Paper Monitor
11:56 UK time, Wednesday, 4 February 2009
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
What sort of colour is sherbet-green, for is not sherbet always white? This strange hue gets a mention in the Times in a piece on M&S's recruitment of 1970s model Marie Helvin to model its new range for women in their mid-40s and over.
Helvin (pictured right) is now 56, "staggeringly ancient" in model years, notes fashion editor Lisa Armstrong. "This is equivalent to the age Methuselah reached - 969."
A victory for womankind? Armstrong is unsure, given "the amount of effort Helvin clearly expends on looking the way she does in the campaign shots" and, importantly, the fact that the clothes have a certain va-va-voom, so long as you are a woman in her mid-40s and over who likes to wear animal print tops and jackets in the aforementioned shade of green. Or a "boxy sub-Chanel" number in sherbet pink. Whatever that is.
Paper Monitor is equally mystified by "MotoGP". It's a sport, and its champion is Valentino Rossi, who has suffered an "unlikely injury [that] has the rest of us laughing", according to the Times. The paper's idiosyncratic sports writer Simon Barnes expounds at length on Rossi's injury - sustained while drawing the curtains and necessitating stitches - but nowhere does he explain what MotoGP is, other than to make reference to motorbikes and taking turns at high speed.
Meanwhile, another possible victory for womankind can be found in the Daily Mail, which very much likes the newly brunette Scarlett Johansson. But the Times prefers her blonde, and goes so far as to blame Posh Spice - in her long-gone Essex guise - with this extraordinary sentence: "Everyone knows that Mrs Beckham is steadily gaining influence among the stars of Tinseltown..."
And finally, a return once more to Fleet Street's love-hate relationship with the snow. The Mail is in clover. Said flowers may be entombed in ice in a Home Counties field made slick by the toboggan tracks of dozens of demob-happy children and skiving stranded workers, but in clover none the less.
For the transport chaos and school closures occasioned by the snow give the Mail the opportunity to air one of its favourite blusters. "Frozen out by 'elf and safety" runs its front page, with more spleen vented on pages 4,5, 8,9, 14, 15 and 17 - including a "waspish personal view from Quentin Letts" in which he invokes not just the spirit of the Blitz but Captain Scott as well - plus an additional double-page spread devoted to photos of amusing snowmen and women.
What's not to like?
UPDATE 1429 GMT: Paper Monitor has just popped down to its local newsagent (one of a large chain) via the sandwich stop, and spotted free copies of Day of the Triffids being given away with bagged copies of the Times (see pic, right). Either Saturday's come early or the Thunderer is raising the stakes in mid-week giveaways.
The 
