Well done my Sun. Etc

Of all the British tabloids, the Sun is the most addicted to the crapulous pun in a headline, and as the readership of JMP is too highbrow ever to descend to the gutter press, I thought I'd share some you've missed today. In just the showbiz Bizarre section today, we have a fine selection including Spears' outfit is a little Brit racy (no explanation necessary), Take That and Rob Book for Good (Take That sign a book deal), Tardy Russell's ever Crowe late (Russell Crowe arrives late for a film premiere), and the woeful Dan a-Mays-ed at Spielberg call (actor Daniel Mays was mildly surprised when Steven Spielberg telephoned him to ask to him to play Tintin in a new film). Perhaps my favourite of today's crop is Pine needled by premiere crowd (actor Chris Pine allegedly annoyed at Simon Pegg receiving more attention at another premiere). And defintely the worst, for my money, is the Oasis-related Gallaghers open - wait for it, wait for it - Noeld wounds (groan).

How ironic - said Alanis Morrisette - that it's Sun sub-eds who are the last people left in England using the term 'tardy'.

Headline of the year?

Former French President Chirac hospitalised after mauling by his clinically depressed poodle

the Daily Mail.

Brand, Ross and Sachs

I've been interested by the coverage of the story about Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross leaving obscene messages on the answerphone of 78 year old Andrew "Que?" Sachs in a pre-recorded segment of Brand's Radio 2 show, and then - oh, how my sides ache with laughter - joking about his killing himself on hearing them.

Most of the comment has been critical of Brand and Ross ("Jonathan Ross isn't worth £6,000, let alone £6 million!", etc). Clearly Brand and Ross bear some responsibility and it would be perverse to argue otherwise. But it seems to me that the person who bears the most culpability is the "senior editorial person" at the BBC who cleared the segment for transmission. After all, Ross and Brand were just doing their job of making dirty and bad taste jokes: it's just that in this case they clearly went too far and should have been edited. For the job of this s.e.p. - his or her entire bloody function in the workplace - is to make decisions in situations like this. And this joker, this halfwit, listened to this segment, in which two BBC broadcasters commit a prima facie criminal offence, and then joke about the elderly victim's suicide - and said "yup, ok for broadcast with no cuts". 

Oh, and don't forget, if you're a licence-payer, you're paying this moron's salary. Grrrrr.

Ah, the Daily Mail

I've always thought that the Mail is brilliant in purely journalistic terms. I admire the naked cynicism of those 'As..question' headlines which allow the recycling of baseless gossip and to which the answer is always, when you read the article, no. "As troubled Robbie Williams prepares for his first live concert in two years, his worried friends are asking the question...Is Robbie addicted to Toilet Duck?" No, of course he bloody isn't.

And now, a classic come-on from the website, with just the right mix of absurdity and priggish moralising:

Ed Balls makes great play of the fact that his Oxford contemporaries David Cameron and Boris Johnson were members of the Bullingdon Club, notorious for its rowdy drunken behaviour. But coming from a man who was pictured in a German officer's uniform staring at the crotch of a fellow student wearing comedy plastic buttocks, his words have a somewhat hollow ring.

Oh for the love of God

Seamus Milne, old school Stalinist and wannabe enfant-terrible of the Guardian's CiF pages, is at it again, getting a hard-on at the sight and thought of Russian tanks rolling into a neighbouring country, and blaming....well, America, of course. The CIA and Israel also get name-checked, natch. I have a vision of Milne being the sole survivor of the Jihadi nuclear apocalypse, sitting at the last word processor in the world, spending his last hours before he too succumbs banging out a piece on how it is all Bush's fault. Oh, and of course he's an ex-proper-public school (Winchester) boy.

On the same page is the quite wonderful Julie Burchill - more genuinely controversial, and a hundred times more interesting. In her latest, she talks about her life as a Christian (who knew?), claiming Christianity as rebellious in this secular, multi-cultural society. But being Julie, she doesn't just focus on soppy old Christ: "I believe, literally, in the God of the Old Testament, whom I understand as the Lord of the Jews and the Protestants." She's endlessly surprising, and effortlessly entertaining. What a shame she seems to have settled into semi-retirement.

Hellograph

What's up with the Telegraph? I mean, really? The new website design is terrible. The sleb addiction is out of control (on the site's main page today there's something about celebrity holidays, in addition to the regular celebrity pictures slot; I haven't been able to face seeing what other sleb tat is within). Rosa Prince's self-styled Miliburn-as-Chancellor "splash" has been laughed out of court as Brownite scheming. They're losing the colonels in the shires; will they get enough upwardly mobile Mail-ites to compensate? Or have the Barclays resigned themselves to vanity publishing?