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Barry Rogerson in action.No one is blaming Rogerson for punching a horse in the face. Well, maybe some people are. But the broader point at issue is his failure to own up to it. Alright, pal, you punched a horse in the face, you'll never have to buy a drink in a Toon pub ever again. Just go with it. But he won't. Rogerson can't deal with who he is. He has joined the select group of people who know what it's like to feel wet snout and downy warm hair crunch beneath your knuckles. Yet all he wants to talk about is how he has been misrepresented by reels and reels of photographic evidence. This is the saddest thing. That he is the kind of man who would claim that black is white and night is day, then repeat his unbelievable truth to a national newspaper with the biggest online news audience on the planet and blithely expect to get away with it.Unfortunately, Rogerson is dedicating himself to repairing a reputation that doesn't need defending. If the past week has taught us one thing, it is that he is not to blame. An ex-factory worker on the sick, here was someone personally affected by the deindustrialisation of Britain's North East. Endlessly falling real wages, increasingly harsh production conditions, his hometown presented to the watching world as a place full of luminous "reality" TV idiots. The pallid, wizened, homophobic stoics who manned the pickets in Billy Elliott seem very distant now.
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