Don’t be Dopey — Snow White is 100% TRUE!
NEXT YEAR’S NEWS TODAY: THE CROWN’S CREATOR DEFENDS ‘REAL-LIFE’ TV SHOW
JANUARY
DURING his weekly visit to Buckingham Palace, Boris Johnson asks the Queen to put up her hand if she has ever watched Shaun The
Sheep. The Prime Minister then flies to the u.S. to deliver an emergency speech to the united nations in which he calls for another show of hands. ‘Come on, be honest, how many of you can name all four Teletubbies?’ he asks.
FEBRUARY
FORMER deputy prime minister nick Clegg leaves his post as Vice-President of global Affairs and Communications at Facebook ‘in search of fresh challenges’. He announces that he is embarking upon an ‘exciting new role’ as chief spokesperson for, among others, Britney Spears’s father, HRH the Duke of York and Kim Jong-un.
THE head of BBC radio 4 issues new guidelines ensuring that from now on every programme must include at least four references to mental health. in future, each castaway on Desert island Discs will be obliged to answer the question: ‘And how’s your mental health?’ — before being permitted to introduce their first record.
MARCH
A LAW goes before Parliament to make criticism of Adele an imprisonable offence.
HAVING already covered every major railway journey in the world, Michael Portillo says he is looking to do something new.
Michael’s new ten-part TV series, From west ruislip To South ruislip, covers three london underground stops on the Central line.
‘Join me as i set out from west ruislip and venture through ruislip gardens until i finally disembark at South ruislip,’ says the former MP.
Highlights include Michael finding out from a local historian that west ruislip got its name from being the furthest point west of ruislip, and his sudden change of jackets from pale yellow to pale mauve somewhere between ruislip gardens and South ruislip.
APRIL
SENSITIVE students at the university of Sussex are up in arms at the prospect of a campus showing of the 1970s film Jaws.
‘This deeply hurtful film plays into an unconscious bias against not only sharks but all large fish,’ says a student leader. ‘Furthermore, it seeks to demonise the entire shark community by engaging in the worst kind of galeophobia. when the shark in the movie swims among the human bathers close to the shoreline, it does so in a manner that is mostly peaceful. But this is disregarded by the film-makers, who prefer to concentrate on the minimal amount of self-defence provoked by aggressive splashing about by the human majority.’
OFFICIAL estimates suggest that 99 per cent of all film and TV dramas are introduced by the phrase: ‘Based on a true story’. nevertheless, one or two nitpicking critics object to their use at the start of the TV remake of Snow white And The Seven Dwarfs. They claim that the story is wholly made up.
But the show’s scriptwriter Peter Morgan, who was also responsible for The Crown, argues it is largely factual. ‘OK, Snow white may not have actually been called Snow white, and she was actually a man, and he didn’t have a stepmother, and there was never a magic mirror, but in most other respects my research suggests it’s completely true.’
Quizzed further as to whether there was a woodland cottage occupied by seven dwarfs called Doc, grumpy, Happy, Sleepy, Bashful, Sneezy and Dopey, Morgan says: ‘Yes, definitely. we may have adjusted the odd detail — in real life, the woodland cottage was a flat in Central london, and the seven dwarfs were a couple called geoff and Jill — but in every other respect our team of researchers stuck doggedly to the facts.’
MAY
IN LONDON, a pedestrian is arrested for failure to look at a mobile phone while walking. ‘This was yet another case of anti-social behaviour,’ says the head of the police’s newly formed Mobile Task Force.
‘The mobile phone is an essential part of everyday life, and there are consequences involved for those who attempt to flout the rules by doing without one. So let this be a lesson. i hope it serves as a reminder to members of the public that as a society we are no longer prepared to tolerate the small minority of individuals who are hell-bent on looking where they are going.’
JUNE
THE Duke and Duchess of Sussex announce a new motto on their coat of arms: Memoriae mutari possunt, which loosely translates as ‘recollections may vary’.
To be continued...