Giles Coren

My week began on a plane to Quebec, where I’m filming a show for Canadian television. It is a broadcast pilot for a format of my own devising and, if it flies, I stand to make billions. But first it must succeed in Canada. Because Canada is the country that has bravely chosen to try it first, and shelled out the initial moolah. I am delighted that my show is getting its big chance in this great country, rather than boring old America, say, or England. I love Canada. I have always said it is the most culturally innovative and pleasant-to-visit country on earth. (I have never been to Canada in my life before.) I flew in, as it happens, on the very day that the Bank of Canada announced the phasing out of the penny from circulation. I have mixed feelings about this.

During a frantic online rummage for last-minute Christmas presents (I am too old to risk actually purchasing anything on the internet this close to the 25th, but I thought I might find some inspiration for presents I could then go out and buy in the shops and drag home in a bag on a stinking bus full of fat tourists through solid traffic), I came upon something very disturbing indeed: novelty baby clothes inspired by… Fifty Shades of Grey. You thought the sexualisation of children had gone only as far as six-year-old girls dressed up as Lady Gaga. But it has gone much, much further. Such as, for example, tiny romper suits available on a website called Etsy, with ‘My mummy read Fifty Shades of Grey nine months ago’ written on it. Nine months. Get it?

As someone who once spent a whole summer refusing to leave the house in anything except his Superman costume (to be fair, I was only 23 at the time), I was tickled to death by the announcement last week of a Costa Book Awards shortlist that included not one but two ‘graphic novels’, and the subsequent declaration by the chairman of next year’s Man Booker judges that he would be open to the idea of such things being submitted for that as well. Oh dear Lord above, the laughable, lumbering, creaky old juggernaut that is the British literary establishment. What, now you decide to accept comics as a literary form? Seventy years after they were last truly popular? Forty years since they were the genuine expression of the tortured poetic underground?