Yellow Bellied Press

The press received a stunning reversal of fortune in ongoing battle for privacy being waged between media and celebrities yesterday, when Morgan Pierce, editor of top British tabloid the Daily Tits, found himself the subject of a sensational two page colour photo spread in rival paper The Shite. The surreptitiously shot pictures show Mr Pierce standing in his living room with his trousers around his ankles masturbating furiously whilst the popular children’s programme Grange Hill plays on the television. According to press community gossip, the pictures were allegedly secretly taken by former radio DJ and rent-a-celebrity Chris Evans – apparently with the aid of a zoom lens whilst standing on a dustbin in the alley running behind Pierce’s back garden – and sold to The Shite as revenge for recent unflattering photos of the Ginger Tosser and his child bride Billie Piper published by Pierce. “This is an outrageous invasion of my privacy,” storms the journalist, who maintains that he was actually whacking off over an adult heterosexual porn magazine which was out of shot on the floor in front of him, and that it was mere coincidence that a programme featuring underage school uniform clad girls was showing on the TV. “What I do in my own time, in the privacy of my own home, is entirely my own business! What possible purpose can be served by the publication of these pictures? Its just a cheap publicity stunt to try and discredit me! There can be no public interest defence in this case – I’m not a celebrity or a politician!”

Despite his humiliation, Pierce still believes that celebrities are fair game for intrusive press attention. “Damn it all, we created them – where would they be without the publicity we give them? And surely the public have a right to know what sordid antics these over-privileged bastards get up to in private – they finance their over-bloated lifestyles by buying their over-priced crappy records and watching their dismal films and TV series,” he says. “I don’t know what that ginger-haired geek Evans is complaining about – his career has been in free-fall since he was sacked by Virgin Radio, and as for his wife, when was the last time she released a single? She’s fallen off the celebrity map altogether. They should count themselves bloody lucky we took the trouble to print their pictures at all – they need all the publicity they can get!” However, Pierce remains vague as to exactly how pictures of Evans and his wife slumped in steaming pools of urine in a Soho back alley, their hair matted with their own vomit in the aftermath of one of their celebrated drunken binges, could in any way be beneficial to their careers or public images.

This is not the first time that celebrities have attempted to turn the tables on their tabloid tormentors. Only last month a video of celebrity scandal magazine In Flagrante editor Ross Bung on the toilet was published by several dubious websites. The secretly taken grainy black and white footage shows Bung nearly giving himself a hernia as he strains to pass a particularly huge turd – close-ups show his eyes popping and throbbing veins standing out on his forehead as his agonized cries of “Jesus! Come on you bastard! Yes, yes!” are mixed with loud farting noises. After several minutes of rocking back and forth, he groans orgasmically as the huge brown trout splashes into the pan. His elation quickly turns to despair as he finds his gargantuan jobby won’t flush away, and he spends the next ten minutes hilariously trying to beat it into submission with the toilet brush – as he flails around wildly, bits of turd which have become attached to the bristles are spattered all over the bathroom walls and ceiling.

Although he has tried to dismiss it as a fake, the toilet video has seriously damaged Bung’s standing in superstar circles. “Now they know his toilet habits, the celebrity ‘A-list’ are very reluctant to invite him to dinner parties,” says top showbiz writer Mary Palm. “Can you blame them? The last thing the likes of Nicole Kidman and Tom Hanks want is to find a huge turd blocking their u-bend, or their fabulous gold-plated bathroom covered in shit.” The film is widely rumoured to be the work of supermodel Naomi Campbell, who had been seeking recourse against Bung since a video of her using an electric toothbrush as an impromptu vibrator backstage at a fashion show had emerged on the In Flagrante website. “Although the video was later proved to be a fake, it did caused Campbell enormous financial damage, as it resulted in her being dropped from a highly lucrative series of toothpaste commercials,” says Palm. “The video apparently showed her using the minty-striped breath-freshening brand she was meant to be selling as a lubricant – that’s hardly the sort of thing that’s going to encourage potential customers to put the stuff in their mouths.”

Ultimately, Palm has little sympathy for either press or celebrities. “The celebrities bring it upon themselves – its no good trying to claim you have a right to privacy when you happily sell exclusive photo rights of your most intimate personal moments to the media,” she says, referring to the recent court case in which Hollywood couple Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta Jones attempted to sue Alright! Magazine for publishing pictures of their wedding night, showing the aged Douglas panting and gasping for breath as he attempted to mount his young bride and suffering a near coronary as he climaxed. However, their case was undermined when it was alleged that they had sold the rights to their honeymoon – including extensive coverage of the conception of their next child using a fibre-optic cable secreted in Douglas’ penis – to rival magazine Yo!, for over a million dollars. Palm is equally scathing about the press. “They don’t give a toss about ‘public interest’ – all they worry about is circulation. Tits and bums generally sell papers, and well-tanned surgically enhanced celebrity tits and bums sell even more,” she opines. “But even worse are the public who buy this dross – if they weren’t so obsessed by seeing pictures of Michael Douglas’ wizened old penis, just because he’s a celebrity, nobody would bother taking or printing the pictures in the first place!”