Paper Monitor
11:48 UK time, Friday, 7 January 2011
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
It's a cold, wet, grey, dull morning in January. Everyone has colds and Paper Monitor is mired in a post-Christmas stupor of lethargy and corpulence.
But yet! It's Friday, which to most of the population might mean the imminent prospect of long lie ins and binge drinking, but to Paper Monitor signals the glorious cocktail of glitter and vinegar contained within the Times's Celebrity Watch and the Guardian's Lost In Showbiz.
Affection for these columns has been documented before, but there is surely no date in the calendar better suited to waspish asides about our red-carpet overlords. Even in the grimmest of times, who could fail to be cheered by the following treatment by of post-natal depression:
As a vegan, Paltrow would not have had recourse to cheese. As millions of exhausted mothers before her have discovered, the only real cure for postnatal depression is yellow, dairy and smells of cheese, ie: cheese. Crackers and cheese; cheese on toast; putting a whole Stilton on your head - aka "the Cheese Helmet" - and eating your way out of it. HURRAH FOR CHEESE! Or, as CW likes to think of it: "The Prozac that's better on a baked potato."
PM cannot help but conclude that, had the producers of EastEnders not drafted in Ms Moran as a scriptwriter for their they may have avoided an awful lot of mither.
Likewise, she fails to disappoint with the news that actress Natalie Portman is expecting. "Come the summer, she and her fiance Benjamin Millepied will hear the pitter-patter of tiny feet," trills Moran. "Or, if it takes after the father, one thousand tiny feet."
Customarily, Paper Monitor likes to square off Moran against Lost In Showbiz's Marina Hyde, but the latter appears to be taking a break. Nonetheless, the Guardian has had the sense to employ as her ringer its chief pop and rock critic Alexis Petridis, whose reviews Paper Monitor has long admired for marrying an exhaustive and encyclopaedic knowledge of modern music with the weary tone of a man utterly baffled as to why anyone, least alone Petridis himself, would bother to devote so much time and mental energy to such nonsense.
It's a voice that lends itself well to the celebrity world, not least when he observes that, when commissioning a writer to interview Nicole Kidman, Vanity Fair "procured the services of the woman all editors' thoughts invariably turn to when they need a fearless, two-fisted profile piece that cuts through the Tinseltown schmaltz: Jennifer Aniston".
Petridis embarking on a Pulitzer-committee-like appraisal of Aniston's writing style:
"You are like the secretariat of actresses - when I see your body of work and everything you have achieved," she begins fearlessly, thus alerting reader and subject alike that they're not in for some unbearably saccharine puff piece.
Does anyone have a number for Aniston's agent? Paper Monitor is minded to see if shifts at the Magazine can be arranged for this emerging new journalistic talent.
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