Paul Gascoigne is a waste of space who brought all his problems upon himself, according to men who pride themselves on “telling it like it is”.
The former England star shocked the nation when he told eminent cretin Piers Morgan that he was consuming four bottles of whiskey and sixteen lines of cocaine a day, sparking a spate of disgruntled letter-writing from viewers who had tuned in after enjoying the previous week’s decidedly more wholesome instalment featuring Rolf Harris.
However, a number of men who see it as a virtue to “shoot straight from the hip” have stressed that Gascoigne’s damaged, fragile and jittery demeanour – so starkly in contrast with the cheerful, cherubically chubby prankster of yore – should not fool people into believing that glaring mental illness is in any way deserving of their sympathy.
Fred Barrett, a financial advisor from Swindon, said: “Let’s call a spade a spade here – Gazza’s just another alcoholic making excuses for his own failings.
“No-one forced him to drink and take drugs. I’ve been doing both since I was 15 and you don’t see me crying about it on the telly. There’s no excuse for not being able to blithely shunt around from bar to bar, never showing any signs of weakness for fear of ridicule from your archetypally chauvinistic mates, thinking that anyone whose genetic or mental makeup differs even slightly from your own must be wrong, because you’ve never known any different and are too thick to understand it.
“I may be a fictional character deployed as a self-parody device for the purposes of flimsy online satire but I’m pretty sure I’m right in thinking myself to be the very model for human behaviour and psychology.”
Fred’s mate Dave said: “You’re right there, Fred. Gazza’s only got himself to blame. The concept of addiction was just invented as an excuse for geezers to stagger home sh*t-faced and smash their birds about a bit.
“I call things as I see them and I make no apologies for that. Anyone who has any sympathy for Gazza is a total queer. There, I said it.”
He added: “Having said all that, I do wonder whether I’d still be wetting the bed every night if mummy and daddy hadn’t separated when I was 5.”