Jordanian and Yemeni Protests Fail To Make News Charts

Protesters in Jordan and Yemen are putting on a brave face after their failure to topple Egypt from its dominant position at the top of the news.

Surely somebody's visit must have been disrupted a bit

“We thought we had all the right ingredients to take the media by storm,” a disappointed Yemeni protester posted on his blog this morning, which he was deeply upset to find had not been blocked by the authorities. “Popular uprisings against remote, authoritarian governments of pocket-lining crooks seemed to be in this year. Tragically, however, we failed to take into account the vital fact that Westerners rarely, if ever, book holidays here.”

Meanwhile, a Jordanian rioter hopefully informed would-be tourists that the picturesque ruins of ancient Petra featured in Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade, and are really very nice at this time of year. The Jordanian embassy later confirmed that any holidaymakers wishing to book a last-minute visit to the carved-out city would almost certainly be advised not to travel to Jordan today or tomorrow, but next week was looking good.

Some protesters, however, are taking heart from one-hit-wonder Tunisia’s protest - which stormed to the top of the news last week, but has now been quickly forgotten by fickle editors – and hoping that the same fate will befall Egypt’s entry.

Strangely, the BBC later failed to apologise for focusing entirely on one Middle East protest and ignoring the rest.

Army Called Upon To Prop Up Unpopular NUS President

As ordinary workers joined forces with student protesters on the turbulent streets of London and Manchester, hated NUS president Aaron Porter desperately called on the army to protect him from his own people.

If this tyrant is toppled, everything will sort itself out

The angry protesters - who are complaining about intolerable fees, taxes, fuel prices, rising unemployment, the creeping privatisation of the NHS, the continuing cold weather, the baby-snatching storyline in EastEnders, the new Facebook profile and the sudden cancellation of their Egyptian winter breaks - say they are no longer interested in the meaningless nobodies in government, and will settle for nothing less than the overthrow of the NUS president himself.

“Porter has shown himself to be arrogant and out of touch with the very people he claims to represent,” shouted a downtrodden socialist worker, outside the burning police station in which the beleaguered president has sought refuge. “We, the ordinary revolutionary people of Britain, will not be diverted from our objective of relieving him of power until we come up with another diversion.”

The BBC later apologised.

Greatest Mystery In World Solved: A Boat Was Involved!

Whoever would have guessed there was a simple explanation for it?

The seemingly-unanswerable question which has been plaguing the greatest minds on the internet for as long back as anybody can remember – i.e. yesterday - was finally solved today, when it was revealed that the piano was deliberately placed on the sandbar with the aid of a device known to a select few boating experts as a 'boat'.

“Well, bugger me,” said webist and genius Josh Geake when he heard the explanation. “I was convinced it washed up there on a freak tidal wave, except I wasn’t absolutely 100% sure than a non-watertight wooden box would float particularly well with ¼ tonne of cast iron inside it.”

“I suppose there probably aren’t that many unreported grand pianos floating freely around the oceans of the world after being washed overboard from cruise ships or musicians' private yachts, actually, now I come to think of it,” he added.

Other meticulously-researched theories bouncing around the interweb involved musical lizards from the ninth dimension, being flushed down an airliner’s toilet, an al-Qaeda cell of extreme noise terrorists and an outstanding example of parallel evolution in an isolated environment.

Teenager Nicholas Harrington admitted that he set fire to the grand piano, took it out to the Biscayne Bay, Florida sandbar in his father’s clever ‘boat’ device and set fire to it again in the certain hope that this inspired act of creativity would get him into a New York art school.

Since owning up to the deeply-moving work of art, he has already received unconditional offers from the Sorbonne and Plymouth College Of Art ‘n’ Design, and a written warning from state officials for dumping and incinerating trash in an designated aquatic reserve.

The piece has now been placed on public display for a limited time at the Miami-Dade Department of Environmental Resources Management’s exclusive South Dade Landfill Gallery, located in Miami’s fashionable SW 97th Avenue district.

The BBC later apologised.

Government To Offer Crime Victims Crisp New Fiver

The government today generously offered victims of crime as much as a fiver to help them rebuild their lives, promising that a whopping £30m would be put into a fund over the next three years to support those most seriously affected, including witnesses.

