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HOME arrow THE ARCHIVE arrow Media arrow No love, no joy
No love, no joy

Helen Chamberlain’s former sidekick has celebrated leaving Soccer AM for 6.06 with a book. Taylor Parkes wants to know why anyone – anyone – thought it was a good idea to expose the presenter’s ego and prejudices across 288 smugly written pages

Soccer AM is a bad memory: hungover mornings in other people’s flats, disturbed by a crew of whooping simpletons, the slurping of pro and ex-pro rectums, cobbled-together comedy that made me long for the glory days of Skinner and Baddiel’s old shit. Yet Tim Lovejoy himself, with his fashionably receding hair and voice oddly reminiscent of Rod Hull’s, I remember only as an averagely blokey TV presenter – in fact, one of the few averagely blokey TV presenters to make me clack my tongue in irritation, rather than buff my Gurkha knife. Other than as a namesake of The Simpsons’ self-serving man of the cloth, he barely registered; just a bland, blond ringmaster in a cocky circus of crap. Almost a surprise, then, to find that his new book is not just ­tedious in the extreme, it is utterly vile.

Chopped into “chapters” that barely fill a page, in a font size usually associated with books for the partially sighted, Lovejoy on Football is part autobiography, part witless musing, and one more triumph for the crass stupidity rapidly replacing culture in this country. Hopelessly banal and nauseatingly self-assured, smirkingly unfunny, it’s a £300 T-shirt, a piss-you-off ringtone, a YouTube clip of someone drinking their mate’s vomit. Its smugness is a corollary of its vacuity. I hope it makes you sick.

First, it’s clear that being Tim Lovejoy requires a very special blend of arrogance and ignorance. When he’s not listing his media achievements with a breathtaking lack of guile, he’s sneering at those “sad” enough to take an interest in football history, revealing his utter cluelessness about life outside the Premier League (in a section called “Know Your Silverware”, he refers to “League Three”) and making sundry gaffes, major and minor. He names Johan Cruyff as his all-time favourite player, then admits he’s only seen that five-second World Cup clip of the Cruyff turn. Grumbling about footballers’ musical tastes, he complains that “all you’ll hear blasting out of the team dressing room is R&B, rather than what the rest of the country is listening to” – by which he means indie bands. Everywhere there are jaw-dropping illustrations of insularity, self-­satisfaction and a startlingly small mind.

There’s something sinister here, too: beamingly positive, thrilled by wealth, too pleased with himself to ask awkward questions, Tim Lovejoy is the football fan Sepp Blatter has been waiting for. Roman ­Abramovich’s darling young one. Not least for his complacency: his lack of understanding of how football works (and doesn’t work) is best illustrated in a section called “Give Your Chairman A Break”, in which he defends “that Thai bloke at Man City”, and implores us to “look at the Glazers... you would have thought they were nothing but a bunch of Americans intent on buying the club and selling off Old Trafford to Tesco judging by the howl of protests from the fans. Within two seasons though, they had won the title and built a squad the envy of Europe.” Bang your head off the wall at such unreviewable stupidity – Tim’s infantile ideas of shunning “negativity” prod him into precisely the kind of thinking that has had such hugely negative influence on the game. “Look across our national team” – he means England, by the way – “and there isn’t one player who wouldn’t walk into any side in Europe... why is it, before every tournament, we start believing we’re overrated?”

And, surprise: Lovejoy is as wretched a starfucker as could be inferred from his television shows. Everyone in football is Tim’s mate (and here we have pictures to prove it, stars looking confused in his grinning, over-familiar presence, frozen by an arm around the shoulders). He’ll “even watch the occasional game of rugby now, because I’m friends with a lot of the players like Will Greenwood, Matt Dawson, Lawrence ­Dallaglio and Austin Healy”.

It’s perhaps telling that among the many anecdotes offered here, the most heartwarming (and least surprising) involves Tim getting clattered hard by Neil Ruddock in a charity game; even in this version of the story, there’s nothing to suggest Razor meant it affectionately. Still, our man is blinded by quite astonishing hubris, reprinting a photo of a banner at Anfield reading “LOVEJOY SUCKS BIG FAT COCKS” with a glee that is nothing like self-deprecation. “The hardest thing about leaving ­Soccer AM,” he says regretfully, “is the thought that I might no longer be influencing the game.” True, it’ll be tough. But who knows? Perhaps the game will struggle on.

It’s not that there was ever a time when football on telly wasn’t in the hands of dimwits, poseurs and blowhards. It’s not that Lovejoy is significantly more objectionable than TV shits of ages past. The point is, in his own mind and that of the powers that be, he’s one of us. He is us. Savour that. God help us.

Lovejoy on Football is published by Century at £16.99

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Comments (18)
Comment by Jonas77 19-03-2008 19:21    [Offensive? Unsuitable?
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Why would anyone seriously want to hear what this guy has to say?

Comment by Psycho Charlie NobCheese 24-03-2008 17:35    [Offensive? Unsuitable?
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Four or five years ago i would have been a big defender of Lovejoy and Soccer AM, but since Sky has cottoned on to what a minor success this show has been it's slowly but surely been commercialised and has taken away from the show.

As for Lovejoy, i think the author here is spot on, and his bitchy little comment towards Gail Porter after she made a Beckham joke was not particularly becoming of the man.

Comment by Zorg the Leveller 27-03-2008 13:07    [Offensive? Unsuitable?
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Soccer AM ran out of ideas about five years ago, and should have been put out of its misery. As for Lovejoy, 606 is the best place for him. After all, the alternative is that he presents something that might otherwise be listenable, or that someone with half a brain occasionally tempts you to tune into 606. Like Victoria Derbyshire doing the morning phone-in on 5 Live, this kills two birds with one stone. So to speak.

