Paper Monitor
10:27 UK time, Tuesday, 23 January 2007
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
Who needs the Big Brother house to shine a spotlight on the state of the nation when events at Branscombe beach let the papers take our pulse?
With the dilemma set between "Ooh, don't look, the greed's terrible" and "Crikey! Have a butchers at what's on offer down here", the papers give their verdict on the cargo-trawling booty-hunters.
A picture of the beach, strewn with rubbish and resembling the aftermath at Glastonbury, takes up the Daily Telegraph's front page. It takes readers back to the golden days - the 1949 film Whisky Galore! and the true story of Scottish islanders racing to save bottled goods.
Inside, the paper is torn between telling us beach-combing is an "ancient tradition" - surely therefore to be defended by Telegraph types? And stirring sympathy in the "awful" tale of a nice family from Sweden whose stuff has been picked through as it washed up en route to their South African winery. Ahh.
Three men in a boat and their wine barrels grace the front of the Times, on the Guardian an urban-looking trendy type is hauling his cask away.
Down to the Daily Mail, then, to take a dim view of "scavengers" who "swarmed" down the clifftops to "descend" on the shoreline, "almost coming to blows" in the battle to sort out who got what. How unseemly...
But over at Mirror Group towers, the seaside goings on barely raise a ripple. The Independent remains unmoved by all the free stuff. For the second day in a row it's more bothered about all the packaging we put on the goods that we do pay for.
And a different beach entirely is featured in the Mirror - a Caribbean one. PM's Formula One radar, for detecting the lame use of made-up equations as a way of generating news copy, (or, in this case, to use pictures of celebs in their scanties) picks up a bikini-clad Kelly Brook on page three.
The paper tells us that the formula for calculating her waist to hip ratio of 0.70588253 - and that's a lot of decimal places for a tabloid - means she's "so gorgeous". But of course it does - it's as easy to follow as the law on scavenging...
The 
