Last week was depressing as hell. Foreigners kept on dying all over the world with no respect for tabloid circulation.It was a week so full of human suffering that the announcement of the budget was comic relief.
The government got pretty much what it wanted from the right-wing tabloids on Thursday when they explained the budget to us stupids. The Mail happily put Osborne’s transparently phrased summary that the budget would “put fuel in the tank” of the economy on their front page. Do you think the Chancellor wanted our attention focused on any specific aspect of the budget perchance? The Mail were very keen to report on the 6p cut in petrol duty. 6p that consisted of delaying a planned 5p rise and cutting 1p from a price which had already been pushed up more than 3p by the VAT increase. You lucky people.
Anyway, sorry about that- budgets are boring. Creative accounting may be creative but it’s still accounting.
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Much has already been said about the Andy Gray and Richard Keys story, with Charlie Brooker supplying one of more interesting slants on it, but we would like to point out The Sun’s sweetly optimistic approach to it on Monday, the day after Andy’s original on-air gaffe and was tucked away on page ten in a teeny article sharing a column with a three line article about falling prices in Portugal.
The incident was treated more like something from a television out-takes show than the final piece in the trinity* of inconvenience that’s got Murdoch’s News International into a bit of a tizz.
The story was over- he had apologised and everyone was laughing about it whilst slapping the arses of passing waitresses by lunchtime. Unfortunately, the same day the Daily Mail, those masters of creating broadcasting controversies from the sparsest of ingredients, dedicated page 3 to it, and a shitstorm was born.
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The tabloids were given a week off from having to rely on stoking anger and intolerance, and got to devote half of their pages to the new Coalition Party Announcement that Wills and Kate are planning to marry in a symbolic act to support unpopular economic policies.
Yes, David Cameron is hoping that Prince William’s marriage will give him a head-of-state makeover, a look pioneered by Tony Blair following the death of Diana.
Cameron quickly announced that the wedding date will be a bank holiday, which means that millions of people will still be able to not give a shit about people they don’t know, but in their own time. Which is jolly nice. It certainly puts all that icky stuff like war and poverty into perspective. Read More >>>
The papers spent another week, making in-depth relationship analysis about Wayne and Coleen Rooney based entirely on photographs of them sitting in or near water.
The Mirror started it off on Monday with a picture of them in the pool in Dubai with the headline ‘Not a Care in Wayne’s World’. We’re not suggesting Wayne’s head is swimming with philosophical thought but when a man is trying to save his marriage from collapse after being exposed for having an affair with a prostitute, it’s probably fair to say that he has quite a lot on his mind regardless of his location at the time.
The Star were so desperate for a Wayne angle to keep him on the cover they claimed that Wayne had spent £10,000 on breast enlargement for Coleen. They based this conclusion on two watertight pieces of evidence; firstly by comparing two bikini shots, and then having a quote made up in the pub, but contributed to ‘fans’, that “Wayne must have bought her the £10,000 twin strikers to say sorry for being a love cheat”. Read More >>>
10 - Japanese celebrities are so much better than ours, aren’t they? – Reuters
9 - This man painted his face every day for a year. What a crazy man! – YouTube
8 - Man electrifies himself. For no good reason – Dailymail
7 - Want to hear a bunch of celebrities talking about how good they are at sex? Of course not. And yet still, here’s the link – ABC
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