Comment by Etienne 28-03-2008 08:56    [Offensive? Unsuitable?
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Does he really mis-spell the name of his "mate", Austin Healey?

Comment by benfawkes 14-08-2008 08:22    [Offensive? Unsuitable?
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I used to like Lovejoy when I was about 15 and Soccer AM was still fresh but yeah he is a rather vile, pseudo trendy character.

Comment by dtruck83 22-11-2008 18:12    [Offensive? Unsuitable?
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Lovejoy is the biggest arse licker i have had the misfortune to watch, did anyone see that allstars programme he did? Or david beckhams soccer USA? If he was made of chocolate he would eat himself!

Comment by SpunkBubble 14-01-2009 17:34    [Offensive? Unsuitable?
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Man, this Lovejoy is a plank! What a superb article, makes so much sense if you've seen this dude on telly. Influence football? Don't make me laugh!! I'd "love" to see him in another celebs match, and this time have a certain Vinny Jones clattering into him full on. It would give me so much "joy". All he ever said that he thought was remotely funny was "dirty Leeds"...and this from a bloke who doesn't have the faintest understanding of the English game, its history or any feel for what football is about. Another plastic glory hunter!! Oh please, no one buy this book. It deserves to be the biggest lemon in history.

Comment by HectorCuper 23-03-2009 23:49    [Offensive? Unsuitable?
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Possibly the best review I've read since Shark Sandwich ... brilliant.

The man's an arse ... the personification of a WKD advert - vacuous, unfunny, trite, unoriginal and offensively representative of lowest common denominator 'lad culture'.

I get the impression that he's the kind of 'New Blokey Man' (tm) that you'd only need to be in the company of for a bare four pints before he'd start driviling on about being at the birth of his child with a whistful look in his eye.

A tw*t ... synonym, a Chelsea supporter post 2001. An embarrassment to the beautiful game of Finney and Shankley. My grandad would've hit him in his L'orel man experted f*cking face.

And his cooking programme's sh*te aswell. Tart.

Comment by Liffrok 12-05-2009 18:23    [Offensive? Unsuitable?
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Sadly, he has been removed from 6-0-6.

What a loss to football he will be.

Comment by El Nacnud 12-08-2009 18:08    [Offensive? Unsuitable?
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I realise now that it was seeing the football, not the presenters, that made me enjoy Soccer AM.

Comment by Terry Savage 17-09-2009 16:51    [Offensive? Unsuitable?
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"Hopelessly banal and nauseatingly self-assured, smirkingly unfunny, it?s a £300 T-shirt, a piss-you-off ringtone, a YouTube clip of someone drinking their mate?s vomit. Its smugness is a corollary of its vacuity. I hope it makes you sick."

Brilliant.

Comment by stuart77 14-11-2009 16:40    [Offensive? Unsuitable?
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bring back Standing Room Only - with that fella off Brookside, I think he played Damon

Comment by George at asda 16-11-2009 21:35    [Offensive? Unsuitable?
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He's too busy doing one of those property programmes on BBC1.

Comment by Mulder 04-12-2009 20:26    [Offensive? Unsuitable?
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I could never get along with SoccerAM, it was too polished and trying to be this "down with fans" programme. It was Skinner and Baddiel that came from proper footy fans, and i so want to start a campaign to get "fantasy Footy with Baddeil and Skinner" started up again. Lovejoy was the right sort of cock to front such a crap piece of TV. The sky generation doesent speak for proper footy fans

Comment by madmickyf 18-12-2009 03:48    [Offensive? Unsuitable?
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The sad things is it's wankers just like Lovejoy who work for TV companies commissioning new shows. No wonder shallow twats like him are on every channel these days, they're moulded in their maker's image.

Comment by uninformedandunbalanced 24-12-2009 23:05    [Offensive? Unsuitable?
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I used to do a lot of things I now regret when I was an ignorant teenager. Complain to my parents about "life not being fair", join in with that despicable chant aimed at Wenger and also watching and enjoying Soccer AM. I still occasionally complain to my parents, but mercifully the latter two are things of the past. Lovejoy and Soccer AM probably set back my knowledge of football by about 3 years - a bit like falling in with the wrong crowd at school - it takes a while, but you realise in the end that you've been a bit of an idiot.

Comment by Les Bagg 28-12-2009 21:42    [Offensive? Unsuitable?
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An astonishingly good review!
At Mudhuts Media in Wigan we have been demonizing that man and that programme for as long as I can remember.
The loathesome and insulting way that he used to seriously think he could play for any 4th division club (sorry, old fashoined me!) just about summed up his horrible attitude.
"Save Chip", "Bouncebackability", "Easy, Easy" Sad, sad warnings about how easily modern football fans are duped and follow the "Monkey see, monkey do" way.
We recently started a thread on the worst football books ever written, however, the book needs to have been read to be included, so even though Lovejoys book probably deserves the top spot I don't think any of us are brave enough to do the deed!

Comment by Lemmiwinks 25-02-2010 10:11    [Offensive? Unsuitable?
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This is the best review of anything, ever. Simply brilliant.

I was once dragged onto Soccer AM by some mates. We were 'fans of the week', and apparently we were only going on to wind Lovejoy up.
In the bar after the show, one of our group approached Lovejoy and asked him at what point he had switched allegiance from Watford (who he apparently used to support) to Chelsea.

His reply, and I quote, was delightful: "Shut the f**k up, you c**t."

As arrogant and self-delusional a man as I've ever met in my life.

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