Queen Bursts

Britain is crushed in the grip of constitutional disaster today, following the tragic bursting of the Queen in the middle of her own Jubilee after the entire BBC tried to crawl inside her rectum.

Horrified A&E medics at St Mary’s Hospital fainted at the sight of the grossly-distended monarch swaying towards them, suspended by steel cables beneath an overloaded air ambulance. Unconfirmed reports indicate that, as the mercy flight passed over Hyde Park, tragic royal correspondent Nicholas Witchell fell out of the royal arse and drowned in the Serpentine before the Queen tragically exploded as she was being set down in an ambulance bay.

Shocked eyewitnesses claim the famously impartial BBC’s ill-conceived journey up Her Majesty’s back passage began at lunchtime, when the One O’Clock News was presented from the gardens of Buckingham Palace – although it is feared that advance parties may have been probing the royal anus since Thursday.
 

Paxman will need years of counselling for that survivor guilt

“I personally saw at least two dozen cameramen, sound engineers and Louisa Baldini disappearing down the back of the imperial knickers as they interviewed Sir Cliff Richard, closely followed by Emily Maitlis,” sobbed a typical traumatised viewer. “The Queen didn’t flinch, bless her. It must be pretty uncomfortable having the entire BBC crawling up your bum, especially at her age, but she’s a real trouper - she didn’t bat an eyelid.”

Tragically, all that now remains of the BBC is a forlorn Jeremy Paxman. Meanwhile, Sir Elton John has been executed in the Tower of London to prevent him from rewriting Candle In The Wind again, tragically reminding a grief-stricken nation of the Queen’s unpopularity when Diana died.

News Goes On Strike

Almost all of the world’s news has gone on strike in sympathy with BBC journalists, the nation's newsdesks reported today.

“We’re reduced to rewriting yesterday’s stories about the US budget crisis, crackdowns in Syria and the Norwegian gunman,” said one sub-editor. “If this keeps up, pretty soon we’ll run out of news completely and have to resort to filling our pages with ill-informed opinion pieces off the tops of our heads.”

“So it’s basically business as usual,” he added.

A spokesman for the striking news said: “”.

Newspapers Clamour For Inquiry Into Just The News Of The World

Kill this evil monster! Kill it now! say all other papers

With one voice, the UK’s world-renowned newspaper industry has suddenly called on the government to set up a formal inquiry immediately – an inquiry whose terms of reference, they insist, must be strictly and absolutely limited to just the News Of The World.

“There are no words in the lexicon of disgust adequate to describe the latest phone hacking revelations involving just the News of the World,” thundered an editorial sermon from the virginal Daily Mail, which summed up the sense of outrage felt by the untarnished majority of Britain’s famously scrupulous journalists.

Prime minister David Cameron is now under mounting pressure to launch an inquiry into just the News Of The World before night falls, so tomorrow’s papers can loftily fill their front pages with self-congratulatory headlines declaring their absolute moral supremacy.

“We urge the prime minister to act quickly in limiting the scope of an inquiry to just the News Of The World, in order to focus all of its attention on the single rotten apple in the luxuriant orchard of British journalism,” said a spokesman for the National Union of Journalists, although strictly legitimate sources appear to indicate that he went on to mutter: “Before some nosey bastard starts wondering how the rest of us get our exclusives.”

Propaganda Department Only For Olympics, Promise MPs

There's a good chap

The Foreign Affairs Committee has published a report urging the government to set up a special unit to rebuff and correct negative stories about Britain which could damage the country’s reputation during the build-up to the 2012 Olympic Games.

The unit – which would not be known as the Ministry of Propaganda, said the MPs, because of certain negative connotations – would be tasked with promoting Britain as diverse, inclusive, friendly, orderly, helpful, peace-loving, nutritious, big-hearted, crime-free, sustainable, well fit, paved with gold, elysian, huggable, lemon fresh, utopian, scrumptious, tropical, 100% organic, bouncing with health, always ready with a cup of tea and a cheery song; or, as the committee put it, “in a word - perfect.”

