Hello, it's Monday, the 18th of November. I'm Miranda Soya and I'm thinking of organising a pay-per-view boxing match with my 86-year-old mum. Welcome back to Papercuts, the modern newspaper review. This is the show where we like to gather the UK papers together and tell them that we've marked their work and assessed their attitude and, well, we're not angry. We're just disappointed. Maybe they'll get the hint.
and why not become a Paper Cuts supporter? For under £4 a month, you can get shows with no adverts and with an added funny bit each episode, plus the chance to join us on an exciting Paper Cuts livestream at 7pm this very Thursday. We'd like some listener questions, so if there's anything you've always wanted to ask me, John Elage or Jacob Jarvis, possibly involving maps or America, Yimby or Britpop or
Then why not send them to paper cuts show on X, Threads or Blue Sky with the hashtag Papercutsclassifieds. Now here are the headlines for today's show. Biden his time, Joe Biden allows Ukraine to use long range missiles to fire into Russia.
Dance till you drop? Was the 90s boy band's trend just child exploitation in big trousers and being boring? Can you cope when life is dull? Welcome to Papercuts, we read the papers so you don't have to.
Thanks for joining us on Paper Cuts, where this, my friend, is politics. That's a bloody 82 reference, just so you know. Thank you. Sure, somebody's seen us. Yeah, I've seen this great. I'm Miranda Sawyer, and joining me today is Saturday Night, LBC host and hummus lover. It's Natasha Devon. Hi, Natasha. Hello. And also joining us is Saturday Night TV expert and firm believer that ice cream is actually a dip. It's grown in the choir. If you just get your picture in Twish,
It's like just a sweet fruition of a savoury snuck. It's lovely. OK, what have we got on the front pages today? OK, Natasha, you've got the serious one. I have got the serious papers. Now, the Times has three lead stories on its front page. So the main one is that Starmer is looking to build a new rapport with China, which I actually know a cat called China. Sure.
Yeah, whenever I read a headline like that, I think, she's got a lot of influence on the world stage. But this is to try and kind of Trump-proof the UK because Trump is already, or his aides are already heavily hinting that in order to have a trade deal with the US, we'd have to step back from the EU and forging a closer alliance with Europe is one of Labour's main policies. And it's also just a bit, it's bullying us really before Trump is even in office. Are we trying to form a new game?
Exactly, so you can understand why he's travelling around trying to see what the options are. Biden has made the decision to let Ukraine fire long-range missiles into Russia, and I know we'll be talking about that later.
been really annoying. Again, young jobless told to take up training or face losing benefits. It's literally anything or properly fund children and adolescent mental health services, isn't it? Apparently, if you don't take up an apprenticeship or training that the job center tells you you must, then you will have your benefits taken away even if you're too sick to work, which can frankly get in the bin. Definitely.
Daily Telegraph, again, Biden gives green light for strikes in Russia, and then there is just the most annoying photo ever of... I think it's just awful, it's like annoying, it's just really awful and upsetting. So it's Trump holding a UFC heavyweight championship belt, and then mask, just looking at him like...
It's so adoring me. I work for you. I work for you. Yeah, it's just try not to look at the front page of the telegraph today if you don't have a strong gag reflex. That's what I would recommend. The Guardian's gone with a slightly different story. So Thameswater repairs crisis leaves supply on a knife edge. Apparently, Thameswater has 23 billion pounds worth of assets in urgent need of repair. And the supply of water to 16 million customers is on a knife edge, which is
I don't know, it's just quite a weird metaphor, isn't it? Like water, bouncing water on a knife edge, it just sounds impossible, what are you talking about? That's really weird. Just don't think about it too much, that would be my advice. There's also a picture on here of, there was some climate protesters ahead of the G20 who have created these heads of various world leaders and put them in water.
It's quite a strange one, isn't it? They're great big heads, and then the water kind of comes up just above their mouths, and there's like, Biden, who else is there? So there's Ursula von der Leyen, Putin. Yeah, they all look a bit like the drowning, and I think that's the metaphor, isn't it? But can I just, I mean, the world is feeling dystopian enough as it is. I don't need that for a thing in the morning.
I don't need the thoughts of my head just on the front page of my nose. They're all in a hot tub together.
And then the eye is leading with move as close as possible to EU in Brexit reset business bosses urge starma. So a slightly different take on us trying to Trump proof the UK. The features section in the eye today looks absolutely amazing. Rebecca Reed has written a piece called why I've stopped boasting about my sex life. We love Rebecca and Lucy Mangan. Why I want a wife. OK, I have to say I've written that feature myself before. Why I want a wife I wrote it about I think 20 years ago.
It's like a perennial. It's a hardy perennial. I like how horny the eye is getting in the morning. Yeah, sickly. OK, you have the fun paper's gone. What's going on? So, mostly fun, but the Daily Mirror is leading with a very sad story. Manhunt, husband is on the run abroad after a murdered 24-year-old wife found.
So that's the very sad story of the suspect in the case of Harshita Brela's murder. So, if a sombre starts from the Daily Mirror, then the Daily Mail anger a starmer cozies up to China. So, at Tori's accused PM of cowtowing to Beijing as he reveals pragmatic plan to trade with a communist regime.
