I began thinking about this blog post last week I thought that it would be tricky to put McKeith as the winner just based on the fact she’s a pretty horrible person. Thankfully some research has shown how much of a fraud she is. Okay, it’s well known that she’s not a real doctor and her CV features no real nutritional or scientific qualifications other than ones she’s just paid for, but wait till you read what the real experts think of her.

"For the most part, Gillian McKeith is astonishingly ignorant of basic nutritional and medical science. So, although she advocates eating fresh fruits and vegetables, she claims that cooking them “destroys all the life-enhancing enzymes”, which she believes are “the life force of food and help the digestion process.” This is not correct: enzymes in raw foods are treated by the digestive system in the same way as proteins generally. They are denatured in the acid environment of the stomach and then digested into their constituent amino acids by the digestive enzymes we produce in our stomach and pancreas. These amino acids are then absorbed from the small intestine and transported in the blood to wherever they are needed, so the body can reassemble them into its own proteins (including enzymes). In summary, the ideas in Gillian McKeith's book and television program You Are What You Eat are a complex mixture of orthodox nutrition, misinterpretations of orthodox nutrition, new-age wishful thinking, Eastern (especially traditional Chinese) medicine and reflexology . Her teachings are generally diametrically opposed to those of current, science-based nutrition and she is not a reliable source of information on how diet can benefit health." – Nutrition Australia

"It is obvious she hasn't a clue about nutrition. In fact her advice, if followed to the limit, could be dangerous." – British Dietetic Assocation

"In my view Dr Gillian McKeith is a charlatan." - John Garrow, professor emeritus in human nutrition at London University.

"In the show I saw there was a total lack of real medical issues. Her theories on food-combining are perfect rubbish." - Dr Edzard Ernst, professor of complimentary medicine at Exeter University.

"We're concerned. Some of the things she says just aren't true." - Amanda Wynne, senior dietician at the British Dietetic Association.

"Our bodies are very good at eliminating all the nasties that we might ingest over the festive season. There is a popular notion that we can speed up the elimination process by drinking fancy bottled water or sipping herbal teas, but this is just nonsense." - John Emsley, of the Royal Society of Chemistry discussing McKeith’s views on detoxing and her detox products.

"The concept of ‘detox’ is a marketing myth rather than a physiological entity, - Catherine Collins, chief dietician at St George’s Hospital Medical School in London.

"I once saw a bloke at the opening of a Jackson Pollock exhibition in the Tate, wearing a T-shirt that said: 'my cat could do better'. What, you may be wondering, has that got to do with Dr Gillian McKeith (PhD)? She is proud to announce under “Professional Associations” that she is a certified member of the American Association of Nutritional Consultants (AANC), which certainly sounds impressive. I bet you get a little certificate and everything. In fact, I know you get a certificate, because I’m holding it in my hand right now. It’s in the name of my cat, Henrietta. I got it in return for $60, and it’s a particular honour since dear, sweet, little Hettie died about a year ago. So, coming in a bit cheaper than Gillian’s non-accredited correspondence course PhD and Masters degrees (although she will have got a discount from “Clayton College of Natural Health” if she ordered them both at once), it looks as if all you need to be a certified member of the AANC is a name, an address, and a spare $60. You don’t need to be human. You don’t even need to be alive." – Ben Goldacre, who writes about bad science in The Guardian.

So there you go, the most annoying person on British Television is Doctor (pfffff) Gillian McKeith. So which TV celebs annoy you at the moment?