“During the Olympics there will be some 25,000 reporter johnnies in Britain, and most of them damnably foreign to boot,” said chairman Richard Ottaway, “What you have to bear in mind is that these games are going to be watched by four billion wogs, all of whom are going to see that the bloody place is falling to bits if we’re not careful.”

The committee proposes that any foreign news reports of rubbish-strewn shopping centres, run-down inner cities, panhandling drug addicts, Muslims, gang-related shootings, neo-nazi marches, howling drunk Scotsmen, Daily Mail headlines or riot police hammering the crap out of disabled protesters would be countered immediately with smiling ministerial pronouncements that the silly journalists had inadvertently wandered into a family-friendly theme park showcasing the bad old days under Labour. The straying reporters would then be assigned a helpful police minder to save them from accidentally departing from the script again.

Prime minister David Cameron said he would take the committee’s recommendations on board, stressing that the propaganda unit would, naturally, only be in existence for the duration of the Olympics.

“After that, you have my solemn word that you will hear no more of it,” he promised, with a wide grin.

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.

In Memoriam: Brian Hanrahan, BBC Correspondent

“I counted them all out, and I counted them all back,” he famously reported, during the Falklands campaign, to get around MoD reporting restrictions.

In the space of a week, both he and the Harriers were counted out for the last time; sadly, they will never be counted back again.

BBC Journalists’ Strike Reveals Extent Of Dependency On Agency Newsfeeds

What is it these people actually do? muse BBC managers

With journalists from the BBC on a 48-hour strike, the extent to which its once-respected news service now relies on simply cutting and pasting content from news agencies like Reuters and Associated Press was revealed by its utterly unaffected website and teletext pages.

However, a sudden shortage of presenters capable of sitting on their backsides in a studio and reading aloud at a steady three words per second has forced the cancellation of Radio 4’s Today programme and several Radio 5 Live shows, a BBC manager told an agency journalist whose subsequent report was instantly pasted onto a web page by a non-striking BBC technician.

BBC Director General Mark Thompson fearlessly took to the blogosphere to tell the world: "We believe that much of the output on the BBC will be unaffected by this action.”

Viewers and listeners are now eagerly waiting for some sort of explanation of just what it is that the corporation’s 4,100 NUJ members actually do.

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.

What I Saw From 2000 Miles Away: Melanie Phillips’ Eyewitness Account of Israeli Raid

Respected British journalist Melanie Phillips has braved world opinion by releasing her startling eyewitness account of what really happened on the Marmara, the aid-carrying ship ambushed by Israeli commandos yesterday.

Writing on the Spectator’s website, Ms Phillips tells how she witnessed the assault at first hand from her desk two thousand miles away in London.

“What the lazy, ignorant and bigoted BBC aren’t telling you is that these so-called ‘peace activists’ planned the attack from the outset,” she explained. “The Marmite was in fact loaded to the gunwales with wire-guided knives, heat-seeking cricket bats and pipes made of depleted uranium - deadly weapons in the arsenal of six hundred trained jihadists hell-bent on martyrdom. They deliberately steered their warship straight into the midst of a small group of off-duty Israeli reservists - who were harmlessly playing a friendly game of sea paintball in their rowing boats and towed gyro-kites - with nothing but bloody massacre in mind.”

The frightened Israelis desperately tried to escape, swore Ms Phillips, but evil strongmen trained in a secret al-Qaeda circus grasped the gyro-kites’ whirling rotors and dragged them down onto the decks, while the ship’s bows opened to swallow up the fleeing rowers. The terrified captives feebly fired their paint pellets – all of which, owing to shortages caused by cruelly-misguided UN sanctions, happened to be red - at the seething army of chanting terrorists, who only retreated after their weapons had all been broken over the heads of the hapless Israelis.

Ms Phillips stoutly maintains that it was then that the masked death squads brought out their deadliest weapons: BB slings, each one capable of unleashing a lethal marble that can easily kill if fired at point-blank range into an unprotected brain.

It was only at this point that one of the beleaguered Israelis remembered he still had the flare pistol with which he had started his innocent paintball game, and with one lucky shot managed to subdue the six hundred trained killers.

