This week?s summary of some the stories reported by the tabloids starts off quite fun, gets a bit serious in the middle before resuming silliness at the end. It is what's known in management (and Spinal Tap) circles as a shit sandwich. Except with funny bread and shit that’s some kind of metaphor for something really clever.
With miners (Yay- live ones!/Oh Bugger- dead ones!) being all the rage these days it's nice to see The Mail getting into the sprit of things and actually undertaking their own mining expedition.
Journalists are laden with picks and shovels making great progress as they tackle the bottom of the Royal Wedding barrel looking for one last nugget of news. Last Friday they ran a story on page 9 headlined Revealed, how William is actually marrying Nanny with the further subhead of After all Charles fell for a dead ringer of his.
Eerily it turns out that there are actual, actual photographs of Kate Middleton and William?s nanny both looking in the same direction, and here?s the really spooky bit. Both. Were. Smiling. As the headline states, they also found similar photographs of Charles?s nanny and wife, but when you look at that one you realise that 40% of women in the 1950s looked a little bit like Camilla Parker Bowles.
The coalition government is the best thing that ever happened to the editors of right-wing newspapers. They get to criticise the government or support them depending on what their readers want to hear. The government do something right and they've done it despite the Liberal Democrats. They do something wrong and it's either the corrupting influence of Liberal Democrats forcing the Tories to compromise or it's their hypocrisy.
Student fees for instance. Students have the right to feel angry at the Lib Dems as they voted for them based largely on their education policy, but why are the Mail upset? The Mail supported the Conservatives in the election and are getting a policy completely consistent with party philosophy. Surely they should be turning out self-flagellating headlines such as Sorry, in all the excitement, we forgot that our readers have other concerns aside from just immigration, cancer scares, political correctness and misapplied health & safety legislation.
Or take another recent Mail story. we're going to have to fill you in on the background and we've not got space for cheap jokes. So, if you want to make this bit more interesting replace some of the nouns with the words ?willy?, ?crevice? and ?haemorrhoids?.
OK, ready?
The Mail hate the fact that the Lib Dems haven't had enough time to become embroiled in any decent scandals yet. They were so desperate to make Clegg less goody-two-shoes, they exposed the fact that his wife?s company had been given over ?85?000 by the Cabinet since May. The story quite happily later explains that the company that employs Clegg?s wife is one of the ten largest law-firms in the world, and that it's on a four year contract that began when Labour were in power.
Now, not only would it not be, in any way whatsover, morally necessary to cancel this contract but also as a rule breaking the terms of a contract with a multi-national law-firm generally leaves you open to legal action. So despite the fact that even the article admits it's a total non-story, they still state in the opinion page that it creates ?an unpleasant image of a group of the privileged and the powerful treating government as their plaything?.
Wait a minute- the facts didn't create that image! You just did! Yes you- the one with the crayon in front of the recently drawn image of the group of privileged and powerful people treating government as their plaything.
Are you still with us? Excellent, then there's just enough time to share our favourite euphemism of the week. The papers reported that X-Factor contestant Wagner shrugged off touching up dancers and becoming obsessed with a researcher on the show as ?Brazilian Exuberance?! Fantastic. Perhaps this could start a precedent of unpleasant acts being justified by national stereotyping. Maybe the courts can acquit rapists as simply showing ?Viking Spirit?? Perhaps war criminals could just apologise and explain that they were indulging in ?Mongol Tomfoolery??
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