Monday 1st September, 2003 - Crisis Point

Imagine my surprise when I awoke this morning to find that I wasn't lying in bed alongside David Beckham, and that he and I were not married. In fact, we do not even know each other.

I had made a mistake.

A forgivable mistake though. I've seen so much of Beckham over the past few weeks that perhaps it is understandable that I might assume that I am in some kind of intimate relationship with him. I now know his face better than my own. I've seen far more of him over, say, the last month than I have any member of my own family. Thus, in my groggy state, I assumed that I was married to him. Quite reasonably.

I wish he would leave me alone. Yesterday, the unhappy coincidence of the release of his (latest) autobiography and his first league goal for Real Madrid meant that he occupied both front and back pages of all the tabloids. Today, a multi-page, colour, David Beckham 'photo album' fell out of the Daily Mirror and onto my lap. Argh. If I wanted to browse through Beckham's photo album, I would break into his luxurious mansion on the outskirts of Madrid and steal it.

Perhaps this is why some people sneer at the tabloid press. Granted, most do so out of sour intellectual snobbery, while I would say that the most important criteria for judging newspapers by - given their vast influence - is their politics, rather than how 'highbrow' or 'lowbrow' their content might be perceived to be. But. The tabloids do tend to develop dangerously boss-eyed obsessions with certain issues and stories.

Thus, Beckham becomes tiresomely inescapable - the same 'exclusive' story beamed from the front page of every tabloid. Similarly, not a week goes by without some intrepid little shit being pictured standing in the aisle of a stationary Boeing 747, or clinging to the bottom of Eurostar clutching a syringe full of AIDS-infected blood, under the headline 'The Shocking Truth About Britain's Airline Security / Britain's Asylum Madness' and so on. And every year, A-Level and GCSE results time is heralded by the same shower of poorly-researched stories about the 'dumbing down' of the education system.

Last month was a superb example of the media's laziness and obsession with crises. The A-Level results came out, with the highest ever proportion of passes and A-Grades. Crisis: A-levels are too easy, and the university admissions procedure is being devalued. The following week the GCSE results came out. The proportion of students attaining A-C grades had fallen for the first time in decades. Crisis: our children are getting stupider. Their brains are being rotted by TV and video games. Especially boys, who are going off the rails, and don't know their proper place in society any more, due to working mums who want it all, thinking they can juggle kids and a career. Etc.

No wonder so many people now rely on the telly for their news coverage. Speaking of which, 7:30 tonight is 'Tonight with Trevor McDonald', in which David Beckham will expose the shocking truth about asylum-seeking internet paedophiles on the Atkins Diet in Falliraki.