It seems that The Sun has gone a bit Chris Morris, judging by yesterday’s front cover (right). Not that I read The Sun, I hasten to add – this was emailed to me by my friend Justin in Aberdeen, who in his defence probably read it in the staff room at his work.
Morris brought us such outrageous media satire as The Day Today and Brass Eye. They were responsible for bitingly accurate and controversial take-offs of hysterical, sensationalist over-reporting. The Sun’s front page could easily have been a Morrisism – so much so that this satire of it simply isn’t as funny as the original.
Justin has a bit of a conspiracy about the Morrisisation of the media – just look at the unnecessarily elaborate presenting you get on a lot of news programmes (think Peter Snow’s election stuff or that hyperactive weatherman who, delightfully, got recently moved from the ghost shift of BBC News 24 to primetime BBC1). Justin’s evidence includes this recent Onion satire about razor wars becoming canny prophecy some months later.
He has a lot of other ideas which I suspect could be goers too – including the Celebrity Breeding Programme, Ceefax Page 777, and Real Football. I might tell you about these one day.