Or you could treat yourself to a nice cigar, of course

Charities and voluntary organisations say they are expecting bumper numbers of rape victims, for example, to rent out a copy of ‘Thelma And Louise’ with their fiver, which will help them tremendously as they struggle to work out their confidence issues and regain their sense of empowerment.

“Yes, I know, I’m all heart,” beamed Justice Secretary Ken Clarke, as he put the first of several brand new fivers into the pot. “People ask me how we can possibly afford to fling such vast sums of money around, what with this recession some people think they’re having, but isn’t it important that the victims of serious crime have access to the best emotional and practical support that five quid can buy?”

“All the more so, of course, since there are going to be an awful lot more criminals strolling about once my shake-out of the prison service starts to kick in,” he chortled sagely.

The BBC later apologised.

Exasperated God Calls Press Conference

Supreme being God today took the unprecedented step today of holding a press conference, to angrily denounce Chancellor George Osborne’s efforts to blame Britain’s woeful economic performance on the weather.

Smiting the nation’s leading financial journalists with heart attacks, God led each of them through a tunnel of light to his heavenly press suite, and promised that paramedics would revive them in time to file their extraordinary copy.

“OK, so every so often I light a little volcano or shake the ground a bit, just to see if you’ve started loving one another yet,” he admitted. “Hey, if you’d existed from before time began, you’d get a bit bored too. But I want to make one thing crystal clear: I don’t run the weather. That’s part of a complex, self-regulating ecosystem which I designed to run itself. And it ran itself perfectly well, thank you, until you buggers came along.”

Cameras capture the moment God struck

“So now that little worm Osborne tries to wriggle off the hook by claiming that your toytown state’s economy has suddenly thrown itself into reverse entirely because of a little bit of cold weather - and you fell for it!” God laughed scornfully. “Oh, for My sake - I gave you free will. Use it! Up to the end of September, your economy was recovering slowly. Now it’s collapsing by half a percent. Osborne pulls the weather out of his hat and blithely tells you it accounts for exactly a suspiciously-convenient half a percent, and you all clap like bloody seals and miss the blindingly obvious point that, even if his desperate conjuring trick is real, your precious little recovery has just flatlined.”

“OK, so let’s put to one side the rather strange inconsistency in his argument, i.e. that this terrible weather seems to have prevented people from buying stuff, but somehow not from going to work to make stuff,” he explained, as His Son held up a helpful diagram showing a rise in manufacturing output. “It got a bit nippy – that’s all that happened. It’s happened before - the only difference is that, instead of the contingency plans your dull little officials with their bowler hats and umbrellas used to dust off every few years and put into action, these days your tacky little island is run by a gang of thieves in Armani suits exclusively for the benefit of an even bigger gang of thieves in Armani suits, and the only ‘plan’ they have is to shrug and point at me, then go back to counting their loot.”

“Well, they can piss right off, because I’m not standing for it any more,” roared an angry God. “When you wake up, tell them I’ve got their bloody cards marked. Watch Osborne closely from now on. Because I promise you he’s going to be frantically scratching his sorry, boil-infested arse raw whenever he thinks nobody’s looking.”

The BBC later apologised.

Britain Carries On Watching Shite As World Revolution Begins

It's all right, Miranda's on in a minute

As country after country erupted in popular protest against its corrupt, self-serving political elites, the people of Britain farted apathetically, cracked open another tin of cooking lager and carried on watching telly.

“I dunt watch the nooze right coziss like rilly depressin?” yawned Shelley Peters, a soon-to-be-redundant housing benefit clerk, as several channels she wasn’t watching continued to show angry citizens in repressive states like Yemen, Egypt and Tunisia risking their lives and liberty to end decades of injustice. “Now yerv made me miss the start uv EastEnders? Piss orf wilya.”

Husband Mark, a call-centre slave, suddenly yelled, “Yurss! Fucken avet!” from the bedroom, as a thick millionaire wearing a shirt he likes kicked a ball in a particularly pleasing way.

“This country’s fucked innit,” he grumbled, scratching an irritating testicle as he lurched down the stairs to extract another container of hop-flavoured water from the fridge. “Why dunt sumbdy do sumfin ‘bout it ay? See them student wankuz a few weeks back kickin off rite? Buncha poncy middle-class bastuds the lot uv um. Speshly that gobby scrounger twat inna wheelchair. Thas my fucken taxes payin for that yeah? Good on them coppuz, givenum a right kicken. Servum right.”

