Paper Monitor
14:28 UK time, Thursday, 23 September 2010
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
As the paper which sent its chief rock critic to review the Pope's appearance in Glasgow last week, Paper Monitor was secretly hoping the Times might dispatch an eager travel journalist on a junket to the troubled Commonwealth Games's Village in Delhi.
Alas, the job fell to local correspondent Rhys Blakely. He nevertheless employs the sort of critical faculties Judith Chalmers used to unleash when examining a hotel/building site on the Costa Brava for Wish You Were Here in the early 1980s.
While most of today's national press feature the story about the troubled build-up to the games, Blakely appears to be the only hack to have gained access to the "off limits" Games village - although all it required was straying across "a tape marked 'Delhi police do not cross'... lying in waterlogged mud!".
(Given the absence of punctuation in this directive - perhaps it was members of the local constabulary who were actually being warned to stay away.)
So how bad is it, Rhys?
"A bathroom was encrusted in grime. The windows were filthy. A circle the diameter of a teacup had been burnt out of the plastic bathtub in the two-bedroom apartment and a jagged edge of metal stood proud from the surface. The beds, which were only just being installed, were chipped."
Imagine, athletes sleeping in scuffed cribs. The indignity.
Actually, there is worse. Blakely notes that as he crossed into the village he was "met by the smell of human excrement".
Sorry readers, to sound vulgar, but is it possible for the average human olfactory system to distinguish between the excreta of humans and other animals?
This is all on the front page, but there is more evidence of the ramshackle conditions inside the paper - including a picture of, brace yourselves, a "too-hastily planted tree".
The Mirror is the only other paper to have planted (geddit?) a man on the scene, although its reporter ventured into the showpiece stadium rather than the athletes' village.
And in time-honoured tabloid style, we know he was there because there are pictures of him, in this case standing in front of the "chaotic main venue" and pointing to an "unfinished sign board".
And what's this from the Telegraph? It seems the Delhi authorities have found their own way of answering visiting journalists' griping.
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