“It is clear that the entire world has got the wrong end of the stick, as usual,” said the omniscient Ms Phillips, as the woefully ill-informed UN Security Council issued a tragically wrong-headed condemnation of Israel. “The Israeli government has only got itself to blame for not getting its honest, unbiased version of events across to anyone but me.”

“It’s a good job I happened to be close by in London to witness the truth of these shocking events at the far end of the Mediterranean,” she added, before returning to her fearless exposé of the communist threat facing us all.

Tears Of Joy At Newsdesks As Haiti Earthquake's Missing British Angle Finally Located

The faraway Haitian earthquake suddenly became a matter of paramount importance today, as thousands of frantically-digging journalists finally succeeded in unearthing a story about a missing Briton amid the appalling mass of jumbled detritus about uninteresting foreign paupers.

Although the Red Cross estimates that 50,000 unimportant black people have died in the disaster, with millions injured, orphaned or made homeless, the full scale of the unimaginable human tragedy was brought home to the front pages by the discovery that UN worker Ann Barnes has not been seen since Tuesday.

On hearing the awful news, prime minister Gordon Brown immediately swung into action by urging the world to send urgently-needed troops and supplies that could be used to find the missing British passport holder.

Meanwhile, the UK newspaper industry is generously donating thousands of tons of newsprint over the all-important next few days, to ensure that the British angle on the story does not die.

Meanwhile, in the United States, a concerned public is anxiously waiting for Hollywood's leading actors to appear on TV asking it for donations.

Nev Filter To Charge For Feeble News-Based Satire

Unpopular current affairs-based satirical blog The Nev Filter is to charge internet users for the privilege of shrugging their shoulders at its intemperate rants, announced proprietor Neville Shite today.

"Frankly, I'm sick of busting my considerable gut scouring the world's headlines for a piss-taking angle every day - or whenever I can be arsed - and getting sod-all in return, other than a hollow feeling of having ineffectually vented my spleen," he told himself over a cup of coffee this morning. "If the John Thomas Press can charge readers for the dubious privilege of checking the whippet-racing results on the Whitby Gazette website, I reckon I should be able to get away with demanding a quid for each painstakingly-researched diatribe."

"Readers will be directed to a completely bona fide payment site based in Ukraine," he explained, "Which will invite them to submit their credit card details, and offer them genuine penis-enlargement sweets on a daily basis."

The media mongrel then went on to say that the charges would be applied retrospectively for articles already read.

"I reckon you all owe me about £500 each," Nev told his readers. "Come on, cough up. I fancy some flying lessons."

News and Satire: An Apology From the Nev Filter

In the light of yesterday's embarrassed announcement by two leading newspapers in Bangladesh that they ran a news story about faked moon landings without realising that their sole source for the story, www.theonion.com, was a world-renowned satirical website that has been making up comedy news-based stories for 13 years, the Nev Filter has conducted an urgent review of its own journalistic procedures.

It is with considerable shame that I now confess to having been less than rigorous in my own daily reporting of the newsworthy events.

Some of the Nev Filter's ground-breaking reports, it now transpires, were based on nothing more substantial than an item posted on my Yahoo homepage from the notorious Sky News comedy website, a notorious source of fiction and fantasy run by James Murdoch, a well-known comedian.

Such rudimentary attempts at corroboration as were occasionally essayed by the writer involved nothing more than a quick scan through the corresponding page from BBC News - a discredited organisation of jokers which is utterly compromised by its total control by the UK Ministry of Propaganda, according to an unimpeachable source (J. Murdoch).

The Nev Filter can only apologise profusely to the readers it so shamefully misled, and from now on will only publish 100%-accurate news stories corroborated by reliable sources which are owned by such reputable paragons of truth as the Daily Mail & General Trust, Express Newspapers and Mr Murdoch's utterly trustworthy News Corporation.

You Read It Here First

Sensitive government e-mails are tumbling into the blogosphere, according to claims made in the Nev Filter blog, following a red-faced apology from 10 Downing Street after an email from Gordon Brown's former press officer - proposing a slur campaign against senior Conservatives - found its way into the hands of Paul Staines, the writer of the Guido Fawkes political blog.

