Skipper

This is a somewhat trivial (and short) blog but my friend Roy Johnson - of mantex.co.uk fame - sugested to me it was worth the effort. It relates to the style of language used in the Sunday tabloids, and indeed some of the daily ones too, to describe the details of kiss and tell stories. In the past such stories would be related in the style of 'and then we went into the bathroom and had sex'. Fine, you might think: that's what they did, we don't really need to know more. But the modern tabloid editor has divined, probably correctly, that we do wish to know more; the bald facts leave just us a little unsatisfied.

Now we learn that the C list celebrity- be it a Sven or a Peter or a Jude- 'fondled'her breasts at length, 'slowly removed my panties' and then indulged in activities which could be rated on a scale from one to ten with a similar standard applied to his physical attributes. Yes, in other words, such stories have now been transformed into a species of pornography. One can almost hear the journalist involved in eliciting the kissing and telling posing the questions: 'So how did his fingers feel when he fondled you like that?', 'Did you feel excited when he did that to you?', 'How often have you felt desire quite like that?'. Cynics might conclude that in its small way this is yet another benchmark of the general decline in our culture; on the other hand, if one is less apocalyptic, or works for a tabloid paper, one might see it as just a 'bit of fun'.