Daily BrewConrad Black is television’s newest and longest-winded talk show host
Fallen media baron Conrad Black is set to follow Katie Couric, Anderson Cooper and Jeff Probst into the world of television talk shows.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, Black is set to co-host a weekly Canadian news talk show, which is also being shopped to U.S. buyers.
Black returned to Canada last year after being released from a U.S. prison following a 2007 conviction on charges of fraud and obstruction of justice. It is a conviction that he dismisses, often, and in as many words as possible.
He recently proved he can make compelling television by verbally jousting with a BBC interviewer over the legitimacy of his criminal conviction.
"You're a priggish, gullible British fool who takes seriously this ghastly American justice system that any sane English person knows is an outrage," he spat during the interview.
[ Related: Black gets nasty with interviewers over his criminal convictions ]
Black has long written his own column in the National Post, a newspaper he presided over during his time as a media baron.
And that works fairly well. With print articles being static, readers have time to look up in the dictionary some of his more impenetrable words.
Black's latest Post piece, on NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair, reads like so:
In the same vein, the NDP leader pats himself on the head and back for declaring his support for the many official restrictions on the use of English and other languages in Quebec, such as on commercial signs. Such restrictions are, in fact completely unnecessary to the preservation of the French language in Quebec, and are odious to anyone with the slightest concern for freedom of expression that is otherwise regarded as one of the cornerstones of democratic civilization. That freedom was proclaimed and assented to by all democratic countries, including Canada, in the Atlantic Charter of 1941, and was what we successfully fought for in the Second World War.
Black is not putting on airs here, that is how writes and how he speaks. In some interviews, it is clear he takes smug enjoyment in leaving the questioner at an absolute loss.
Now he is to appear weekly on the same medium that brought us Honey Boo Boo.
A rare treat, to be sure.
