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Mangan Makes It Up
Feb. 1st, 2006 11:59 pmI just got a text message from Tom Baker.
It's a weird experience to be told 'I love you,' by the fourth Doctor. Although I suppose Mrs Baker gets it all the time. Is there even a Mrs Baker?
Well, actually it was from somebody else, but it got sent to the landline instead of my mobile, and Tom Baker is now the voice of BT's SMS delivery service, as reported this morning in that esteemed organ, the Metro, also home to some of the most incomprehensibly unfunny comic strips in history, and also the laziest astrologer ever.
This brings me onto another point ... lazy people working for newspapers. I had the misfortune to stumble upon another Lucy Mangan column in the Guardian today. Now, I dare say Lucy Mangan is a fine, well-rounded individual. Unfortunately she is also an idiot. The giveaway is in the first line, which reads 'I have never actually been to the London Planetarium...'
Now, it is true that the London Planetarium is closing, and it is also true that the London Planetarium is a wonderful place that had me spellbound when I visited it as a nine year old, and it is a disgrace and a national scandal that it's being treated this way, but the Guardian seems to think an acceptable reaction is to commission a reporter who admits she's never visited it to write a few paragraphs of excerable dross that scream 'aren't I just cute enough to eat because I can work in some snide references to Brad and Angelina and Chantelle off Celebrity Big Brother whilst simultaneously poking fun at a venerable, august and, alas, doomed attraction?'
I mean, really, what is this shit; 'sprayed with Waitrose pine disinfectant by a parent', what the fuck is that supposed to mean? How the shit does that have anything to do with OCD? It doesn't, of course, because Mangan Makes It Up. The closest that hackette ever got to OCD was watching the OC, which is a whole consonant short. Now, I'm a fan of the witty, inciteful newspaper sketch as much as the next man. Few like a good Hoggart in the morning more than I, and Maureen Lipman's musings in the same pages are a weekly delight. But this is just crappy, happy-slappy hackery of the most odorous kind. The Guardian wrote an excellent leader on the Planetarium today and really, they should have just left it at that, and not vomited Mangan all over the story like a boozed-up chavlet after six pints of White Lightning.
Lucy Mangan is the reason I can never work at the Guardian. I wouldn't be able to stop kicking her under the desk, or moving her chair away when she's about to sit down, or flicking mashed potato at her in the staff canteen.
It's a weird experience to be told 'I love you,' by the fourth Doctor. Although I suppose Mrs Baker gets it all the time. Is there even a Mrs Baker?
Well, actually it was from somebody else, but it got sent to the landline instead of my mobile, and Tom Baker is now the voice of BT's SMS delivery service, as reported this morning in that esteemed organ, the Metro, also home to some of the most incomprehensibly unfunny comic strips in history, and also the laziest astrologer ever.
This brings me onto another point ... lazy people working for newspapers. I had the misfortune to stumble upon another Lucy Mangan column in the Guardian today. Now, I dare say Lucy Mangan is a fine, well-rounded individual. Unfortunately she is also an idiot. The giveaway is in the first line, which reads 'I have never actually been to the London Planetarium...'
Now, it is true that the London Planetarium is closing, and it is also true that the London Planetarium is a wonderful place that had me spellbound when I visited it as a nine year old, and it is a disgrace and a national scandal that it's being treated this way, but the Guardian seems to think an acceptable reaction is to commission a reporter who admits she's never visited it to write a few paragraphs of excerable dross that scream 'aren't I just cute enough to eat because I can work in some snide references to Brad and Angelina and Chantelle off Celebrity Big Brother whilst simultaneously poking fun at a venerable, august and, alas, doomed attraction?'
I mean, really, what is this shit; 'sprayed with Waitrose pine disinfectant by a parent', what the fuck is that supposed to mean? How the shit does that have anything to do with OCD? It doesn't, of course, because Mangan Makes It Up. The closest that hackette ever got to OCD was watching the OC, which is a whole consonant short. Now, I'm a fan of the witty, inciteful newspaper sketch as much as the next man. Few like a good Hoggart in the morning more than I, and Maureen Lipman's musings in the same pages are a weekly delight. But this is just crappy, happy-slappy hackery of the most odorous kind. The Guardian wrote an excellent leader on the Planetarium today and really, they should have just left it at that, and not vomited Mangan all over the story like a boozed-up chavlet after six pints of White Lightning.
Lucy Mangan is the reason I can never work at the Guardian. I wouldn't be able to stop kicking her under the desk, or moving her chair away when she's about to sit down, or flicking mashed potato at her in the staff canteen.
