AA Gill is one of my favourite writers. He has a weekly TV-critic column in The Sunday Times culture magazine, and I do believe he can do no wrong. I usually despise TV critics because it seems such a lazy and pointless way to make money. I am a TV critic every time I change the channel and I don’t see me getting paid for it, so why should anyone else?

But I have always been quite happy for AA Gill to receive any accolade that might be bestowed upon him. He’s funny, clever and right all of the time. And he’s friends with Jeremy Clarkson, apparently, which I thought was quite interesting.

Anyway, I was reading his column a while ago, and I came upon this little gem regarding Richard Dawkins. Dawkins is the scientist every Christian loves to hate (or should that be hates to love?) because he is staunchly and stubbornly opposed to religious belief, and Mr Gill writes a very satisfying review of a program he recently appeared in.

(I will just note here, as an aside, that I read a very good book by Alister McGrath, Dawkins’ God: Genes, Memes and the Meaning of Life in which the author put forward a very sensible and rational rebuttal against some of Dawkins’ ideas. It was immensely refreshing in that it didn’t dismiss the theory of evolution as bunk and was, in fact, very persuasive).

Scientists all over the nation must hold their heads and groan whenever Richard Dawkins appears on television, as he did in The Root of All Evil? (Monday, C4). He is such a terrible advertisement such an awful embarrassment, the Billy Graham of the senior common room. His splenetic, small-minded viciously vindictive falsetto rant at all belief that isn’t completely rooted in the natural sciences is laughable. Dawkins is a born-again Darwinist, an atheist, so why is he devoting so much blood pressure and time to arguing with something he knows doesn’t exist? If it’s not there, Richard, why do you keep shouting at it? He looks like a scientific bag lady screaming at the traffic, and watching him argue with a fundamentalist Christian, you realise they were cut from identical cloth, separated at birth. Dawkins is, of course, the archetype of a man who protests too much, and I’d say he’s well on his way to, if not a Pauline, then at least a Muggeridgian conversion. Any day now, he’ll be back on telly quoting CS Lewis.

AA Gill, The Sunday Times, January 15, 2006.

When is this man going to be knighted?