The Death of the Silly Season?

Well, I'm disappointed in the press this year. The best they can come up with for the 'silly season', it seems, is a picture from Google Earth allegedly showing the Loch Ness monster. It really is pathetic. Not just the picture - which is clearly just a boat trailing a wake behind it - but the whole lack of effort on the part of the media. What happened to the good old days of the 'silly season' when we were inundated with tales of crop circles, alien abductions, pixies and phantom sex offenders, (maybe I made the last one up, but you get the idea)? I blame television, the web, video games, or something, for this dearth of imagination. Actually, I suspect the problem is that all of the things which used to make up 'silly season' are just not fashionable any more. Aliens and flying saucers in particular have been so done to death by films and TV over the past few decades that they no longer have any impact.

Nowadays, it seems, the hacks in the press seem to expend all of their imagination on making up bizarre stories about various celebrities. Consequently, 'celebrity silly season' now lasts all year round. Nevertheless, I miss those halcyon days when Warminster was the UFO capital of the world every August and we didn't know about the drunken exploits or sexual antics of various Z-listers. Maybe if they combined the celebrity stories with the weird stuff we could get 'silly season' off the ground again. How about 'Amy Winehouse: I Walked With a Zombie (or Was it Pete Doherty?)'; or 'Lilly Allen: My Life as a Serial Killer'; or even 'Penelope Keith: My Alien Abduction Hell' ? Perhaps some loser from Big Brother could tell us how they created a crop circle in the shape of a huge cock and balls, or Russell Brand could describe how he seduced and shagged the Loch Ness Monster, before cheating on it with Bigfoot. Circulation winners, all of them.