Notorious tabloid The Shite has been forced to apologise to the Queen after printing a story implying that she had posed naked for a photographer. “I just asked her to take off her clothes. It was all artistic, nothing kinky like,” claimed fifty eight year old Gavin Plood. “I can tell you, she might be over eighty, but she’s still a looker. Phwooar!” Amateur photographer Plood said in the article that he paid Her Majesty eighty pounds for the session, which took place in his Hove studio – a room above a derelict shop. “If she’d kept her kit on, it would only have been forty quid – that’s the going rate for these sessions,” he revealed. According to Plood, the Queen had answered an ad he’d placed in the Brighton and Hove Weekly Pictorial Advertiser for photographic models. “Nobody was surprised as I was when she turned up,” he said. “I mean, it’s only a local paper, I was just expecting another hard up former page three girl turned hairdresser, with sagging boobs and a fat arse, to turn up, in a desperate attempt to rekindle their glamour modelling career.” Instead, Plood claims, the Queen of England herself arrived at the studio one rainy afternoon last March. “Obviously, she was incognito – she turned up in Vauxhall Astra rather than a Roller, with Prince Philip himself, rather than a chauffer, behind the wheel,” he reveals. “They were dressed down too – no tiaras or any of that bollocks! Liz was dressed in a green shell suit and a baseball cap, while Phil just had his dirty raincoat and a flat cap instead of an Admiral’s uniform. I can’t say I was surprised by their clothes – just common sense really, their usual clobber would have stood out like a sore thumb around here.”
During the two hour session the Queen reportedly told Plood that it wasn’t a one-off and that she worked regularly as a life model. “She reckoned that she mainly worked in the London area, but that she’d seen my ad and fancied a bit of sea air. It was that and the fact that I paid cash which attracted her,” he told the newspaper. “She doesn’t just do photographic sessions – she also poses for art classes at local schools and colleges.” According to the amateur photographer, the Queen confided to him that she only continued with the modelling because she needed the cash. “Everyone assumes she’s loaded, but all her money is tied up in palaces and castles – she just doesn’t have ready access to cash,” he explains. “Liz told me the money she gets from being a life model pays enough for her and Phil to go out to the pub or the bingo a couple of times a week – they’re getting on a bit and it’s their only comfort, you know.”
The Shite admitted that story was entirely false and, far from stripping for Mr Plood, it was the photographer who disrobed for Her Majesty. “In reality Mr Plood is an obsessive stalker who once broke into Buckingham Palace, and whipped his plonker out in front of the Queen,” said a spokesperson. “We knew nothing about it until the police contacted us after an officer recognised Plood’s picture in the paper and informed us that he was on the Sex Offenders’ Register.” The spokesperson added that the story had been bought from Mr Plood in good faith, although, in retrospect, it should have been suspicious when he showed them some of his ‘nude’ photographs of the Queen. “It’s easy to be wise after the event, but at the time it seemed quite credible that Her Majesty might have a firm set of D-cup gazonkas,” says the spokesperson. “However, by the time we realised that they were actually pictures from a porn magazine with the Queen’s head stuck on them, it was too late. The article had already gone to press.”
It has subsequently emerged that this wasn’t the first story that the tabloid had bought from Mr Plood: seven years earlier it had paid him two thousand pounds for his exclusive pictures of a nude modelling session by pop group Girls Aloud. “They were just starting out, and needed to make some money on the side,” he had claimed at the time. “It was all very tastefully done – none of that girl-on-girl stuff, or touching themselves in lewd poses. It was simply a series of artistic tableaux inspired by the Bible. The Saddam and Gomorrah bit of the Bible, mainly.” However, upon closer examination, the pictures turned out to involve five of Plood’s extensive collection of sex dolls, rather than the real girl group. “Apparently it’s another one of his hobbies – he has a huge collection of these dolls and dresses them up to look like various female celebrities,” admitted the newspaper’s spokesperson. “In fact, he used the two grand we gave him to commission a specially built doll of that bird with the big knockers off of Eastenders. Apparently, his probation officer encourages this particular obsession – he reckons it stops the old bugger from pestering real celebrity women.”
Plood isn’t the only sex offender that The Shite has had dealings with in recent years. In one notorious incident, three years ago, it ran a series of ‘exclusive’ pictures of celebrities in intimate situations, allegedly taken by a top paparazzi photographer. “Those pictures of soap actresses with their knockers out in the privacy of their own bedrooms boosted our circulation by tens of thousands,” explains the paper’s spokesperson. “The bloke we bought them from seemed to have an endless supply of them, too. I must admit, that as they got saucier and more and more intimate, we did begin to wonder how he was getting them, but we just assumed that he had a very long telescopic lens on his camera.” The still pictures were followed by a series of videos, featuring various celebrities masturbating in their bedrooms, sitting on the toilet and performing lewd sex acts with various items of fruit. “They were all grainy with tinny sound quality, but the subjects could still be clearly identified – we knew they’d be perfect for the launch of our adults-only subscription web site, so we bought the lot, no questions asked,” says the spokesperson. “They were purchased in good faith – the photographer told us they were ‘home videos’ taken by the people involved that he’d somehow managed to obtain.” Unfortunately for The Shite, the ‘paparazzi’ turned out to be a serial stalker of TV celebrities, who was finally caught when he fell through former Blue Peter presenter Valerie Singleton’s bedroom ceiling. “Apparently he slipped whilst drilling a hole over her bed for a webcam to shoot through,” says the spokesperson. “He had more surveillance equipment than MI5 and News International combined. It turned out we were financing his hobby.”
Despite having to pay out millions of pounds in out-of-court settlements to the celebrities involved in the debacle, a year later The Shite paid another mysterious ‘source’ for details of a plot to kidnap former Spice Girl Gerri Halliwell. “He reckoned he could get us a deal to negotiate exclusively with the kidnappers – we were planning a huge promotion asking readers to contribute to raising the ransom. If we could meet their demands, the kidnappers promised not to let her go,” the spokesperson explains. “How were we to know that he was the one planning the kidnapping?” Nevertheless, in spite of these unfortunate incidents The Shite is keen to emphasise that sex offenders with potential stories should not be deterred from submitting them to the paper. “Just because they’re pervs and nonces doesn’t mean that they might not have a good story,” says the tabloid’s spokesperson. “Treating them as fantasists and liars would just be discriminatory – and that sort of thing just isn’t acceptable in this day and age.”
