No, no, not actually on the CBC: he’s been blacklisted, he says, according to sources he won’t name. Apparently that “old fraud” Peter Gzowski had something to do with it, though.

The above clip from the CBC’s sub-par “competition” is entirely sufficient to get the measure of Coren. It’s a triple-distilled shot of purest spite and envy, and I urge readers to suffer through it, if only for their edification.

Coren launches into an assault on Mary Walsh, aka Marg Delahunty the Warrior Princess who recently threw a mortal scare into Toronto Mayor Rob Ford. But he could have been describing himself: “a sad old comedian…grasping desperately and angrily for what is left of [his]…career”; “a pity case” who was once an up-and-coming literary and cultural commentator, even witty on occasion back in the days when he wrote for Frank magazine.

His first job in Canada, as it happens, was at the CBC: he describes the allegedly lackadaisical corporate culture there as “vehemently disturbing.” No less a person than the “CBC hack” Adrienne Clarkson offered him a better job, he avers, but he turned her down.

Now the gang-o’-libs running the place won’t give him and his glittering accomplishments any airtime. Take his “brilliant” (his word) new book, Why Catholics are Right. It’s been well-received everywhere, he says, a best-seller, but not a word about it on the CBC. The blacklist is, it seems, still active.

But, managing to keep a straight if somewhat irritated face, Coren says his anti-CBC rant is “not about me.”

“Why the anger?” he asks, in reference to Mary Walsh. He couldn’t be wider of the mark there, but perhaps we might pose the same question to him—although he already seems to have answered it perfectly well.

[H/t Marie Ève for the suggestion]

UPDATE: Alert reader Brian Busby shows that Coren’s memory is weirdly faulty. Blacklist? What blacklist?