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.

Pope Excommunicates Belgium

The war of words between Pope Benedict XVI and the Belgian police over the latter’s recent crackdown on kiddie-fiddling bishops has escalated, with the pontiff dramatically rising to his feet during this morning’s mass in St Peter’s Square, raising an arm and performing the dreaded Rite of Excommunication on Belgium.

“The mounting of raids on retired archbishops is a deplorable act unprecedented in the darkest chapters of human history,” scowled the Pope, resplendent in his best excommunicating vestments. ”Unlike the mounting of small boys by the clergy, which is a perfectly normal everyday occurrence.”

“Not even Hitler’s Gestapo had the bare-faced effrontery to subject Catholic priests to the petty, piffling laws of the land,” he fumed. “And believe me, I should know.”

Unrepentant Belgian police pointed out that hundreds of Catholic priests were in fact sent to the concentration camps for having the moral courage to speak openly against the Nazis, but Pope Benedict has spent the day wearing solid gold earplugs and shouting the Horst Wessel Song very loudly.

“The bible clearly teaches that, er, it is perfectly all right for the jackbooted enforcers of a totalitarian regime of mass murderers to apply their sick ideas of justice to the clergy, but unutterably wicked for a democratic nation’s upholders of the law to question a holy bishop’s divine right to familiarise himself with the contents of little boys’ knickers,” stuttered a sweating cardinal to reporters in the Vatican later. “I hope this clears up a minor ecumenical misunderstanding, and if it doesn’t then anybody communicating with Belgium will have to answer for their sins.”