Paper Monitor
11:07 UK time, Thursday, 10 July 2008
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
WARNING: This entry contains a plot spoiler, spoiler.
One of those dilemmas today... HOW to illustrate a story about an M&S shareholder who complains its current range of women's underwear reveals too much cleavage. Now that's a tricky one... let's see... how about... no, that wouldn't work.... what if?.... no, scotch that. I know. I've got it. Let's have pictures of models in their underwear!
Well done the Daily Mail (and Telegraph - and see picture, above, for Paper Monitor's suggestion fo a more responsible means of illustrating the story). Especially since it has put so much energy today into pictures of the "preacher of hate" Abu Qatada, recently released and now seen doing his shopping. And he wasn't just holding his prayer beads as he went out, the paper says he was "fondling" them, which sounds really vile. It also points out that he was clutching "a bumper-pack of toilet rolls", and adds the detail that he used to be 20 stone but lost weight on prison food. Not a nice image for breakfast time.
Anyway, it's all all right because the Sun reports on a man who has found an image of the Queen in a tree trunk, which has to add to the gaiety of the nation. Now one comes to think about it, we've had images of famous people in unlikely places, sightings of UFOs and crop circles all making a return. It's suddenly feeling like the Nineties again.
But before you dig out your baggies and revert to your curtain haircut, what's all this about Gordon Brown comparing himself to Heathcliff? No, not the irritable Garfield-like , the "It's me, Cathy, I've come ho-wooo-oohh-ohhh-me" Heathcliff of Wuthering Heights fame.
Paper Monitor must confess it has never got round to reading Bronte's classic novel - so many books (next up, the Lewis Hamilton autobiography), so little time - but in likening himself to Heathcliff, the Prime Minister set off a spark of interest in one day getting round to this literary classic.
Yet in its bid to unpick the PM's analysis, the Telegraph proceeds to blow the gaff on the entire plot - telling how Cathy Earnshaw meets an untimely death and "for 18 years Heathcliff is haunted by her".
Well, thanks aplenty guys. Even Kate Bush had the good grace not to go that far.
The 
