Paper Monitor
11:16 UK time, Tuesday, 15 February 2011
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
And cue the brunette, glossy hair. It's like one big shampoo advert on the papers' front pages today. If you're blonde you don't get a look in.
But who is on which front page? The brunettes featured are Kate Middleton and her sister Pippa, who will be maid of honour at April's royal wedding. Then there's Cheryl Cole, who attended the Elle Style Awards last night, Victoria Beckham and the prostitute who claims to have slept with Mrs Beckham's husband David. Finally, there's "Britain's worst binge drinker aged 15", who has surprisingly glossy hair considering she is said to drink 15 litres of cider, 10 cans of lager and half a bottle of vodka each week.
It will shock no one that the Times and Daily Telegraph have gone with pictures of the Middleton sisters on their front pages. The only surprise is the size of the picture featured in the latter. It has used its broadsheet size to print a photo so big it would leave very little room for any words had it shrunk to tabloid size like the Times. It even trumps the size of the paper's usual A-Level-joy photos, which more often than not feature blonde females. The Express also goes with the sisters.
But what about the Daily Mail? Surely, Kate and Pippa are a certainty? No, publicity veteran Victoria Beckham beats the two amateurs. Not that she'll be entirely happy about this, seeing as the accompanying story is about her husband's failed £15.5m legal action against a magazine that published an article claiming he had had slept with a prostitute. It's the woman in question, Irma Nici, who is splashed across the Mirror's front page.
So, that leaves Cheryl Cole and the UK's "youngest binge drinker" on the Sun and Star front pages respectively. It's a choice between Cheryl in a low-cut dress or a cautionary state-of-our-nation's-youth tale. Remarkably, the binge drinker has knocked celebrity and boobs off the Star's front page for the first time in... well, ever possibly.
Once you get past all the brunettes, today's Telegraph has a story about Google's home-page doodle celebrating the anniversary of the birth of one of Britain's most renowned explorers, the polar adventurer . Fine, nothing wrong with that. Everyone loves a good anniversary, especially the newspapers, just not usually the 137th anniversary. It's normally a 25th one or 100th. Will this signal an anniversary free-for-all? Watch this space.
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