Those Big Brother contestants in full
Eschewing previous failed attempts to get a good demographic representation of young and funky Britain, Endemol has taken the carnivalist approach for its fifth series
*Gay lad who hates chavs and Islamics
*Muslim who hates gays and very probably wants Sharia law
*Gay lad who hates everyone because he’s like so above that shit
*Scottish body-building, Hoxton-bequiffed prick, looks like gong man on old films
*Stars-and-stripes bandana wearer who is the cleverest man you’ll ever meet just because he is studying psychology
*The G-Man from the 'street' – once again we are promised a radge who’ll take no shit from nobody
*The bridge between man and woman is a post-op Portuguese transsexual – I thought there was something funny about her voice
*Blonde Bok there to titillate Muslim and the Jock Tarzan
*Geordie ex-porker there to play same role – likes a bit of ‘porn’ she said. Well lassie, the camera’s running 24/7
*Brassy but brain dead northwesterner
*Controversial Brighton lesbian – this riot grrl will team up with the gay man who takes no shit;
*Irritant southern Sloane ‘Glaswegian’ – squiffy on two sips – there to play mediator by saying nothing
Pure entertainment baby! Watch the controversy flow
Here Comes the Mirror Man
Piers Pugh Morgan’s sacking at the hands of blonde bombshell, Trinity Mirror CEO Sly Bailey, bought to an end his nine-year Mirror editorship. “His balls are bigger than his brains,” quoth Murdoch, who used to have him at News International. Morgan spent his first day of freedom at ‘the Arsenal’ in defiant mood at his ousting.
Nearly 10 years in which the ex-Scum/NoW man has been unable to seriously challenge his old paper.
Though he seemed able in his personal life to bridge the gaps between prole spirit and bourgeois business acumen (the City Slicker insider dealing scandal; the only shock being that he got caught), he had no answer for Murdoch’s ruthless populist marketing. Apart from to move the Mirror awkwardly further left into a niche without a market. More awkward still, because he went on chasing the big exclusives like Burrell’s ramblings or peddling jingoistic prose such as “Achtung, for you Fritz ze game is over”, or whatever nonsense it was in Euro ’96. “It’s a laugh though innit?” No, it retards international relations. I don’t want to live in 1945.
And characteristically the Mirror’s sales were in continuous decline yet his and the paper’s profile raised. It certainly seems odd that, though the Piers Puce spent years attacking Naomi Campbell’s role as a celebrity, increasingly we had to suffer his face narrating ‘Tabloid Tales’ like it’s an amazing process and not just trite kiss-and-tell jackanory for stunted adults.
Private Eye’s ace moniker of Piers Moron is succinct. Not only is the Tabloid Tales presentation job a waste of taxpayers’ money, he also fronted another vacuity fest, this time on C4 – “
The Importance of Being Famous”, a titular rouse that would have had Wilde fighting in Marbella for not having thought of it.
Quite where this combative simpleton has acquired the reputation as a mediator on celebrity rather than a plain old fame masturbator, like his tabloid contemporaries/fellow swine, I do not know. Maybe he expressed a not very controversial opinion about Michael Jackson at a dinner party held by Peter Bazelgette. Maybe he’s just a greedy bollock with a singular yet increasingly common talent: self-promotion. As the Sun ‘Bizarre’ columnist, he was one of the first in a lengthening line of talentless parasites splurging personal opinion and vendetta into uncomprehending receptacles.
It certainly seems odd too that the Sun alumnus was consistent in delivering the paper’s anti-Iraq war rhetoric. Forget declining sales (that’s happening to all of them), in a populist paper this was a vital counterpoint to the jaundiced prejudice of the Sun, Express and Mail. At least some of they masses could be influenced into seeing the illegal invasion/occupation for what it was. Though equally it could be argued that if you scratched the surface of that coverage it was lame and merely seeking popularity. Which rather sums up the Mirror under M.Organ’s editorship – a tetchy Sun sibling that does a disservice to people who hold views that do not fit with the tabloid template/the Sun.
History will not vindicate Morgan over the UK troop torture pics. They are fake. But at least the truth and substance of coalition abuse was bought into the British spotlight by the week-long denial and counter-denial.
Where now for the Mirror? What is of slightly higher public concern than his second-rate editorship of a confused tabloid is the fact that the US shareholders in Trinity Mirror, Fidelity and Tweedy Brown, had already registered opposition to the Mirror’s anti-war stance.
Described by Chief BBC Business Jerker Jeff Randall as “two of the most aggressive shareholders in the world’, Fidelity and Tweedy Brown’s intervention demonstrates why this section of the media should never be wholly privately owned, not because the glassy-eyed idiot should have been kept on as editor but for rather more obvious reasons of public access to information and objectivity in journalism.
