[John Whitworth]

Bill saved our bacon with a fine cliffhanger. Good on him! This week's competition may favour Brits. Do Americans have tabloid newspapers? Aussies do.

No. 2719: telling tales
A well-known literary character of your choice spills the beans to a tabloid. You are invited to supply the resulting front-page story, including headline (150 words max.).
Please email entries, if possible, to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 19 October.

[Gail White]

"Do Americans have tabloid newspapers", indeed. You should just join me in the grocery check-out line, where I get a choice of half a dozen.

[John Whitworth]

Are they owned by the great Rupert Murdoch?

[Lance Levens]

Don't know if Rupert owns them, but post-apocalyptic tabloid archivists will record that in the early 21st century Brad Pitt, Jennifer Anniston, and Angelina Jolie attained, jammed as they were between Butterfingers and Snickers Bars, a god-like status.

[John Whitworth]

Toybear Toyboy

‘I was his plaything of an idle hour’ claimed a tearful Winnie-the-Pooh (3) a Bear. 'We were definitely an item but he cast me aside and now I am suffering from an eating disorder involving honey. I blame it all on him.
Christopher Robin (8), a committed Christian, denies wrongdoing. ‘We simply attended small prayer meetings together,' Asked if these took place in his bedroom after they had shared baths, he said, ‘I wish to be left alone to complete my education. The Bear wrote poetry. We all know where that sort of thing may lead.’
Winnie is now considering a career as a singer. His 'Hundred Best Hums in the Hundred Acre Wood’, will be launched next month. The Hundred Acre Wood was a common scene of assignation, where they were often accompanied by a small pig. The pig was unavailable for comment.

[FOsen]

Henry Jekyll, acquitted on manslaughter charges last fall at a trial in which his legal team employed the novel and now notorious “potion metamorphosis” defense, has gone missing from a prestigious rehab facility in Southgate, just days before he was to have launched the book tour for his soon-to-be-released autobiography, Nothing to Hyde. Jekyll checked himself into the celebrity clinic last month, citing unspecified “anger-management” issues and, in an interview with our reporter Hastie Lanyon, promised to reveal exclusive details of a rumored dissociative identity disorder. Unfortunately, Lanyon suffered a stroke at that meeting, perhaps precipitating Jekyll’s disappearance. While confined, Jekyll had continued philanthropic work through his company, Jekyll Laboratories. Telephone enquiries as to Jekyll’s whereabouts elicited this response from an unnamed spokesperson: “He’s probably helping little African kids in the Amazon – that’s it – he’s pissed off there – now you go do the same, mate.”

[Donna English]

Tara Dactyl

"Scarlett O’Hara is dying of gluttony!" So says Rhett Butler, who claims his ex-spouse
reneged on her vow that she’ll never be hungry—she eats all the time, she’s as big as a house!
Disturbing, and shocking, says Butler, she’s ravenous, scavenging fields for potatoes to eat,
She’s eaten the horses, the cows and the chickens, she’s emptied the barns in her search for more meat!
Serious physical ailments are plaguing her; horrible chaffing between her fat thighs,
raging infections in all the deep creases, where juice and crumbs gather, decay, and draw flies.
Scarlett’s now selling herself on the internet, showing her bulk on a tiny web cam,
eating her way through the money she’s making, and frankly, says Butler, I don’t give a damn.

[RCL]

Donna,

Good one, but do you mean the opposite of reneged? It sounds like she exceeded her vow.

Ralph

[Roger Slater]

NOT 2B WASN'T MEANT 2B!

Prince Hamlet of Denmark told a group of troubled schoolchildren today that soon after his father was murdered, he became so depressed that he almost committed suicide. "I held the bare bodkin in my hands and weighed my options," Hamlet recalled as the children took turns holding the bodkin in question under their teacher's careful supervision.

"Life was painful. My feeling were hurt when my mother remarried. I blamed my uncle. I thought, what's the use? Why not just end it all? And I almost did. But do you know what saved me?" The children demanded to know. "Here's the thing," Prince Hamlet said in voice that was almost a whisper. "Exactly what happens when you're dead? Nobody knows. It may be even worse than the stuff that happens when you're alive. I couldn't risk it."

[Roger Slater]

YUMMY?

A huge white whale named Moby Dick today admitted to having chomped off the leg of a certain Captain Ahab. "I have no regrets," Moby told reporters, "except that his shoe leather was rancid and tasted like week-old squid.”

But what would drive even a wild, untamed beast to do something so despicable? According to Moby, he much prefers plankton to human flesh, but Captain Ahab was armed with an enormous harpoon and would have hurled it through his eye or up his blow-hole unless he acted quickly. He did what he had to do to defend himself. "It's not as if I was just swimming around in the ocean looking for a crazy old coot to munch on," Moby joked. "I've got much bigger fish to fry."