Paper Monitor

12:42 UK time, Monday, 11 September 2006

A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.

“This is Chris Tarrant, he’s a forgetful man, he forgets because he doesn’t exercise his brain. He’s even forgotten his wedding anniversary, this is why he’s playing Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training.”

So reads an advert appearing in Monday’s Independent, illustrated with a pensive looking Mr Tarrant. With consummate tabloid timing, Mr Tarrant also appears on the front page of the Daily Mirror, under the headline “Tarrant and the bimbos”, in which his wife defends him by saying “Chris was so drunk he wouldn’t know if he kissed anyone”.

What? Even with Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training?

Elsewhere, the Daily Mirror is still engaged in its family-friendly theme, with the front page dominated by Babar the Elephant, the current DVD give-away, standing shoulder to shoulder with a 9/11 anniversary picture.

And the big news on page three is that Postman Pat’s early years are going to be revealed, in a Godfather-style retrospective film. This includes the nuggets that Greendale’s favourite son supports Pencaster United and is scared of heights.

Meanwhile the Independent is upping the stakes in the give-away poster war – by launching a double-sided poster, trees on one side, human skeleton on the reverse.

At least this means there will be more to look at on a poster than on the cover of the Independent, which has gone for one of its stat-attack front covers to mark 9/11. This looks like Big Knowledge meeting Clever Design until you actually read it and see it includes such dull details as “11: Weeks the 9/11 commission’s final report was top of New York Times’ non-fiction best-seller list.”

The Guardian, on the principle four-legs good, six-legs better, has taken flight with its own poster campaign: Garden insects. They’re all there - ladybirds, beetles, earwigs, a damselfly – the whole gang. The coverage is comprehensive, right down to the ones with names that make less high-minded people snigger – such as “common cockchafer” (melolontha melolontha).

But this eco-awareness is blown away by what must be one of the least predictable campaigns to have emerged from the tabloids in recent years.

This is the Sun’s Global Warning week – with Monday’s paper packed with the type of apocalyptic global warming stories that we haven’t seen since … almost every edition of the Independent. There’s even a map showing most of Britain disappearing below rising water levels.

And who has the big picture by-line above “10 Years to save planet”? It’s Al Gore, the Sun’s kind of fella. At the top of every page in the news section, there’s a green factoid: “Temperatures in Alaska, western Canada and eastern Russia have risen almost 4C in past 50 years – twice the global average.”

The front page also pushes the green theme with a big picture of a cheerful family on a beach and the radical, eco-warrior message: “Be Green And Forget Going Abroad. 123 parks in the UK. Collect token token, page 23.”

And it’s Monday, so the Daily Express has a front-cover picture of Princess Diana.