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The Sad Death of Tabloid English
The last great folk poetry of the English-speaking peoples.
Once upon a time in Great Britain, you could not step five paces without a tabloid newspaper bunching around your ankles. Punchy papers such as The Sun and The Mirror papered over the pavements. Dripping in alarming red ink, the tabloids stained millions of fingers each day.
These newspapers flaunted their own vernacular. A compressed, bawdy, semi-literate poetry understood by the barrister and the bricklayer. They termed prisoners as lags. They routinely exposed vicars and love rats in sex shame hell. Sexual acts were always romps and unfailingly steamy. When gleefully exposing the bulimic carnal appetites of a Premier League footballer, The Sun rioted in tabloid morality: Prem Star probed in coke-romp shame.
Tabloid English was the national language of Tabloid England, an inglorious village of sixty million governed by shame and redemption playing king and executioner.
A typical story followed the hero’s journey. A love rat celeb probed in a steamy romp with a busty babe. His mugshot, dripping over millions of copies of The Sun, devastates his wag and tragic tot. Over the next week, readers absorbed daily developments in this love rat’s inglorious, public collapse. In cafes and pubs and salons and everywhere in between, they’d debate the finer points. In Sunday’s edition, our fallen hero breaks his silence. The love rat reveals his coke-booze shame. He apologises. His hero journey ends, ultimately, with redemption.
In today’s post-tabloid culture, redemption is in short supply. So too is shame. Few lament the passing of Tabloid English and its gaudy primal screams. But it served a vital social instinct. What replaced it is far from humane.
For want of a better term, I’ll call it Therapy English.
