Have you evvah seeeen a grownmannaked, Rupert?
It’s been a helluva week for royal stories, and a timely reminder that the Murdoch cancer is still among us. But if nothing else, the varietal sweep of history has been both fascinating and hilarious.
Other Windsor soap episodes aside this week, I’m a little suspicious of the one about Richard III having been buried in a car park. I mean for one thing, in those days they didn’t have cars did they? Right then. So that’s all that bollocks deconstructed.
It could be of course that the old psycho hunchback* sorry, loss of pc reception for a second there, the mature mentally challenged spinal malformation sufferer was dug up at some later time. In an era when it was already clear the future was unlikely to lie with horses, perhaps. Thus, as a means of ensuring he wouldn’t be found for ages, the grave-robbers built the world’s first car park and put him underneath, a good sixty years before car parks became one of the joys of modern life.
Or, just possibly (although it’s a long-shot this one) they buried him in a place that later became a car park, the come-lately car park constructors being unaware that Royal bones lay beneath their feet. In which case, ‘Richard III was buried in car park’ as a headline is wrong, innit?
I know this is more Grammar Nazism on my part, but the headline is sloppy, wrong and misleading. One could lose the ‘was’, or one could lose ‘was’ and add ‘found’; one could lose ‘buried in’ for under…and produce a perfect headline thus: ‘Richard III found buried under car park’. But at the BBC, all sense of craftspersonship in the News department left years ago: Paxman seems to me the only one left who gets upset by careless reporting, and he looks so miserable these days, he must be pondering retirement.
Some stories, however, don’t easily lend themselves to perfect headline summation. For instance, ‘Prince Harry found naked in Sun’ could be about his enthusiasm for nude tanning. ‘Prince Harry’s cock on Sun front page’ gets nearer, but we didn’t see one’s member. Also the shower is left out, which seems a bit showerist. So perhaps the best line is:
ROYAL COCK SPLASHED ON SUN FRONT PAGE
It fits the bill for me: Harry is royal, he is a cock, he was splashing about, and thus he became the Sun’s lead story.
Yes, Harry has done it again. ‘It’ being something of an outrageously daft nature, and ‘again’ following in the wake of looking pissed, improperly dressed, and all stations to utterly indiscreet.
This time his crime was to be caught on camera proper undressed an’ no mistake guvnor cor strike me pink. The poor chap has his father’s brains, his mother’s exhibitionism, and his grandfather’s tact.
The trouble with Harry is his ability to walk straight into the media trap time after time after far too much of a good time. Had the Murdoch press and amoral media-hungry slappers existed in Edward VII’s time, I have no doubt that he too would’ve been on The Daily Sunrise’s front page regularly doing highly irregular things….albeit accompanied by slightly more respectful text:
‘His Royal Highness Prince Harry depicted in harmless full frolic with famous socialite Miss Phyllis Butes. HRH is renowned for his sporting interests and must, like all Royal sons, sow some wild oats along the way. In this republican age it is good see that, if called upon to extend the Battenberg line, the second son of our future Monarch should have no difficulty in siring the necessary heirs.’
But this isn’t 1876, it’s 2012: and even the dimmest Royal progeny cannot fail to have noticed that whistle-blowing kiss and tell long ago replaced acceptable fun in private followed by discreet confinements in south European countries for those noble maidens impregnated as a result. We must only thank God, meanwhile, that (left) photography wasn’t invented much longer ago.
I suspect that the smartest King we’ve had in modern history was George V, the instigator of the Royal Christmas broadcast, the inventor of The Royal Family as a national example, and the man who did a better job of marketing the Windsors (while remaining at arm’s length) than any monarch before or since.
He also found it very easy to tell putty from excrement, did George V. He is alleged to have said to the great abdicator – his son the Prince of Wales – in 1928, “Sir, you dress like a cad, you talk like a cad, and you behave like a cad. By God sir, you are a cad. You will ruin yourself within a year – get out of my sight”. G5 was right on the money: Edward VIII ran off with a man dressed as Mrs Simpson in 1936, and was never crowned. Later he leaked secrets to the Nazis and gave vulgar television interviews alongside his trans-sexual partner in the United States. He was indeed a cad.
Will Charles III display the same wisdom when his time comes? I very much doubt it. He allowed himself to be bullied into marriage to a dork. He gives Harry too long a leash. And his political interfering could all too easily render him the next Duke of Windsor. The good news is that we have Wills and – barring tragic accidents – we are unlikely ever to wake up and find ourselves under the merry rule of Henry IX.
The funniest part of Harry’s bigger splash for me was (left) when the Sun defended its ‘story’ by saying that it would’ve been ‘perverse’ to ignore the photos. A bit of instant online research then showed that 75% of Brits thought the scoop wasn’t in the public interest: ergo sum, the Scum was being perverse in running the cock-shots. But that wasn’t the funny part. You can tell that wasn’t the funny part, because none of you are laughing.
For me, the rib-tickler is a Murdoch title pontificating on the nature of perversity. There’s James of course, about whom we need say little beyond observing that his manner is that of a management consultant with a flair for bright colour schemes. And there’s his Dad Rupert, who hates the Royal family because upper class twerps were rude to him at Oxford, synchronises marital and nationality changes, makes psychotic secretaries CEOs, and bangs tables to demonstrate his humility before Parliament.
Past alumni of the Murdoch press include Andy Coulson, Kelvin McKenzie, and Piers Morgan –respectively responsible for multiple perjury, naked darts on telly, false news stories about the British army, and celeb phone hacking antics still to be revealed. Rebekah Brooks’s interests when she wasn’t being a blind Chief Executive included powdering the inside of her nose, perverting the course of justice, baby-sitting for the Camerons, and hacking dead people’s mobiles – this last a rare condition known as Murdoch’s hacrophilia disease by proxy.
Pretty perverse all that, I’d say. So being perverse, Newscorp should’ve ignored the nude Harry shots. And had they done so, the British people would’ve declared them normal. Thus both the Murdochs and the British people are odd. QED.
Bottom line:(gerritt??): My rejoinder to the dirty Digger hypocrite – appropriately in this case – is ‘Freedom of the press my arse’.
Finally, we must turn to the pensioner who passed on his regal genes to Harry Redtop.
His Royal Highness Prince Phillip has been a wonderful consort to the current Queen, adding that dash of humour, sport and controversy one needs with a Monarch as dedicated and squeaky-clean as Elizabeth II. He is also a very rude and demanding man, himself guilty of being a wee over-cocksure in the past. But wee-wee now seems to the main problem facing the old gent, rather than a penchant for dry-land swimming for which he was infamous among certain circles many decades ago.
He is, we are told, unable to play his full Royal role in the Paralympic festivities. Well, he deserves a rest from all this Olympic lunacy. As indeed we deserve a rest from him.
I am still struggling to get regular internet access, but it’s a case of BT not reaching out terribly well rather than some dastardly globalist geopolitical plot. Please bear with me.
Bankrolled Taxidermist has opened a new site, imaginatively called Johnwardtalksbollix. It’s on wordpress, who have allowed it – and still not replied to my abuse complaint. Let’s hope it keeps him busy. Those needing troll training sessions in readiness for visits over there, the email address is the usual one.
*Most historical research I’ve seen suggests that Richard III didn’t have a hump. But he did have a nasty way with hot pokers and young princes.
The Slog 