A hat-tip to regular reader “Jo of Brighton”, who has brightened up our Tuesday afternoon by directing us to a blog called the Nether Regions, which spends all its time ridiculing the extraordinarily naffness and parochialism of local papers.
Such as the Croydon Sadvertiser devoting a “news” story to the tale of a boring old woman who hasn’t got the sense to know how to lock and unlock her own car.
The newspaper reported how she called out the Fire Brigade after, as Nether Regions puts it, “an ordeal lasting what can only be described as a whole half hour”. Yes. A. Whole. Half. Hour.
Inevitably, the non-story centres on Anne Giles, a woman who seems to think that outlining her weekly diary of espressos drunk and doctors visited is really of any interest to anyone. Croydon’s insomniacs should be prescribed a 10-minute read of the woman’s personal blog, and save the NHS a small fortune.
In the past, there were some in the borough who’d assumed that “Anne Giles” was in fact the creation of the fetid imagination of a comic genius at the Sadvertiser.
Readers suggested that the blogs posted on the website were just a joke designed to make Croydon seem like the world’s most boring place, an elaborate, ironic attempt at reverse psychology.
People would read the dreary weekly offerings confident that eventually there would be some punchline or witticism involved. Tragically, they were wrong. For this was a one-joke column… Anne Giles really does exist.
In the end, even the Sadvertiser twigged that the Anne Giles blog was about as useful as Emile Heskey in a penalty box. Just like Heskey, she was dropped after failing to hit the target for too long a period.
Yet not one to take an unsubtle hint, Giles is still out there, blogging away.
Nether Regions discovered this latest tale of Giles’s numbskullery from May 2010. The “news” report provoked about 100 comments on the Sadvertiser‘s website.
Half were from those astonished that such a non-story ever got past the news desk. It’s not dubbed the Sadvertiser for nothing.
The other half came from Giles, as ever trying to justify herself.
That’s one way of driving your online traffic figures up on a slow news day, I suppose.
When living persons get adopted into rhyming slang, it’s inevitably a bit of a back-handed compliment: eating a Ruby Murray, wearing your Lionel Blairs, taking it up the Gary Glitter. For the afflicted people of Croydon, your “Nobby Stiles” might soon be replaced in our lexicon of rhyming euphemisms by your “Anne Giles”.
Some great gags on the Nether Regions site. Well worth a read: Here in my car, I feel safest of all… « The nether regions
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One of the standout examples for me was the “100 days after the riots” issue, in which they featured 100 short quotes from 100 random people in the street. Mind-numbingly boring and pointless. The sad bit was I get the feeling they were quite proud of this cheap drivel.