Tomorrow's Headlines, Yesterday

"Malcolm Muggeridge - Malcolm Buggeridge!"  I opened a story over on The Sleaze last year with those words.  Written at the height of the celebrity sex offender media feeding frenzy, the story focused on the desperate attempts by newspapers to identify new targets for their salacious stories, preferably dead celebrities as they wouldn't be able to sue.  Muggeridge becomes such a target (in the story) simply because his name rhymes with 'buggeridge' which sounds a bit like 'buggering'.  However, the editor character in the story concludes that pursuing Muggeridge as a celebrity sex offender would be pointless as, these days, nobody remembers who he was.  Now, it turns out, Muggeridge might actually have been a sex offender, with new allegations that he and other BBC heavyweight 'intellectual' presenters, including Hugh Weldon, had spent the seventies groping female staff.  And those who didn't grope were bust being sexist: Robin Day allegedly asked Joan Bakewell whether the men she interviewed were looking at her breasts, (to be fair, bearing in mind that Bakewell was touted as the 'thinking man's crumpet' back then, that could have been a serious question - without knowing the context it is impossible to tell whether he was simply being a perv or not).

Anyway, the reason I bring this up is, in part, as another example of just how prescient The Sleaze can be.  We aren't just smut peddlers and we don't just parody the news which has already happened - we also predict the headlines of tomorrow!  I'm also bringing it up to put down a marker reminding people that I was the one who came up with the 'Muggeridge - Buggeridge' thing before someone more famous and media-connected than me tries to claim it as their idea.  After all, there is a sitcom currently running on BBC4 which shamelessly rips off our Assange Exposed story from a while ago.  Indeed, not only did we describe a sitcom based on Assange's enforced stay at the Ecuadorean embassy in London, but I'd also floated the idea in a post here at Sleaze Diary some time before that.  It's pointless me trying to claim that Asylum plagiarises my story - I'm just a nobody and the BBC would doubtless claim that any similarities were merely coincidence.  I take solace in the fact that Asylum is on BBC4, which means that it will be seen by fewer people than have read the story on The Sleaze. Whilst I'm prepared to let that one slide, I'm giving fair warning: I'm drawing the line at 'Muggeridge - Buggeridge'  - plagiarise that at your peril!