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Everyone’s still angry that Fox News doesn’t like Radiohead

By Andy Malt | Published on Tuesday 31 October 2017

Fox News has found a way to get people outside its traditional audience talking about it. And boy is it laying it on thick. Now look at us here, falling right into the trap. Again.

This all dates back to earlier this month and an edition of the news channel’s low budget late night talk show ‘The Greg Gutfeld Show’. On it, reporter Kat Timpf claimed that Radiohead had been nominated for induction into the Rock N Rock Hall Of Fame next year based on “fame and not talent”. She added that their music “is just elaborate moaning and whining over ringtone sounds”.

Radiohead fans immediately took the bait and began defending the band, even though 1) Radiohead don’t need defending and 2) that’s actually quite a reasonable description of their music.

It caused such a fuss that Gutfield and co realised that they were onto something. So the following week, he said of the band: “You know, Radiohead is a fine band but they stole everything from Coldplay. Like, Radiohead is the poor man’s Coldplay”.

I know. I know. There are lots of arguments against that statement, but you know the whole thing was deliberately crafted just to make you start shouting them angrily. It’s like if I said, “Even though it ended up being better than the original three films combined, ‘Star Wars: Episode 1’ would have been a lot better if Jar Jar Binks hadn’t been so woefully underused”. No wait, I got it wrong. That is actually a stone cold fact.

There’s no use me telling you not to get upset about Gutfield’s Radiohead fan baiting now though, because this happened a week ago and everyone’s already expressed their outrage on Twitter. Oh, the outrage! Surely after two weeks of it, the team behind the show wouldn’t want to feed off that anger some more. Would they? Yes, of course they would.

This week, they went all out and filmed a sketch! A classic comedy sketch. The sketch is set up as a mock advert for a remedy to rid you of ‘Radiohead lice’, called ‘Yorke-B-Gone’. I think the idea is that Radiohead lice make you itch, and they also make a horrible wailing sound.

It’s sort of… no, I don’t know. But it finishes on a joke about Coldplay being “more innovative” than Radiohead, which might have been funnier if the build up to screening the sketch hadn’t been filled with better jokes on that theme. Actually, Gutfield concluded that run by stepping things up a gear with the majestic claim that Blink 182 are “a poor man’s Red Hot Chili Peppers”, who in turn are “a poor man’s Smash Mouth”.

Anyway, everyone’s now got annoyed by this, because everyone loves being annoyed by things these days. I’m even annoyed about you being annoyed. And now I’m annoyed that I’m annoyed that you’re annoyed. When will the cycle ever end? Never, that’s when, watch the fucking sketch and then go and complain about it somewhere.