Sticks and stones may indeed break bones, but the right insult can last a lifetime.
The vocabulary of TV has come a long way from the days of Dad’s Army, when “Stupid boy!”, yelled at Private Pike by Captain Mainwaring, became one of the country’s most recognisable insults.
Armando Iannucci has built a career on the back of his insults, lacing his prolific TV output – which includes The Thick of It, Veep, and Mid-Morning Matters with Alan Partridge – with some of the cruellest and funniest barbs in the whole medium.
But it’s not just acid-penned screenwriters who provide the best insults; some of the wittiest jibes from non-scripted TV also feature in this selection of the 30 greatest TV insults.
Some of these lines are hilarious, some are crass, and some are just plain nasty.
Click through the gallery below to see which insults made the list.
