Gavin’s Gaily Gigest

thelondonpaper and London Lite are two freesheet papers that have been littering our capital’s streets and trains since 4th September 2006. Distributed by brightly-jacketed twentysomethings with a cheery attitude and philanthropic obsession, they’re like Scientologists without the spaceships and Tom Cruise. Stationed outside every Tube and train entrance, they encourage rudeness in every Londoner (who hardly need encouragement in the first place) and the occasional umbrella-led violence.

I want to make clear before I start that I am by no means criticising the superb (and original) freesheet, Metro, but rather those ones that look like they’ve been designed by a five year old in Microsoft Publisher. Unlike Metro, thelondonpaper and London Lite are one step away from toilet paper and that step is down. Their titles alone are an insult to the English language – one squeezing together three separate words, and then failing to capitalise any one of them, the other spelling “light” incorrectly.

Every headline is either a bad pun or reads like it was said by a Native American chief (“Chief ’sorry’ on day two of rail chaos” is my favourite example). The focus of the whole paper is very much on pictures as opposed to prose, meaning that every story, no matter how important, is given no more than one hundred words. Should London ever be unfortunate enough to suffer another terrorist attack, hapless freesheet readers shall have to read the details between more sensational pictures of Kelly Brook and a five minute interview with whichever airhead celebrity they can lay their hands on that day.

If you ever make it far enough to the double spread fashion pages, the visual onslaught will probably cause your eyes to just give up, plop out their sockets, roll down your body and bitch slap your cock until you turn the page. Or at least, that’s what I think happened. The only saving grace of both papers is their games pages, which are actually quite good, and of all the sections likely to occupy my time, it’s cracking the cryptic crossword or sudoku, rather than reading the what’s hot and what’s not. Maybe that’s what we could have instead of these two faeces filled wastes of papers: an ad-filled games book.

But then who am I to judge. They get 400 to 450 thousand readers, I get three… on a good day.