“Wankuz,” he added as he stumped back upstairs to exercise his brain some more on Facebook about the unfortunate absence of his two favourite bigots from the airwaves.

The BBC later apologised.

Sacked Sky Presenter Seeks Extra-Large Tube Of Witch Repellant

So that's how Blackpool got promoted

Richard Keys, the Sky Sports presenter sacked after forgetting that the broadcaster he worked for is in the habit of leaving microphone channels open, today claimed that his views on the suitability of women regarding the interpretation of the rules of football were shared by the majority of extinct reptiles, and movingly shared his morbid fear of witches with the world.

Visiting TalkSPORT radio in search of a job, Mr Keys mistook the small studio he was ushered into for a job interview suite, and candidly confessed that he deserved to be “battered” for his “prehistoric banter” – an allegation hotly denied later by a crocodile spokesman for surviving saurians – before expressing his surprise at the anger his comments had generated and warning: “There are some dark forces at work here.”

The interview ended abruptly when Mr Keys claimed he saw the wing of a bat briefly bob to the surface of the coffee brought to him by “an evil tea witch”. He left via the fire escape, and was later spotted in an alternative health shop asking for “the biggest tube of witch repellent” they could find.

The BBC later apologised.

News Of The World Cleaner Finds Tape Recorder Nailed To Telephone Hidden Behind Editor’s Filing Cabinet

It's my DIY answering machine, officer

News Corp today confirmed that senior News of the World editor ‘Big Ears’ Edmondson has been sacked, after a Lithuanian cleaner failed to read the ‘Warning! Minefield’ sign on his filing cabinet and inadvertently moved it whilst looking for somewhere to plug in the vacuum cleaner – revealing a dusty telephone with a microcassette recorder nailed to the handset.

“Regrettably, further investigations into the filing cabinet have revealed thousands of little tapes, which we have now handed over to the police for their amusement,” commented ashen-faced News Corp chairman James Murdoch. “We don’t know or, frankly, care what might be on them – probably just a load of uninteresting everyday chit-chat of no possible interest to anybody – and we have no idea about the meaning, if any, of a numbered list found sellotaped to the back of the cabinet.”

“People like ‘Brown, G.’, ‘Miller, S.’, and ‘Elizabeth R’ who appear on the list are surely no more than random nobodies culled haphazardly from the phone book,” he added hopefully.

“The police have been nosing about and asking a lot of damn silly questions ever since,” he added peevishly, “Like why so many of our newsrooms’ filing cabinets are labelled ‘Danger: UXB’ and ‘Contains Gelignite – DO NOT TOUCH’. The answer, of course, is simply that many of our world-beating investigative reporters are working tirelessly to uncover explosive stories of tremendous public interest and international importance, and do not want any of their jealous colleagues stealing their sensational scoops. What, I ask you, could be more innocent?”

“Well, me, obviously,” he emphasised. “I have no idea of how the news media works, as anybody in the industry will readily agree.”

The BBC later apologised.

News Corp Reacts To BBC Web Cutbacks By Removing All News Content

No more of this, then... er... hang on...

In keeping with their side of the deal under which the BBC is to remove all entertainment content from its websites, James Murdoch announced tonight that, as of tomorrow, none of the newspapers published in Britain by News Corporation will contain any news.

“BBC sites such as h2g2, 606, Video Nation and Switch were nothing but a cynical attempt to put us out of business, by offering content that people might actually enjoy for nothing,” explained Mr Murdoch. “However, after Jeremy …Hunt’s brain was reprogrammed by my dad, we thrashed out an agreement not to encroach upon each other’s territory any more. I am therefore pleased to report that the Sun, the Times and the News of the World will in future be marketed purely for entertainment purposes, and will never again print anything of the slightest importance to anybody.”

“This mission realignment should not cause any major upheaval to our organisation,” he smiled, “And our readers probably won’t notice the difference.”

“Sky News will carry on unchanged, of course,” he continued, “It already offers primetime knockabout laughs aplenty from its stable of hilarious slapstick comedians, including Adam Boulton and Kay Burley.”

From now on, he added, News Corporation will simply be known as The Corporation.

The BBC later apologised.

