SILLY SEASON

It must have been all that mud at Glastonbury: it’s got into the system and clogged up the editors’ judgement much too soon. The Silly Season isn’t meant to start yet, not while the official Season is still running. I can see the press’s point though: gorgeous Brit-Icon Kate Moss jumping into a fake marriage with this year’s Thoroughly Bad Person, Pete Doherty, in a filthy corrugated-iron cowshed converted into a fake church at Glastonbury is hardly a story to spike, even when you read on and discover the clothing manufacturer Diesel picked up the bill for a not-so-fake wedding party afterwards. It wouldn’t surprise me if Diesel also issued the subsequent press release too, and edited and paid for the pictures. A good B+ start. We await the high profile ‘divorce’ which will doubtless involve alcohol, darkness and the pitter-patter of numerous paparazzi at a place and a time t.b.a. (probably a day or two before).
One unfortunate side-effect of warm sunshine, that rare and frabjous phenomenon which sends Brits balmy, is that quite unsuitable people start taking their clothes off and wandering about in public. Our streets are crammed with X-certificate tourists oozing their way around the pavements, showing us all a lot more of them than we really want to see. This was echoed a few years ago when Demi Moore, the shy, retiring Hollywood megastar, plopped her pregnant body starkers on the cover of Vanity Fair and caused a storm. Now VF Editor Graydon Carter has saved up enough pennies to pull the stunt a second time, on this occasion with the pregnant chanteuse Britney Spears. We’re told she’s being paid a really huge number of pennies, around $5 million-worth, but then that’s part of the stunt too, so who will ever know? One thing I find curious: if you put the most exciting – and expensive – thing in your magazine on the front cover, does anyone need to buy it? Won’t they just stand around in W.H.Smiths ogling it? Mayfair, Razzle and Richard Desmond’s unusual top-shelf titles such as Readers’ Wives go out with tasteful non-see-through plastic wrapping on them nowadays, but I suppose it’s too much to hope we’ll be spared the sight of Bulging Britney when we’ve only popped into the newsagents for an ounce of shag and a Fisherman’s Friend or two.
So bring on the stunts, I say, and let’s make a summer of rich entertainment and jaw-dropping headlines. For instance, a ‘recent survey’ has revealed that fewer than 2% of the population think the Beckhams have a happy home life. That’s the kind of statistic which makes us all feel better about not earning a hundred grand a week or whatever sum it is, so it might actually engender sympathy for Posh and Becks, which isn’t something they’ve experienced much in the past two or three years.
Today’s lead in The Sun is that Princess Di snorted coke & shagged a dead Kennedy. Oh pleeeeease. It’s as though a computer had picked up the keywords of the most-written tabloid stories of the past 20 years and combined them in one masterpiece of fiction. At least try to make your stories feasible if you’re going to cook them up. We’ve moved on from ‘Giant Telescope sees Fairies on the Moon’ (New York Sun, 1827) and “WWII Bomber Found on Moon” (Daily Sport, 1983). Now we want our hoaxes sophisticated and believable, don’t we?
Step forward…Gordon Brown!