Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Consider This My CV, Fleet Street!

I have no opinion either way on the Mills/McCartney divorce trial other than that it's horrible that something private has to have been conducted in front of the entire world. Rumours have flown around about their behaviour in private and public, with both getting their share of criticism. I don't care about that. I hope, for their sake, that it gets resolved if not amicably (which seems to be an impossibility by this point), then at least within the ballpark of not actually killing each other in the High Court.

However, the newspaper coverage has been really annoying. I often wonder what it must be like to be a journalist, and wonder if I have the chops. What is the average day like? Wake up, go to work on tube, refuse to stand up for pregnant woman on tube, arrive at office, shave face in toilet, listen to recording of the Today programme, base inflammatory article around out-of-context argument between Ed Balls and John Humphrys, copy out press release about film opening, get all the facts wrong, reword study into teen behaviour so that it sounds like New Labour are brainwashing women into having unprotected sex with immigrants and then having an image of Stalin tattooed on their backs (I'm imagining a Daily Mail journalist there), head to bar at 12:00, stay there until 23:30. Perhaps that's horribly horribly unfair, but even worse, how hard can it be to be a sub-editor coming up with headlines? Dealing with crappy copy from those addled hacks means they don't have enough time to come up with better headlines for the Mills/McCartney story. Here are today's examples.
  • Get Back (The Mirror)
  • A Hard Day's Fight (The Sun)
  • Yesterday... (The Times)
  • Mucca: Let It Bea £100m (Daily Star)
  • She Hates You, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah (Metro)
  • We Can't Work It Out As Macca Faces Mills (Also Metro)
  • We Can Work It Out (The Herald)
  • Mr Justice Bennett Tries To Work It Out (The Guardian)
I don't work for a newspaper so I can only speculate, but my theory that it doesn't take much effort is not exactly being tested by these weak puns. So, please consider this to be a demonstration of my ability to come up with pithy and punny headlines for news stories. This list took me about twenty minutes, and I think they show much more variety.


  • Got To Get You Out Of My Life (surely this one has been used a million times)
  • Love Me Don't (same for this one)
  • I Don't Wanna Be Your Man (seriously, these write themselves)
  • You Never Give Me Your Money (didn't even need to change that one)
  • Things We Said Under Oath Today
  • I Don't Want to Spoil The Party But You Are A Selfish Asshole Who Owes Me Pounds
  • Without You, Without You
  • Happiness Is An Expensive Lawyer
  • You've Got To Hide Your Millions Away
  • I've Just Seen A Face That Asked Me For Millions Of Pounds
  • She Said She Said (I Hid Her Bedpan)
  • You're Totally Going To Give Me Your Money
  • Because (You're A Bastard And You Owe Me Pounds)
  • I Don't Want You (She's So Crazy)
  • P.S. I Loathe You
  • Fuck Prudence (Hand Over The Pounds!)
  • Being For The Benefit Of Ms. Mills!
  • Here Comes The Son-Of-A-Bitch
  • I Want To Hold Your Pounds
  • Heather In The Bank Vault With Diamonds
  • The Fight Album
  • You Won't See Me (For Dust Once I Have Your Pounds)
  • Good Bye Fortune
  • I Am The Plaintiff
  • The Blonde And Whining Ho
  • Please Mr. Justice Bennett
  • She Came In Through The Bedroom Window And Tried To Take All Of My Pounds
  • Everybody's Got Something to Hide Especially My Horrible Soon-To-Be-Ex-Husband And His Law-Monkey
  • Golden Numbers
  • While My Bedpan Gently Weeps
  • Mean Mr. McCartney
  • When I'm Sixty-Four Million Pounds Richer
  • With A Little Help From Nicholas Mostyn QC
  • Why Don't We Do It In The High Court With The World's Media Watching?
I'll just sit here and wait for the Daily Mail to contact me and offer me a job interview for a position as sub-editor writing headlines like "Cancer Gives You Cancer" and "UK Population Now 175% Foreign, Says Migration Watch Survey" (my politics are to the left but that can change given enough of those lovely lovely pounds).

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