Nottingham Post Under New Ownership?? Shurely Not!
As regular readers may be aware, I’ve been a bit of a convert to the No More Page 3 Campaign. I was sceptical to begin with: when it comes to The Sun, I’d quite like to see the end of Pages 1,2, 4 etc as well. But Lisa Clarke, the local organiser, has written some persuasive, even-handed and eloquent pieces for Beestonia, as well as her own blog. This has attracted The Times to interview her, and the campaign as a whole has even seemingly shook the Dirty Digger himself: Rupert Murdoch conceded it was perhaps as much as a relic of the seventies as Carry On movies and viewing Gary Glitter as a role model.
The Nottingham Post gets wise to the story, and decides to run a story. Great news. The more coverage the campaign gets, the wider they can get their message out, the better. So how do they report it?
The article was efficiently written, and I have no quibbles about that. Yet when it came to illustrate the article, what image did they use? Lisa and her fellow campaigners resplendent in their campaign T-shirts, marching in London? Well yes, but only a picture 45mm by 30mm, which you have to squint to make out. The main image, coming in at 100mm x 600mm; was an old publicity shot of tawdry ‘glamour’ ‘model’ Jo Guest, breasts spilling out of her overalls as the bloke whose car she is unconvincingly washing leers at her soon-to-escape tits. Nice one, sub-editor.
I’m a fan of The Post, and have been since I pushed it through the letter boxes of Stapleford as a teenager. It’s journalists are diligent, intelligent and still capable of pulling off some brilliant scoops. They’re also good company, on the occasions I end up sharing a pub table with them. I’m sure this was an oversight, the product of a sub-editor having a brain-fart when throwing the page together. If it was cold-calculating policy: ‘Put some norks in, we’ll probably sell an extra 50 copies in Cotgrave’ then, just as with Sun journos, there talents are diminished by this cynical strategy.
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Issue 16 of The Beestonian is available! It’s online here, and will be in our usual stockists later today and over the weekend. If you’d like to stock us-it’s free- drop us a line at thebeestonian@gmail.com . It’s a corker of an issue, featuring Boots avoiding tax; Robin Hood avoiding a dartboard; Nora and Tamar joining forces to attack romance; a new gardening column; a celebration of The Civic Society; and much much more. Pick it up, then go and say thank you to our sponsors by visiting them and buying stuff off them. We have absolutely no pics of pendulous mammaries within, so if you’re looking for that, sorry.
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Part 2 of my Hugely Self Indulgent Celebration As I’ve Gone Past 100,000 hits on here: Twenty Four Hour Garage People.
Beestonia has little agenda: some people read it for polemic, some for whimsy, some for the various campaigns we highlight. The following article doesn’t really fit into any of these categories, and was a bit of an accident. I wrote it during a particularly nasty fever, and was published by accident. I decided to delete it, but started receiving some congratulatory messages, including one from Nick Palmer, who would have been our MP at the time. I still can’t recall writing it: I really was quite ill, so excuse the slightly weird style. https://beestonia.wordpress.com/2009/07/23/119/
..and if you’re wondering where the title comes from, I filched it from the always wonderful HalfMan HalfBiscuit:
Beestonia 