Paper Monitor
11:32 UK time, Friday, 9 November 2007
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
Still a few days to go until the launch of ITV's I'm a Celebrity… but already the tabloids are throwing everything they've got at the story. Yesterday's Daily Mail called into question the credentials of the line-up, rhetorically asking "So you're a celebrity?"
The whispers had been of "Delia Smith and Paris Hilton… there were even wild rumours about Gary Glitter", it said. Granted, Hilton has A-list status, but Delia Smith? And were Glitter to make the selection, Paper Monitor couldn't imagine the Mail taking it in good humour.
Today's Sun gives us the full line-up with pen profiles, including personal set-backs - although when talking about the Fairbrass brothers of Right Said Fred fame, it's perhaps a little disingenuous to note their "troubles" as being "heavily into the latex fetish scene".
To go off on a slight tangent, Paper Monitor has never quite *got* the show. Would its organisers really endanger the health, much less the lives, of these pampered celebs?
Could Paper Monitor suggest a more edgy reality show? Maybe pro-celebrity golf in extreme circumstances? It seems to be all the rage after all, particularly in the features supplements. Yesterday's Times 2 led with a piece about golf in Zimbabwe. Today's Independent Extra runs with "Golf in a war zone. Teeing off in the most dangerous places on earth". The piece hinges on a round at the Kabul Golf Club, but then there are two further pages on golf courses in unlikely locations. And then, ditching the whole dangerous places theme entirely, there are two pages simply on the "world's eight most awesome courses".
And so (as newspaper diarists' are wont to say) to Tracey Emin's column, also in the Indy, which this week is brought to us from Los Angeles. Full marks to the paper for co-opting that tabloid stunt of picturing a celeb – in this case Ms Emin – reading a recent copy of the paper in which he/she appears. Quite how the "artfant terrible" managed to track down a copy of the Indy in LA is a bit of a mystery, but also, look closely. The edition she is reading is last Friday's. And Ms Emin seems to be engrossed in something toward the middle of the paper. Is she simply reading her own column?
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