Apparently the affair is over.

Can we go back to discussing important and interesting things then?

This wasn’t news when we first found out about the affair. It still wasn’t news when they split up. And that was a rhetorical question.

Now I’m not saying for a second that this isn’t news, but I really don’t like the way the tabloids are reporting it. They all have headlines like “Millie – Body Found”. Only by reading the details do you discover that a body has been found that just might be Millie’s. And a couple of hours later the police announce that it definitely isn’t Millie and the papers all end up looking very stupid. Bet we don’t see a follow-up on tomorrow’s front pages tho’.

And now we get to the serious stuff. This is all about the tabloid’s desperate need to sell as many papers as possible and the fact that they don’t really care whether or not what they print is true. This story had been shown to be false by the middle of the morning. But the following day there was no sign of a correction or an apology. Sometimes it seems that the tabloids really believe that their readers don’t remember

what the paper wrote the previous day.

Can someone please explain to me why it’s news that two grown adults are (or maybe aren’t) having an affair. It’s been on the front pages for days now and it’s just very boring.

Even ten years on, I still don’t understand why this

story was so important. A TV presenter has an affair with a football manager. Why would anyone possibly care?

Beppe is a character in Eastenders which is an extremely tedious soap opera so presumably they aren’t talking about “Beppe” but the actor who plays him. The opinions of an actor about a program he acts in should, of course, be a matter of supreme disinterest to the newspapers, but in

this case it’s obviously important enough to knock even Beckham’s foot off the front page.

I have no memory at all of who “Beppe” was or who played him. But he was obviously very important to the tabloids ten years ago.

The story of Beckham’s foot rumbles on. Today both the Mirror and the Sun have a photo of a foot taking up

the front page. I guess it’s supposed to be the broken “Miracle Foot”, but there’s really no way to be sure that it is. I’m starting to wish that another royal would die – to keep this nonsense of the front pages.

Another day, another sea of front pages covered in photographs of a footballer’s foot. What a waste of space.

Beckham has hurt his foot (again? didn’t we cover this just a few days ago?) and this apparently means that England won’t do very well in the World Cup. Of course this really shouldn’t be seen as the tabloids lining up excuses in advance knowing that England never

do well in the World Cup. And anyway why do they give such importance to football? Does anyone really care what happens?

And we’re talking about Beckham’s foot again. At this point it’s about six weeks until the competition starts and (now that the Queen Mother has been buried) the tabloids can talk of little else. Of course, my question “does anyone really care what happens?” was a little naive. There are plenty of people who care deeply what happens in the World Cup. A better question would have been “why?”

By

“Era”, I mean the last ten days or so when the tabloids have had nothing but the Queen Mother on their front pages. Now that she’s been buried, perhaps we can get back to the usual nonsense.

TV stations had learned their lessons from Diana’s death five years earlier and had drastically scaled down their original plans for dealing with the Queen Mother’s death. Many of the tabloids still assumed we lived in the 1930s and had published wall to wall coverage of every detail of the mourning period and the funeral. Once the funeral had taken place they went back to norrnal.

There’s all-out war in Palestine and parliamentary tributes to the Queen Mother, but neither

of these are important enough for the Sun.

Their main story today is the fact that David Beckham has hurt his foot and they don’t know when he’ll be able to play football again. I despair.

Oh, this one runs and runs. It all got very depressing.

The front page of today’s Mirror has a photo showing the (almost non-existent) queue of people waiting to sign the books of condolence for “the people’s granny”. They also run a leader bemoaning the fact that no-one seems to care. We see this

as evidence that we’re right. The general public really isn’t interested in half of the “news” that the tabloids publish.

A few days after the Queen Mother died and the general public still showed no sign of being anywhere near as

interested as the tabloids thought they should be.