“Have you noticed that there just haven’t been any good religious ‘miracles’ or portents of late?  I mean, not so very long ago it seemed that hardly a day went by without there being reports of weeping statues, or of images of Jesus or assorted saints appearing in the most unlikely of places,” declares Jason Uckler, pop culture historian and small press publisher.   I ask you, when was the last time you saw a tabloid headline screaming about how some guy had found a dog turd shaped like Christ on the cross, or seen the face of the Madonna in pool of vomit in the alleyway behind their local MacDonalds?  (Mind you, I have to concede that the former is less likely to happen now that people are obliged to clear up their own dogs’ shit, thus depriving us of many potential sightings of such things).” According to Uckler, the decline of such stories is inextricably linked to the decline of Britain’s tabloid press.  “I don’t know about anyone else, but I used to quite enjoy reading about this sort of stuff – I was always keen to see just how bizarre the sightings would get: ‘I was watching a porn film last night and one of the guys had a scrotum which resembled the face of Christ when seen from a certain angle’, that sort of thing,” he notes.  “It’s the same thing with portents and omens – when did we last see a plague of locusts or a rain of fish or frogs reported?”

The problem, Uckler contends, lies with the tabloids’ increasing obsession with such trivia as celebrity news and Royal scandals, along with scaremongering about the next war, epidemic or the threat of AI wiping out humanity, not to mention immigration and encouraging right wing extremism. “Not only is it profoundly depressing, but it leaves no room for the sort of stuff we used to expect from tabloids: ghosts, UFOs, backstreet miracles and the downright weird,” explains the historian. “I know that every so often some tabloid or other likes to try and scaremonger with a story about how some guy who predicted the late Queen’s death has now predicted when World War Three will break out, (although, I have to say that predicting the death of a woman nearly a hundred years old and in obviously declining health isn’t the most impressive of predictions – something the papers themselves obviously realised as they later substituted predicting the Queen’s death with a claim that he had predicted the pandemic). But it simply isn’t any proper substitute for the real thing.” Uckler believes that contemporary tabloid publishers have lost sight of the true purpose of their publications. “They’ve mistaken them for legitimate newspapers, but in truth, a popular tabloid is no place for news,” he opines. “They’re meant to be about popular entertainment, about giving readers what they can’t get anywhere else – weird shit of the most marvellous kind!”

Consequently, Uckler is planning to launch his own ‘traditional tabloid’ via his small press, which usually puts out academic tomes on various aspects of popular culture, all with low print runs. “Putting out a weekly tabloid – modelled on the classic, but long defunct, British weeklies like Tit Bits, Reveille and Weekend – will be quite a departure for us,” he concedes. “But I can promise that its pages will be chock full of the sort of weird stuff that is currently so sadly lacking in current tabloids.” Indeed, prior to going to print with a first issue, Uckler is currently busy researching potential stories, travelling the length and breadth of the UK searching for the weird and the wonderful. “I actually started by going through the archives of those old weeklies and tried to follow up on some of the stories I recalled from my youth,” he explains. “There was one account of some rural old crone claiming that her jam-making could predict world events – ‘Last year my freshly made raspberry jam soured overnight after I’d sealed it in its jar – three days later the Six Day War erupted in the Middle East!’, was one of her claims. Well, incredibly, it turns out that she’s still alive, living in a run down remote cottage in Devon!”

Visiting the woman – who claims to be a hundred and forty years old – Uckler learned that she puts her longevity down to her jam. “Apparently, it has amazing healing properties – sticking it up your bum could cure piles, for instance,” he claims. “Moreover, it hasn’t lost any of its predictive qualities, either. She told me that back in February she was awoken in the night by the sound of breaking glass – when she investigated her larder, she found that two jars of gooseberry jam had unaccountably exploded – a clear portent of war!  Within weeks, the US had started bombing Iran!” As well as revisiting old stories, Uckler has been looking into new reports of the strange and paranormal. “I was very excited to learn of a heavenly portent of disaster witnessed by multiple people in the City of London, just after Liz Truss became Prime Minister,” he enthuses. “They told me of how they had seen a thundercloud shaped like an arse had descend over the City and let forth a colossal clap of thunder that sounded like a huge fart just prior to the massive stock market crash. Triggered by Truss’ insane budget!”

Uckler is also hoping to run down some new stories of UFO incidents to help fill the pages of his paper. “Even UFO sightings are boring nowadays – they are all vague videos of fuzzy lights in the sky,” he laments.  Not like the good old days when you’d get nice clear cut pictures of saucer (or hubcap) shaped craft in the sky, or even sometimes on the ground. Even better, those tales of eerie space suited figures peering through the windows of lonely farm houses!” Uckler is confident that his new publication will have a wide appeal. “People don’t want to read depressing news stories in their low end tabloids – they want to read stuff that sounds just plausible enough to be believable, but that could equally be utter bollocks. But entertaining bollocks!” he muses. “We really need to get back to that wonderful age of tabloid ‘miracles’ that amused, entertained and stoked that elusive ‘sense of wonder’ in impressionable young kids like me when they read them.” He dismisses warning that today’s younger generation has no interest in old media like newspapers, instead preferring to get their traditional tabloid-style entertainment from online sources like You Tube and TikTok.  “I know, I know, the web is full of this sort of shit, but just isn’t the same,” he says. “It’s all too obviously contrived and its presentation is too ‘ironic’ and knowing. It certainly isn’t as entertaining as reading it breathlessly presented as fact in a grubby tabloid, that’s for sure.”