Lock up your daughters

The half-informed twitterings of Sun 'journalist' Victoria Newton are a constant source of amusement.

In today's "Bizarre" column, she has a few things to say about the new Girls Aloud album.

Let's see what we can learn from this reporting masterclass.

"GIRLS ALEWD!"

Do you see what Victoria has done there? It's a pun on the band's name. This is frightfully clever and sets up the tone for the rest of the article. The audience now expect some very shocking and filthy revelations. Let's see what they are:

"IF you are the parent of a young girl who loves Girls Aloud, their new album might just be your worst nightmare."

Now, first of all, we all know that you only need one capital letter at the start of a sentence, so Victoria has already lost some marks for grammar.

But this introductory paragraph is intruiging. How awful could this album be? Although I have no children, I can imagine the sort of nightmares parents have: paedophiles, leukaemia, getting redcurrant stains out of t-shirts.

But here, we are being led to believe the new Girls Aloud album is worse than all of those. I hope Victoria can explain why...

"They have come up with some near-the-knuckle lyrics for Chemistry, out on December 5, in an attempt to appeal to an older audience."

Surely not!

"Mums and dads across the country won’t be best pleased when they hear their kids singing along to tales of sex and boozing."

You're right. This is a parent's worst nightmare. "Our poor little Johnny is being corrupted by this song about beer," they would say, "I would rather he was anally raped by a man in a cassock".

No, wait a minute… I've heard 5-year-olds being positively encouraged to sing Chumbawamba's Tubthumping. Mind you, that probably constitutes child abuse in itself, but ear-grating pseduo-nursery-rhymes aside, I think they emerged from the experience unscathed.

So maybe Girls Aloud are talking about something more extreme than whisky drinks and lager drinks. Victoria, what are these deadful, shaming words we need to ban from our children's bedrooms?

"He’s made seduction a work of art, a PhD with her legs apart. She’s got undulating, grundgulating grinding hips."

This is truly shocking stuff, is it not? There is no 'g' in the middle of grundulating!



But wait! There's more!

"On Model, the girls put punk-rocker JOHNNY ROTTEN to shame with their explicit putdown: 'You get your kicks like flies to s***, buzzin’ round the model zoo.'"

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Johnny Rotten said "cunt" on primetime TV. That hardly compares with Nadine doing a minor swear on an album track.

In any case, this is hardly new ground for Girls Aloud. Has Victoria missed the lyrics on their last two albums?

"Is it just the margaritas, or are you looking at me?"
"Shut your mouth because shit might show"
"I don't do sex, but I do do second base"
"I've got a fistfull of love that's coming your way"
(I might be reading too much into that last one)

While she may have missed the opportunity to be morally outraged about those songs, Victoria is making up for lost time now by campaigning for censorship:

"There is... no sign of a parental advisory warning sticker."

This shows remarkable powers of prediction, since the album isn't out until December. Newton can only have seen a promotional copy, but she knows it won't have a guidance sticker. Perhaps she should start writing the Sun's horoscopes, too.

In the end, Victoria tries to soften the blow of her tirade by empathising with the girls (after all, she must have had a few late nights and drunken shags to look as haggard as she does in her byline photo):

"I suppose you could say in the girls’ defence that it is best to write about what you know . . . but you also have to know your audience."

It's touching that Newton is so concerned for the minds of our youngsters. Perhaps now she'll persuade her bosses to stop running pictures of naked teenagers and glorifying the drunken antics of footballers to protect the sanctity of the next generation's tiny minds.

And in other earth-shattering Girls Aloud news, Nicola is likes to touch Kimberley's bum.

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