the Radio Times's smart arse interviewer, who usually spends his sycophantic life crawling up the arses of the stars. He sensed that Bernard had few defenders and tore into him. I just hate that sort of intellectual bullying.

But you are happy to praise the creative effort that is needed to insult people with words like sambo, nigger and wog like he did, to those waitresses in Derby when he had a microphone and they couldn't answer back. That takes real intellect and fantastic creative talent.

Can we just try and get rid of the argument that what he did took a certain amount of skill and most of us would be scared shitless. For well over twenty years I stood for twenty+ hours a week in front of some of the toughest roughest students that Sheffield could provide.

Bernard Manning would not have lasted five minutes.