Paper Monitor
12:14 UK time, Wednesday, 31 December 2008
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
Seen anything good in the papers?
'Cause none have arrived at Monitor Towers. The only newspaper to hand is a dog-eared copy of the Times bought to pass the time on Paper Monitor's morning commute.
There's a picture of a beaver. Shhhh! Who's that giggling in a juvenile fashion down the back?
Is it Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer? (They're from the Nineties, young people.) It may well be, for the pair are back.
"Should auld comedy characters be forgot, and never brought to mind..." says the Times' TV reviewer, devoting much of his column to last night's retrospective mockumentary and 15th anniversary edition of their Shooting Stars panel show. "It came as no great surprise that the clips from the old ones were the best."
Paper Monitor, personally, lost it at the old clip of Bob Mortimer in Ray Mears mode, wearing extra short shorts and surviving in Epping Forest.
But the paper concludes - hitting the nail firmly on the head with a frying pan - "Remember lads, a comeback special is just for Christmas, not for life."
Flipping through a colleague's copy of the Guardian, there is another Shooting Stars review by the ever-masterful Nancy Banks-Smith, who opines that it was "an object lesson in never going back".
And, as ever with a Banks-Smith column, there is an observation - nay, a universal truth - that Paper Monitor hopes to pass off as its own one day: "... fly buttons are crucial to a man wishing to avoid tedious explanations in the magistrates court".
We are, truly, not worthy.
The 
