You can go for hours on Absolute without hearing a female singer, let alone presenter, and when you do chances are it'll be Sheryl Crow – a female artist who has somehow snuck under their bloke detector – or a Weight Watchers advert.
Snatched conversations of colleagues are just about audible: "Well, he should get 'five-for' here … how come their bloke was spinning it so much?" Or, one favourite that I once heard from an umpire at my end (David Halfyard, as it happens): "What are you doing?
The potted version was that "if the referees are going to let their big blokes hit my little blokes, then I'll tell the big blokes in my team to hit their little blokes, and we'll have open slather".
"They're hitting form at the right end of the year and they've got most of their injured blokes back so it's not going to be easy but hopefully we've got the strike power to get over them".
All their big blokes had never had a fucking kicking before but they did this time and it was from a load of little Herberts from Canning Town.
For its sins ("Phwoar!" "Cor!"), Loaded pulled off the groundbreaking male publishing act of making friends of their readers, celebrating the lives they had, their "ordinary bloke-hood", instead of goading them about the alpha lives they didn't have.
Male academics who wear jeans, hoodies and t-shirts are "lads" to their students, and "good blokes" to their colleagues.
The wheelchairs moved around of their own accord, such that the old blokes with their blankets on their knees bumped into each other from time to time.
