"I really don't know why a doctor under a hippocratic oath takes the risk of something going badly wrong, sometimes with general anaesthetic, because someone can't be bothered to go for a f**king run," the comic says in his new audiobook, The Ricky Gervais Guide To Medicine.

"They have bits sliced off and tied up and sucked out. I want to say to them, 'You lazy f**king fat pig. Just go for a run and stop eating burgers."

Is it terrible to agree with him? It’s just that every time I hear about another “obesity victim” getting a gastric band stitched to their innards or of getting fat globules sucked from their thighs I, like Ricky, want to shake them and tell them to get a grip, they’re not incapable of losing weight them selves, just lazy.

At risk of angering the “I can’t afford to eat healthily / don’t have enough time to exercise” brigade, I have to get this off my chest: it depresses me to contemplate a society where no-one takes responsibility for their own problems.

I can try and ignore it a lot of the time, but then someone like Tina “I’m mad as a box of frogs” Malone, the brassy Shameless actre

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Not because I dislike it, you understand, but because I like it so very, very much.

This is a song that, listened to as a child, I thought of love and death, cathedrals, candles and things far bigger than we can ever imagine. I thought it had always existed in the world like Little Donkey and Away In A Manger.

When, years later, Jeff Buckley sang it, hairs pricked the back of my neck in uncanny recognition, eyes stung with salty nostalgia as the sweet tendril notes raised and fell in major, minor bliss.

And when Rufus Wainwright covered it more recently, memories of Cohen and Buckley flooded back as the subtly sombre singer-songwriter did his best to emulate their haunting, tender tones.

Now cut to present day and who do we have honouring this blessed prayer of a song, hymn to hymn-making? Not Paul Simon or Joni Mitchell, Don McLean or even Bruce Springsteen.

Nope. A 20-year-old from North London who admits she was “gutted” when she first heard she’d have to sing that song because it “just didn’t do anything for me”.

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The 78-year-old was left “embarrassed and upset” after receiving a string of calls made during Brand’s late-night Radio 2 show. 

That's a shame. But it doesn't mean that Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand, who were suspended today, should now be fired. 

BLOG: IS JONATHAN ROSS ACTUALLY FUNNY?

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