Japanese Ambassador Now Demanding Apology For 31 Episodes Of ‘Tenko’

Following the BBC’s craven apology for mentioning the war, Japanese Ambassador Keiichi Hayashi has issued the perpertually penitent broadcaster with a slew of demands for grovelling acts of contrition for 31 inflammatory instances of internment-camp drama ‘Tenko’ broadcast in the 80s, 109 deeply-insulting airings of ‘Tora, Tora, Tora!’, 157 unpardonable showings of ‘From Here To Eternity’, 26 cynical counts of ‘Empire Of The Sun’ and an embarrassing one-off screening of ‘Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence’.

To propitiate the hurt feelings of the Japanese people, all of whom watch QI in solemn contemplation every week, BBC bosses have promised to push the notorious racist, Stephen Fry, into a cramped, airless box for a week to atone for his bigoted slur that double A-bomb survivor Yamamoto Tamagotchi was “either the unluckiest man alive, or the luckiest, depending on how you look at it”.

However, this is not enough for Mr Hayashi, who claims that the BBC has for decades been implementing a cynical policy of lying repeatedly to the world about Japan’s unfortunate involvement in World War II.

Here's what started it

“Every Japanese schoolchild is taught the truth about the West’s attempt to subjugate our traditionally peace-loving country,” he screamed to hastily-assembled ranks of sweating BBC producers. “Namely, that the US forces - led by a sex-crazed Burt Reynolds - callously and without provocation opened fire on the 353 aircraft of the Imperial Japanese Navy’s aerobatics team during their dazzling display at the 1941 Pearl Harbor Air Show, the ensuing explosions shaking loose their dummy bombs and torpedoes. Insane with bloodlust, however, many frenzied US gunners accidentally dropped anti-aircraft shells onto the decks of their own ships, causing superficial damage which the cynical warmonger Franklin D. Roosevelt secretly manipulated using an early, analogue version of Photoshop to inflame world opinion against our peace-loving nation.”

“Japan’s naturalist expeditions, boating enthusiasts and sun-seeking holidaymakers struggled for four miserable years to make their way home safely from all over the Far East,” he shouted, as he brandished the traditional ceremonial sword of admonition at neck height. “Meanwhile, ungrateful white imperialist squatters were occupying Hirry Hitin’s many popular holiday camps all over the Pacific, selfishly making their lives intolerable for their unfortunate Khakicoat hosts.”

The Chinese Ambassador then rang the doorbell and politely asked his Japanese counterpart if, since apologies seemed to be on the agenda, he wouldn’t mind asking his government to apologise for murdering half the population of Nanjing in 1937 – an incident which the Japanese authorities have for years stoutly maintained was caused by an atrocious lack of hygiene in a takeaway restaurant.

BBC Director-General Mark Thompson eagerly stepped forward, however, and volunteered to take the blame for that as well.

Trees Much Cuddlier Than Crips, Says Public

Look at those lovely trees

As millions of Facebook users vented their anger at government plans to sell the 18% of British trees that it owns to salivating chainsaw enthusiasts, a disabled jobless registered a solitary, selfish vote in support of a petition condemning the government’s proposed cuts to the welfare budget.

“How dare he?” commented one outraged tree fan. “Trees are lovely. They give us all our air, and they look all nice and green. What have disableds ever done for us? Nothing. I wouldn’t mind so much if they just had even a hint of style, but God, just look at them. They always look like they’ve been catapulted through a charity shop. And they’re ugly.”

Another person who lives in a nice part of the countryside added, “I tried to hug a disabled with Asperger’s Syndrome once - because that’s the kind of wonderful caring person I am - and the ungrateful shit jumped out of his skin, gave me a creepy, cold look and walked away. Trees don’t walk away when you hug them. They love you unconditionally.”

An environmentalist posted: “Trees live for a very long time. Disabled people don’t. There simply is no comparison.”

“How dare some person in a wheelchair – a wheelchair I paid for, mind, with my hard-earned taxes – say I don’t care about the most vulnerable people in society?” complained a Guardian reader. “Of course I care about them, the whiny useless bastards. But they can speak for themselves, or at least squeak or grunt or use one of those hilarious drony things like Stephen Hawking. The poor trees can’t speak for themselves, though, which is why I have to bombard my friends’ newsfeeds at least twice a day with demands to sign online petitions to save the trees.”