Paper Monitor
10:43 UK time, Tuesday, 28 October 2008
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
As Paper Monitor's second cousin once removed, Crunch Creep, likes to note, many a trend these days is being laid at the door of ye olde credit crunch, but not until now has anyone raised the prospect that this squeeze on easy money could catapult us back to Mesoamerica circa 200 AD.
Who on earth would seriously moot such a possibility? Step forward the Guardian, which sets the whole thing off on the cover of its G2 supplement with a picture of a loin-clothed chap being strangulated by a Mayan warrior, complete with goat mask.
"Death of a civilisation: Could we share the same fate as the Maya?"
(At which point Paper Monitor finds itself pondering whether ready access to bountiful supplies of dark chocolate is necessarily a bad thing?)
Inside, the paper juxtaposes a picture of the part-ruined Mayan Temple of the Sun with... wait for it.... yup, the Bank of England, AKA "The Temples of Doom".
G2's dramatic depiction of what a plummeting Dow Jones might eventually mean for all of us sets the stage for some serious drama, the like of which Paper Monitor was on the look out for yesterday, albeit in the guise of PBH - "prejudice, bigotry and hatred" - the Mail's agenda, according to the Guardian.
Yesterday's search was frankly a bit disappointing. But unlike the hunt for WMD, today we definitely have some results.
Sadly, however, the target for today's PBH is Paper Monitor's venerable employer and sugar daddy. The ±«Óãtv is "facing an unprecedented backlash" it says, adding these readers' comments: "Of course none of the ±«Óãtv production team saw anything wrong with it... they are all of the same ilk - uneducated, impolite yobs with no insight at all into what is decent or commendable" and "The ±«Óãtv seems to employ nothing but people who suffer from an inferiority complex."
Do not! It's YOU who has an inferiority complex! So there.
But there is reams and reams of loathing - actually Russell Brand comes out of it much worse than Ross or the ±«Óãtv. The Mail even goes so far as to accept that "it is just possible that Ross is genuinely contrite". Brand, however, still wears nappies, according to Richard Littlejohn.
The one line which somehow seems to be buried in the coverage is the verdict of the man himself, Andrew Sachs. Way way way down in the middle of the story, far from the headlines, is this humble paragraph: "I wasn't attacked in any way. People are writing and talking about it, quite rightly. I am sorry that I am involved in it - I'm just fed up talking about it. I love the ±«Óãtv. I have worked for them for over 50 years and I continue to work for them. Sometimes things can go wrong."
If only that were the final, dignified word on the saga. Paper Monitor for one will say no more about it.
As it is, it has no time to say anything at all about the Times .
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