Paper Monitor
12:16 UK time, Wednesday, 30 July 2008
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
Opera? The Sun "loves it" apparently.
It's currently running an extraordinary promotion which will see Sun readers pay as little as £7.50 to see a performance of Don Giovanni. The scheme will see an audience in Covent Garden's Royal Opera House entirely made up of Sun readers.
It's not a category of entertainment that usually features much in the Sun. To do a quick unscientific test in the form of a search on LexisNexis, shows this.
In the past 12 months, the Sun has mentioned the phrase "Royal Opera House" just 17 times, while the Daily Telegraph has mentioned the same phrase 154 times in the same period.
So the Sun spends two pages explaining why its readers will love the opera.
"Most operas are dirtier than Amy Winehouse's beehive, riper than a full-on effing rant by Gordon Ramsay and more violent than a Tarantino bloodfest," it trills.
The Sun's piece also complains about the Guardian's pre-emptive strike against this unusual promotion.
"Elitist broadsheet the Guardian wrote an article last week sneering at the fact that lowly Sun readers should dare to grace the Royal Opera House.
"Blow them. They can have a night in with their mung bean sandwiches and discuss existentialist feminism."
To bring back a phrase from school: "Fight. Fight. Fight."
Could the Guardian be objecting to Sun plot summaries like "SEX PEST STRIKES IN SUNNY SPAIN" and "BAD BOY DON IN BID TO BONK THE BRIDE"?
Elsewhere, there are emotional extremes illustrated in today's papers.
At one end of the spectrum, in the Times, Will Pavia goes to meet the "Heart Robot" and confesses: "My ex-girlfriends say that I am incapable of understanding human emotion."
At the other end is the story in the Sun and the Daily Mirror of a man who proposed to his girlfriend using a giant message written in a cornfield.
And please remove your hat for a Daily Telegraph story that achieves maximum Telegraphicity: "Punt pirates hold tourists to ransom on River Cam".
Youths are apparently gathering on bridges and stealing poles from punters. And they are divebombing those who refuse to pay the ransom.
Paper Monitor is trembling with rage.
The 
