I have tried to avoid knowing anything about the revelations in Prince Harry’s book, so that I could use the privilege of these column-inch opportunities to ridicule something more significant. But the Harry headlines snigger from the newsagent shelves, elegant sirens shouting about sex and drugs but in the gruff tones of high-street newspaper vendors. Readallabahtit!
“Prince Harry admits he had frostbitten penis when he was best man at William and Kate’s wedding,” exclaims the Daily Record. The topical radio comedy hack writer I was 33 years ago kicks in. “Frostbitten penis. Wow! That was an extravagant wedding menu! Were the gangrenous testicles off? Was there no sunburned anus?” But of course, a quick search of social media reveals that the infinite number of monkeys of the general public have already made an infinite number of monkey variations on this joke, and with far greater speed than we professional satirists, still tilling the arid soil of legacy media, winding up the letterpress to hand-crank out our already irrelevant opinion guano.
