Yesterdays Press had a front page completely devoted to Show Week. A banner headline squawked Its our week and a giant photograph of a woman with the improbable name of Nettles Lamont beamed out at us. Reporter Georgina Stylianou gushed about the grassroots to glamour festival. On page 2 Stylianou got creative and wrote about a female wood chopper Ashleigh Heath on one side of the photo-bedecked page, and horse-showing air hostess (who calls them that these days?) Channelle Dickie on the other. Dickie was tottering along on silly shoes and wearing a strapless dress that prompted Roy to ask didnt they have one in her size? The outfit was topped off with the required silly hat and was daft enough in itself but edged towards the truly comic by virtue of the fact that she was leading two horses. We wondered if the effort of keeping hat and dress in place and staying upright on her shoes was the reason for the very odd expression on her face. Dickie gets to lead the winning horses into the enclosure at Addington and shows standardbreds at the A&P Show. We were treated to an insight into the truly mad world of showing. Stylianou effervesced about how Dickie spends about 6 hours primping and preening each horse; painting their hooves, adding false manes and tails, and applying makeup. Of course shell also shave off their whiskers and the hair in their ears, sand off the periople on their hooves and slather them in silicon-based coat enhancers. Its enough to make me wonder if the frothiness of the hats matches the contents of the heads they sit on. Stylianou further reinforced her claim for the title of most fatuous reporter of the year by detailing Nettles Lamonts beauty and fitness regime in preparation for the rigours of Cup Day. Lamont also got a plug for her company. And Stylianou was back on page 8 talking about the racy, social side to Cup Day. Ooh a pun. The subject was Christ College old boy and racing aficionado Andrew Bell. Stylianou lovingly detailed his background and the details of his business and treated us to a description of the outfit Bell was planning to sport on race day: knee-high cowboy boots, a crisp white shirt, a black, patterned Italian tie and an orange Cutler and Co jacket.... What - no trousers? Seriously - we know that newspapers are being dumbed down for a reason but FFS the world is going to hell in a handcart and the only daily newspaper in the region has degenerated into a mess of coloured photos and white space largely held together by fatuous, vacuous, witless, empty-headed froth produced by people who seem determined to prove to the world that they are airheads. Such international news as makes it into the paper is taken straight off the press agencies or out of other newspapers. Occasional features and columns relieve the tedium but are not enough to make me want to continue to buy the thing. Some old curmudgeon wrote into the Press moaning about how it had degenerated into a womans magazine since being run by a female editor. Some people also think shes left wing which is the cause of much hilarity in this household. But I hate to say it - Tuesdays Press was about as bad as a cabal of airheads could make it. Whats a good collective noun for airheads? A stupor? A torpor? How about a puff? Or possibly - a hype of airheads?
Posted on: Tue, 12 Nov 2013 20:56:26 +0000
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