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Paper Monitor

11:07 UK time, Friday, 4 March 2011

A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.

The hidden camera has a long and distinguished Fleet Street history - one that has exposed multiple misdeeds by corrupt politicians, business people and sports stars, very often in tandem with a man posing as a sheikh.

This morning, the Sun takes covert recording to an entirely new level with an innovation it labels, with customary brevity, as

This, it turns out, is a tiny video lens attached discretely to the posterior of an attractive, and inevitably female, model. Passers-by who find themselves gazing at said backside are captured on film and exposed with dead-eyed ruthlessness.

From around the country, Bum Cam's findings flood in. London is the first target. "On Tower Bridge two runners nearly tripped over as they craned their necks for a look," exclaims the paper.

In Manchester, one "brave bloke even spun round to get a look while walking with his girlfriend". And in Birmingham, "leggy blonde Iskra Lawrence, 20, had all the passers-by staring".

Paper Monitor is reminded the Press Complaints Commission's code of conduct insists journalists must not "seek to obtain or publish material acquired by using hidden cameras or clandestine listening devices" except where the tactic "can be demonstrated to be in the public interest", and if the public interest is not served by printing images of passers-by slyly glancing at the rear of a young woman Paper Monitor doesn't know what is.

PM's gaze is diverted, however, by Oliver Pritchett in the Daily Telegraph, who laments the decline of bowls in Plymouth, where Sir Francis Drake famously refused to desist playing the game as the Spanish Armada was sighted.

The bowling green on Plymouth Hoe is threatened with closure, it appears. by introducing "baseball caps, fluorescent jackets, sponsors' logos, group hugs and tantrums".

He continues:

It is time to introduce Wags (of a certain age, perhaps) and flashy cars (or at least the smartest of mobility scooters), as well as agents and lawyers paid to keep the goings-on in the tearoom out of the newspapers. From now on, anything goes - so long as the sacred turf doesn't suffer the merest dent or blemish, of course.

´óÏó´«Ã½ iD

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