NAKED CITY: BRAINLESS HEADLINE IN BAVARIAN BAR!

Some years ago when British politician Michael Foot was put in charge of a nuclear disarmament committee The Times ran the headline “FOOT HEADS ARMS BODY”. It was the type of attention grabbing large type that you might have expected in one of the more racy tabloids, although perhaps the cleverness would have been lost on many of the readers of The Sun or The Daily Mirror.

Certainly when it comes to front page humour, the tabloids, be they British, American or Australian, shoot for the lowest common denominator as we have clearly witnessed here with the start of the “Murdoch” election coverage. Last week’s Daily Telegraph mock up, headed “I KNOW NUTHINK” which portrayed Kevin Rudd as Colonel Clink, Anthony Albanese as Sergeant Shultz and Craig Thomposn as Hogan is a prime example. The Nazi gibe, minus any swastikas, was based on an incident in which ‘Albo’ shared an after work beer with Craig Thompson at Sydney’s Bavaria Bar.

The concept was straight out of the pages of the notorious New York Post and it’s no surprise that its long time Editor-in-Chief Col Allen, aka ‘Col Pot’, is currently in Australia to supposedly orchestrate Murdoch’s anti-Labor election campaign. The Post is of course synonymous with perhaps the most infamous tabloid headline of all time with its 1983 shrieker “HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR”, now immortalised in not only a movie title, designer posters, coffee mugs and endless t-shirts but the tabloid psyche itself.

Like the recent Telegraph cover the Post loves the full page pictorial, tagged with screaming 144pt type. When Saddam Hussein was executed it ran the headline “GOOD NOOSE” complete with a mock-up of Saddam with a noose around his neck. When Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega was toppled from power in 1989 it bellowed “CANNED PINEAPPLE”, a reference to Noreiga’s pockmarked complexion and his nickname “Pineapple Face”. And when al-Qaeda’s Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi was killed, a photo of the dead ‘terrorist’ was ballooned with the caption “Warm Up The Virgins”.

With another three weeks of the Federal election campaign still to go we can expect lots more of the NY Post style covers on the Daily Telegraph and the other Murdoch tabloids around the country. Luckily there’s even an App for a tabloid headline generator that you can download these days which will make the job of subs and editors a lot more easier. It’s a convenient way to address election comment without boring the reader with pages of analysis and policy scrutiny. Photoshop has a lot to answer for when it comes to concocting a cheap political gag.

We can only hope that sometime during the campaign, one of the major candidates, be they Labor or Liberal, commits some kind of indiscretion in a ‘gentleman’s club’ that will bring out the inevitable homage to tabloid journalism’s greatest headline. They can be the “faceless poli” or have the nickname “Noddy” (like Queensland’s Campbell Newman). Whatever the scenario it’s been thirty years since the Headless Body hit the Topless Bar and we are certainly due again!