Newsrooms Finally Admit Existence of Place Called Belgium

Middle-aged news editors who went through a brief teenage rebellion when punk was fashionable finally conceded that there really is a place in Europe called Belgium, after one-hit wonder Plastic Bertrand insisted that he was not the voice singing ‘Ça Plane Pour Moi’ in 1978.

Millions of British viewers and listeners were astonished to hear newsreaders openly reporting the latest turn of events in a legal case in the small and deeply uninteresting country, whose existence has always been strongly denied by the media up to now.

The facts in the royalties dispute are unclear, partly because reporters keep falling asleep through boredom, but it seems that the lyrics to the tiresome, repetitive pop dirge were in fact droned by the record’s producer, whose name is pronounceable only to heavy smokers and treacle drinkers..

“It’s ironic,” said one newdesk veteran at ITN. “This Belgium place has finally burst through into reality after the nearest thing it’s ever produced to a celebrity admitted that he’s never actually done anything at all. Apparently it has some sort of king, too, but nobody at Buckingham Palace knows anything about it.”

Cartographers are now working furiously to re-attach Holland to France, in case the newly-emergent nation ever does anything else worth mentioning.