"I can confirm that the Nev Filter has come into possession of an email circulated by Gordon Brown to Britain's senior police officers," said Nev today. "It suggests that Gordon is more than a little pissed off with the media banging on about the recession day in, day out and drops heavy hints to the effect that, what with the budget coming up in a few weeks and the papers screaming about reducing public expenditure, if they want to hang on to their funding they'd better pull their heads out of their arses and come up with a few major terrorist scares for the front pages, pronto."

"I've also heard that the Daily Fortnight has a copy of a crudely-designed Flash game in which Boris Johnson runs around trying to impregnate every woman he meets, leaving blonde babies littered around the neighbourhood," added the obscure online ranter. "And it seems to have been created by none other than Lord Mandelson."

The online satirist said he also had it on good authority that The Daily Mash blog had got hold of an email from Number Ten containing a digital image of David Cameron, which had been crudely modified in Paint Shop Pro.

"Unless, of course, he normally sports a top hat bearing the message 'Posh twat - kick me hard' as he cycles to the House of Commons," he added.

Traditional journalists are said to be deeply concerned at the emerging trend of sensitive documents being leaked to underground bloggers.

"These people operate on the fringes of the media world, without the financial backing of a large corporate to pay them handsome bonuses for obligingly receiving leaked information from departmental moles," complained one tabloid hack. "I don't like the look of this at all."

Tsvangirai's Call for Action Not Quite Important Enough To Us

Zimbabwe’s opposition candidate, Morgan Tsvangirai, has announced his withdrawal from the controversial run-off presidential election due to be held this Friday, saying that the prevailing conditions of violence and intimidation “do not permit the holding of a credible poll.”

So far, 86 people have been killed and 200,000 displaced from their homes for supporting Mr Tsvangirai.

President Robert Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party responded by claiming that Mr Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change was responsible for the wave of political violence sweeping the country.

“I wish these people would stop burning their homes, beating themselves to death and raping themselves,” said Mr Mugabe. “They are only doing it for attention. I blame the foreign media, who are working in league with the evil British Empire.”

Mr Tsvangirai is hoping that the outside world will force Mr Mugabe to stand down from the presidency. However, when he rang the world asking for support, he was put on hold and told by a computer that although his call was important, the world was currently fully engaged in watching Euro 2008 and complaining about the rising cost of filling its people-carriers and 4x4s with petrol, and instructed to call back later, if he was still alive.

“In the interests of fairness, we are steadily working our way through the alphabet,” said a spokesman for the United Nations. “And unfortunately for Zimbabwe, we seem to have been stuck on the letter ‘I’ for the last few decades. To be honest, we haven’t even finished with ‘A’ yet.”

Coldplay Topple Tibet and the Olympics from Top of News Charts

The weekend saw the Olympic torch pass through the streets of the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, amid heavy Chinese security and suggestions that the people lining the route were hand-picked by the authorities. The re-released story briefly topped the news charts, before being toppled by the exciting news that Coldplay have their first number one hit with their current single, ‘Viva La Vida’.

TV viewers around the world were puzzled to see Tibet and the Olympic torch back on their screens after a gap of several weeks. BBC switchboards were jammed with calls, with “Is this a repeat?” the most common complaint.

“I thought we’d sorted Tibet out weeks ago,” said one viewer. “Now I’m worrying about the fuel prices. When that blows over, I might bother myself slightly about the A-level results, or get vaguely worked up over the length of the parliamentary recess. But Tibet is old news. Boring.”

Grand News Cockup IV

Embarrassed news editors have had to admit that the media furore over the alleged stabbing in London of a customer queuing to buy the latest must-have console game Grand Theft Auto IV was grossly misreported.

The man, it turned out, had not pre-ordered the game, was not in the 100-strong queue outside Croydon’s Gamestation, and was in fact attacked a quarter of a mile away outside a train station.

Further enquiries revealed that there is in fact no such game as Grand Theft Auto IV, and nor is there any such thing as responsible journalism.