Being needlessly rude about Tynan

This week, I am embracing nihilism. Unfortunately, it is a philosophy that is full of spikes. To embrace nihilism is to feel discomfort at the closeness of the contact. Like any good critic, I have stalked the internet to find a victim. The victim will receive my bile, and my invective will cure my bad humours.

It has to be Kenneth Tynan - critic of the Observer, literary manager of The National Theatre and the man to whom all critics pay their homage. He died, sadly rather young, in 1980, ending a career marked by controversy with some desultory sexual obsessions and writing books about celebrities.

Tynan is held up as the model for the critic, mainly because he was often savage in his reviews and because he was very clever. He was another one of those very English figures, who manage to convince the world that their arrogant sense of entitlement is, actually, a revolutionary sentiment. Despite being easy to spot - Oxbridge education, the establishment quickly making space for them - they seem to slip under the radar of public irritation. Stewart Lee knows what this is like.

To follow Kirkegaard - and what nihilist doesn't? - life makes sense viewed backwards, from grave to cradle. And Tynan's final decade certainly exposes the myth of his 'revolutionary' sensibility. After being kicked out of the National Theatre, he wandered off to America, and his 1979 Show People is an early exercise in the sort of celebrity hagiography that flies off the shelves in the pound shop today. It takes five people - Ralph Richardson, Tom Stoppard, Johnny Carson, Mel Brooks and Louise Brooks - whom Tynan 'admires enormously.' Apart from Stoppard, whom he had supported while in post at the NT, there is little in the book to recall the fierce theatre enthusiast who had become the most divisive name in performance communities. And there might even be a rather unexpected reason for the inclusion of Louise.

Tynan also spent his latter years indulging in some rather too public sexual role-plays. I won't go into them too much - especially since judging such antics is exactly the sort of thing that annoyed Tynan. However, the highly theatrical nature of this adventures do make me wonder whether he was given to handing out star ratings to his sexual partners.

This is, of course, the beginning of a long and bitter series of complaints against a man whose only real crime is to have set a bar for the critic of theatre. In a sense, Tynan is the father of contemporary criticism, and I have to attack him to find my own voice. Think of this of the notes of an Oedipal child who longs to become Orestes...