Words Dept.: archive

I went out on Saturday night. I know. It was a revelatory experience. I went to the cinema (rather than on an acid garage-soundtracked Prodigy video-inspired junk binge) to see a creepy Spanish film called El Orfanato, or The Orphanage. I was taken aback by three trailers that preceded the film, all of which were [...]

So many press releases are ruined by inane quotes. So here’s Morrissey, talking about his forthcoming gig at this summer’s O2 Wireless Festival in Hyde Park, showing how it should be done. I like to imagine the press officer making up something suitable, sending it off to Moz for approval, and finding out later that [...]

For all-round wrongness, Carol Vorderman advertising cheapo chicken from Farmfoods in the ad-break for Dick Fearnley-Whittington’s Be Nice to Cocks programme (or whatever it was called) was bad. But professional dimwit Danielle Lloyd’s recruitment as the “face” of a new campaign for Rustlers’ Microwaveable Offalburgers (TM) surely trumps it. Ignoramus Lloyd famously said, during an [...]

Despite the obvious generosity of Sir Simon of Cowell, and his clear commitment to furthering his profile by crassly announcing that generosity on the most viewed television programme in America, I’d like to off-set the recent blizzard of positive publicity, in the only way I know, by reminding everyone that the man is still a [...]

The rest of the media has joined in an extended reporting-as-gloating session over the out-of-court settlement that Express Newspapers agreed with Kate and Gerry McCann today. It has been top of the running order on news bulletins all day, with pundits queuing up to decry the coverage of Richard Desmond’s papers. Nobody does schadenfraude better [...]

Just in case you were struggling to imagine what a child hidden in a drawer under a bed looks like, the Daily Mail is pleased to help out. Next week in the Mail: a delightful cutaway diagram showing how asylum seekers prepare swans for the oven. Mmm. Swans. [Dribble.]

Someone predicted on a forum on the Liverpool Echo website at 10.28am yesterday that Arsenal would draw Liverpool, Man Utd would get Roma and Chelsea would play Fenerbahce, leaving Barcelona v Schalke in the quarter finals of the Champions League. The idea of fixing a live cup draw seems initially ridiculous until you consider the [...]

Sunday Mirror columnist Carole Malone talking about Shannon Matthews, on the One Show tonight: The media reflects the public mood, and the public just haven’t taken to Shannon’s family as they did to Kate and Gerry McCann. Yes, it’s the fault of the public – the scum who read newspapers rather than the nice people [...]

The headline in the MEN (page 11, today) says Boy, 13, cut free from spanner. Surely it would have been easier to cut the spanner from the boy? Still, I’m no expert. FIRE-fighters had to use a hacksaw to free a 13-year-old boy’s finger from a spanner… The boy told doctors he had been playing [...]

I was thinking the other day about precisely the issue Roy Greenslade discusses on his blog today. Namely, why is it that three weeks after the disappearance of Shannon Matthews, the case doesn’t have nearly the same profile as Madeleine McCann’s did? Greenslade speculates that the “unsympathetic domestic profile” of Shannon’s mum, Karen, in contrast with the educated, middle [...]