File Under 'People Are Shit': Chat Magazine

It’s not often that queuing in Sainsbury's and hangings at Tyburn come together in my head, but that’s exactly what happened to me the other day. While waiting to pay for some banal everyday items, I stood behind a woman who had Chat magazine in her basket.

‘Chat’ sounds like a pretty harmless publication aimed at elderly ladies who also dig the People’s Friend. However, when I looked closer I saw that Chat’s strapline is ‘Life! Death! Prizes!’ (I haven’t added the exclamation marks, Chat magazine really is screaming those words at you). It’s a novel variation on the classic ‘life, death, taxes’ trope and no doubt was focus group-tested to, er, death to reflect the interests of its lovely readers. I like the order of priority too – prizes obviously comes narrowly behind death in the Chat reader’s all-time top 3 of things they want to read about.

I was really taken aback – wow, that’s a bit brazen, I thought. No beating around the bush there! Then I read the cover stories (there’s a lot of elderly people at our local supermarket – one has time to take things in). I’ll just bullet list them because they’re all so totally wrong in every possible way:

• Why we TATTOOED our quads
• Kicked to death…for calling this brute HONEY BUNNY
• I had 10 PINTS of fat sucked out!!!
• PRONGS OF DEATH! Killed with a pitchfork
• My lovely wedding dress saved my life!
• The steamy sex life of MURDERING MARTHA…

Is it just me, or is Chat magazine reducing personal tragedy to sick morbid entertainment for the kind of women who would have been knitting in front of the guillotine during the French revolution? Am I naive to be offended?

Which brings me to the crowds that turned up for hangings at Tyburn. When we look back at our history, we are often shocked by the cheery savagery of the populace turning someone’s death into a day out. But have we really moved on? I genuinely believe that Chat magazine readers would love a few public executions. They’d be there with their camera phones, giggling as some poor fucker kicked air.

Ben Elton Get a Grip Crapness Mystery Boggle-Poser

When did Ben Elton become crap? Was it after his 60th shit novel? Or after he decided to become the nation’s sanctimonious leftie conscience? Indeed, did Ben Elton become crap or was he always crap and it just took us a while to realise? Admittedly this isn’t a philosophical question that would bewitch Wittgenstein, but having endured the ads for ‘Get a Grip’ I feel I need answers. The bit that really makes me wince is when his young female sidekick says a line relating to his age/her youth and he pulls a face of aghast bemusement. The expression reminds me of nothing less than the face that my baby son pulls when he’s doing a poo-poo. Is Ben Elton so old that he's dropping one in his colostomy bag? The mind, as it so often does these days, boggles.

Cock