Osbourne's Dumping a Literal Warning to Critics

I am going to be careful today, in the light of the very interesting piece in this paper on Saturday, in which Sharon Osbourne revealed that she punishes particularly harsh critics of her work - whatever that might be - by sending them a lovely ornate box, which looks like it might contain beautiful jewellery, but actually opens to reveal a sample of Osbourne's very own faeces.

A delightful gift for Gillian McKeith maybe and, as it happens, a rather apt metaphor for the kind of television in which the sainted Osbourne appears, but a terrible warning to us penny-a-liners, whose common currency is sarcasm and bile.

My tendency has always been to err on the side of pusillanimity anyway, not just in the lovely Shazza's case (knowing that her father, pop impresario Don Arden, is alleged to have dangled the Bee Gees manager, Robert Stigwood, out of a fourth floor window, something many of us may have felt like doing but did not have the ruthlessness to carry through, kind of counsels caution) but with other performers as well; I know how sensitive artistes can be.

I remember the Hammer horror movie in which Dame Diana Rigg went around inflicting hideously appropriate deaths on the critics who had destroyed her actor father. Yes, it is a tough business this, although by no means as brutal as heavyweight boxing, which ITV brought vividly into our living rooms on Saturday night, dispatching the contest between Audley Harrison and Danny Williams, much as Harrison disposed of his opponent, in a punchy, efficient but disturbingly blood-spattered way.

In a commendably short build-up to the contest, ITV still managed to tot up an impressive "redemption" count and to slip two or three "Last Chance Saloon" cliches past our guard as they discussed the importance of the fight to Harrison. As the boxers stepped out for round one, my colleague John Rawling said Harrison was "literally in that Last Chance Saloon". Now far be it from me to upbraid someone I could easily bump into at the office party or in the studios of Radio Five Live's hit punditry programme, Fighting Talk - to borrow a line from Woody Allen, I do not have a yellow streak running down my back, it runs across - but I have to tell you, John, that at that moment Harrison was not literally in the Last Chance Saloon. He was literally in the ExCel Arena fighting Danny Williams.

There may well be a Last Chance Saloon somewhere where Alan Pardew is enjoying a pint with George Bush, but that was not where Harrison literally was, John. An easy slip to make, of course, in the fevered atmosphere of a big fight, the excitement of which the commentator mostly conveyed perfectly - the last thing I want for Christmas is a parcel of Rawling's waste - but I feel obliged to repeat a suggestion I made here about five years ago, and that is that commentators jettison the word "literally", spurn it as they might a rabid dog.

Sportsmen, in the course of their business, are rarely doing anything literally other than kicking a ball, bashing some geezer around the head, and such like. Metaphorically, Harrison walked proudly from the Last Chance Saloon, having stood his round, taken the jackpot from the fruit machine and convinced the regulars he was more of a man than they thought he was, although some of the hoi polloi round the pool table still insisted on jeering him as he left to face Jim Rosenthal.

Or not face Jim Rosenthal, as it turned out, with Harrison determined to deliver his post-fight interview as a monologue straight to camera. "I want to thank the Lord," he told us. "It's been a tough couple of years." It has indeed, what with war, famine, man's inhumanity to man, the ice caps melting and so on; although I suspect Audley Harrison meant it has been tough for Audley Harrison rather than the Lord.

On which topic, Harrison was not only a changed man in the ring, but also in conversation, having largely ditched his trademark third-person references to himself. Only once did he slip into old habits, explaining to Gabriel Clarke before the fight how he intended to come back stronger after the dismal defeat against Williams a year ago: "I wasn't in the right place then," he told Clarke. "Normally, Audley Harrison, I can overcome that."

Clarke did all he could to lure Harrison back into familiar responses, lobbing at him questions Garth Crooks might have rejected as a little too baroque, such as: "Hunger. Audley Harrison and hunger, they haven't been in the same world in the last couple of years. Is that fair?"

The newly focused Harrison shrugged it off: "It's all ahead of me, and I just need to walk to it, and I'm walking to it, starting Saturday night," he declared. He was full of talk of his new spirituality after the fight too, although the idea that any deity might care which big blighter beats up which other big blighter has always seemed to me a little fanciful.

Maybe the Lord to whom Harrison refers is Lord Grade, new head of ITV, who may have thoughts on whether Williams's badly bloodied and bashed-in face, shown without warning, made an edifying sight for a mainstream family audience. I have my doubts. It made my blood run cold, quite metaphorically.