Walliams and Wootton and Fox, oh boy

From the Britain's Got Talent transcripts to the GB News live studio, casual misogyny has moved from the dressing room to centre stage. So has anything really changed since Russell Brand's heyday?

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“Who'd want to shag that?”

Oh come on. It’s five words. Only five words. How offended can you even be by five words?

Need more context? OK then, here’s a bit more. “We're past the watershed so I can say this. Show me a single self-respecting man that would like to climb into bed with that woman - ever, ever.

“That little woman has been spoon-fed oppression day after day after day.

“And she's sat there and I'm going like – if I met you in a bar and that was like sentence three, [the] chances of me just walking away are just huge.

“We need powerful, strong, amazing women who make great points for themselves, we don't need these sort of feminist 4.0… they're pathetic and embarrassing.

“Who would want to shag that?”

OK, it’s a little more than five words. Five paragraphs, in fact. But still, it’s just locker room banter. Just boys being boys. Nothing in it really, right?

Except it wasn’t a locker room, and these weren’t boys. This was Lawrence Fox to Dan Wooton on national NEWS channel (insert your own air quotes) GB News, speaking about Politics Joe reporter Ava Evans.

It is a conversation that was deemed fit for broadcast in full. It didn’t end early and go to an ad break. There was no cutting away to an apology, or sequeing to a different topic. It is a conversation that stayed on air until the bitter end, Fox spitting bile at a sniggering Wootton until the point today, hours later, when someone got cold feet and both men were suspended. Good work GB News. Good work indeed.