ELVIS SPOTTED IN DOOYOO OFFICE! (The Sunday Sport)

Name: Rumblefish

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Product:	The Sunday Sport
Date:	27/04/01 (7350 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Used to be so bad it was good.

Disadvantages: Now it's so bad it's just bad.

For a newspaper with a relatively tiny circulation the Sport is quite a well-known publication. I cannot say it is also well respected, as even in Fleet Street it is looked down upon (which is saying something). However the Sport can claim to have had the most…colourful history of all British newspapers in circulation today.

The Sunday Sport was launched on September 14 1986 by David Sullivan, who had made his millions in the British soft porn industry. Within less than two years a Wednesday edition was launched, and by October 1991 the Sport had become a daily newspaper. Though its title suggested a newspaper dedicated predominantly to sporting news, the Sport in fact offered a similar amount of news and features to other tabloid newspapers.

But there was one major difference. In its early days the Sport’s agenda was to take tabloid sensationalism to its logical - or rather illogical – conclusion. It had long been accepted that tabloid journalists bent and twisted the facts to make them more interesting to readers. So the Sport went one step further and dispensed with the facts altogether. In practice this amounted to quite stunningly ludicrous and bizarre stories filling up each edition. A famous example is “WORLD WAR TWO BOMBER FOUND IN SPACE”, a worldwide exclusive claiming that NASA was planning a secret mission to tow the bomber back to Earth. For good measure the piece even had a photograph depicting the plane lodged on the surface of the Moon. These stories generally concerned aliens eating family pets, people sharing beds with farm animals, or any number of sightings of Elvis, who was spotted at various times shopping at a supermarket, living as a woman, and even once trying to get Rick Astley’s autograph.

One of my most treasured possessions is my ‘Best of the Sunday Sport’ book, which features many of these classic exclusives. To give you even more of an idea of what the paper was
about (and hoping you’ll forgive my indulgence) here are my top five:

5: “MUM GIVES BIRTH TO 8lb TROUT” – “Now doctors aren’t sure if it will need an aquarium or a cot.”

4: “GREENFLY ATE MY LOVER!” This story was sub-headed “HEARTLESS INSECTS PUT END TO MIXED-SALAD MARRIAGE”

3: “LORD LUCAN SPOTTED ON MISSING SHERGAR” In this piece we learnt that the fugitive nobleman Lord Lucan was alive and well and galloping through Scottish glens on kidnapped racehorse Shergar.

2: “LOVESICK GARDENER MARRIES LETTUCE” “It’s the vegetable or me!” girlfriend Jackie had warned.

1: “BUS FOUND BURIED AT SOUTH POLE” Perhaps the ultimate Sunday Sport exclusive, this reported that the 109 from Croydon bus station had been hijacked by a green alien in 1961 and taken to the Antarctic (and of course the paper had a photo to prove it). Follow-up stories even detailed eyewitness accounts from passengers. “The whole journey is a complete blank,” said mature student John La Trobe, “but I do remember the penguins.”

In addition to the absurd news items, the Sport let its air of pure silliness spill over to other features, to the degree that almost nothing in it could be taken even remotely seriously. The editorials would be tongue-in-cheek, the financial news would be imagined, and the agony aunt would get to deal with problems like, “I asked my boyfriend what it was like to be gobsmacked, and he hit me.”

Then suddenly the fantastical news items and surreally over-obvious humour began to disappear from the paper. In contrast the amount of sex-related content shot up. Suddenly adverts appeared for expensive 0898 numbers with titles like “I’m Sally – Spank me!” There were topless models on at least every other page (hence the fabled “nipple count”,a
nd a thousand office sweepstakes). The silly headlines became replaced with simply lurid ones. Out went giant sprouts from outer space; in came top soap stars in saucy sex romps. Though authenticity and accurate journalism remained strictly no-go areas, the tone had changed with humour now playing second fiddle to titillation.

In recent years the rise of the Internet and the greater use of colour photography has reinforced the new approach, with hardly a day going by without faked topless pictures of Britney Spears or various Spice Girls. The Sport’s formula is now a predictable mix of numerous topless women, enormous adverts, plugs for their own website, and regular listings for massage and escort services. Regular columnists in recent times have included boxing promoter Frank Maloney (“There ain’t no baloney with Mister Maloney”) and Happy Mondays/Black Grape singer Shaun Ryder (a quite phenomenally bad writer). Other regular items include a photo caption competition invariably involving farm animals having sex, a kind of word puzzle in which all the answers are printed alongside for you to fill in (I kid you not), and a weekly feature - ‘Boobs on the Box’ - detailing the exact timing of all sex and nudity on terrestrial television in the coming week (e.g. “look out for a glimpse of Susan Sarandon’s left knocker on 52 minutes”).

Purely in terms of value for money it’s poor, even at 35p, since if you took out all the pictures and adverts you’d be left with about a page and a half of reading matter. Although stocked by most newsagents, it remains one of the very poorest selling national newspapers, even the more popular Sunday edition being lucky to sell more than 200,000 copies (The News Of The World sells about 4 million).

An accusation often levelled at the Sport since its launch to the present day is that it is not a newspaper. Though this charge is essentially undeniab
le, I would suggest that it is rather like angrily declaring that Arnold Schwarzenegger is not an actor, and just as no one really believes that Arnie is annually robbed at Oscar time, no one (at least no one with an ounce of intelligence) really buys the Sport expecting in-depth coverage of current affairs. Next time you visit the newsagents, glance at the cover of the Sport and tell me you’d genuinely expect it to contain a word of proper news. In truth you get the strong feeling that real news is an inconvenience to Sport writers, and they only grudgingly cover it at all. After all, where’s the sex and scandal in foot and mouth disease?

The other chief criticism of the Sport is that it is basically pornography. Pornography and its role for better or worse in society is a separate issue, but the Sport would only be on the periphery of such a debate anyway because to call it porn is probably a slur on the porn industry as a whole. The cheap paper and dull sets and clumsy poses that constitute the Sport’s “glamour” pages are scarcely consistent with the pornographer’s avowed aim to excite and arouse. Some people might argue that dreary, mundane pornography is the most damaging of all, but the total lack of variety, imagination, and ambiguity in the Sport’s format make it a rather pitiful candidate for great peril to the nation. If it is porn at all, it’s c**p porn.

Failing miserably as both a newspaper and a smutty magazine, it is a mystery that the Sport remains in circulation at all. Since its golden days of alien and Elvis stories, the paper seems to have completely given up on any pretence of novelty or creativity, and it might well be the only daily publication in the world that is almost indistinguishable from one day/week/year to the next.

In fact the Sport’s one true virtue might well be its unreconstructed awfulness. Just as contemporary scholars puzzle over mankind’s g
reat follies in ages past, the Sport - like Hear’Say and the Millennium Dome - may yet offer the historians of the future some deep insight into how horribly confused and misguided humanity had become around the turn of the twenty-first century. Though I always regret it within minutes, I still buy the Sport every few months or so, simply because I can’t help feeling that there will one day be museums with copies of it on public display, no doubt providing endless amusement for parties of incredulous schoolchildren.

And perhaps by then someone will have dragged that 109 bus back to Croydon.

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