And then this picture of Colleen Rooney and she claims that she spills the beans on Wayne on her first night in the jungle. I haven't watched it yet, but I'm very excited about Colleen Rooney. Why do you think she's going in the jungle? I've got lots of theories because she doesn't need the money. Can I just say she wants to get away from the kids?
Is that her grim being appearances? It's four boys. It's not grim, it's grim. They all play football. All she's doing is taking them to matches and washing the kit. That's her life. It's all like eating bugs. This is a holiday.
Go ahead. So the sun calls grin it to win it. A picture of Colleen just having a laugh. She's got great teeth, aren't she? And beautiful skin. Yeah, yeah. I mean, just well done. But the main story is gang on royal estate. So this is the headline is Windsor raid as wills, Kate and kids slept. And so
I mean, not to accuse the son of being hyperbolic, but they make it sound like the kids and the, you know, Kate and William were like, oh, no, did you hear that? It just is somebody broke into a building on the same estate as Kate and William's house. And still farm machinery apparently. Still farm machinery. I know it's not because farmers, they are what's going on with them. The desperate. You have to do this in the pension.
And then finally, the Daily Star, I'm a celeb yeti. Get me out of here. Jungle Star is worn to be wear of hairy beasts. I have to say, as bookings go, if they could get the yeshy on I'm a celebrity. Yeah, that beats Colleen, didn't it? It really does, so well done.
Now, on the front page of many of the papers is the story that Joe Biden, for the first time, has said that the USA will allow Ukraine to use long-range missiles to fire into Russian territory. There was a ban on this before. OK, Natasha, explain this to us. What does it mean?
Well, there's various different elements to this, I think. The first of which is that Trump, part of his campaign pledge, was that he was going to bring peace to the region. And by bring peace, what we presume he means is just give Ukraine to his mate Putin.
Yeah, there's definitely an idea that he said it would kind of stop it and it was like a photo stop and wherever anybody was, like, that was the situation it was going to be. And at the moment, Russia is in quite a lot of Eastern Ukraine. So that would be handed over to Russia. Exactly. And so the Republicans
are obviously really angry about this decision that Joe Biden has taken because they consider it to be escalatory, and Donald Trump Jr. has even said that it's bringing us a step closer to World War III. However, it's not like these long-range missiles are going to be fired at the Kremlin. What Ukraine are going to use it for is they have done an incursion into Kursk, which they're currently holding, but they say they're not going to be able to hold it for much longer.
So they're going to use the long-range missiles to try and target military targets which are going to weaken the soldiers that they're fighting in Kursk, bearing in mind as well that North Korea have just sent over 10,000 soldiers to help Russia too. And then what they're hoping is that they can use the fact that they are currently occupying Kursk when they are negotiating in any kind of peace process. Yeah, okay. So it's complicated, isn't it, really?
Well, yeah, war always is. Yeah, yeah. So the idea that we can just kind of stop it doesn't seem likely. No, and I just, I mean, I, I, my first thought when Trump got in was for Ukraine, because it must be devastating to have been fighting for the many years that they have, and then know that the President of the United States and the US have been the biggest gifters of military aid to Ukraine is not on your side.
Yeah. President Zelensky has said, he said on Saturday that he was, this is a quote, certain that the war will end sooner as a result of Trump's policies, but he didn't elaborate. So it's a bit ominous.
Now, in the eye a couple of days ago, tagged to a new documentary on the BBC was an article about boy bands, boy bands of the 90s and 90s. The headline we signed for £1 million, then got £125 a week. The brutal reality of 90s boy bands. Okay, Grannya, you have read this article and indeed you have watched the documentary.
What do you think? It's really, really good. I definitely recommend having a watch, especially if you were sentient in the 90s and have memories of that more innocent decade. It's just a really fascinating deep dive into the reality of being in a boy band. So they focused on, take that, E17 9-1-1. It's forgot about that.
we all we all forgot about nine more than five and blue okay those are one damage and damage as well yeah yeah those are good ones all right and it was just a very fascinating look at the whole industry around boy puns about how very young kids basically they're all like Robbie Williams was 16 when he joined take that and how so much exploitation happened to where they weren't
paid properly and how they were just worked nonstop because they were offered this fairy tale like you could be a pop star and you know a lot of these guys come from very working class backgrounds and then they're just worked, worked, worked, they don't have any time off, they don't have any control over any aspect of their life and the impact that had on their physical and mental health and also how
Racism had played a part in which bands were promoted and had a chance of like a big mainstream success, like damage, where this incredible band and they had amazing songs and now they had to tailor their music for this sort of perceived white audience and how they weren't given like front covers of magazines and how they just weren't given the same sort of like respect
that other bands that you worked in. So obviously in the late 80s and 90s, I worked for various magazines and four pop magazines. It genuinely was racist. It was considered that you would have a lower selling magazine cover if you put someone black on the cover. And so they would say, this is about sales. You can't do it. So we would always obviously fight against that, but we were told that. It's really unbelievable. This article in the eye is kind of really interesting as well. So Terry Caldwell, he was in E-17. He was the one who looked a bit tough.
Yeah, yeah. A little bit mean. But he says, OK. OK. A little bit mean, I think. Yeah. Maybe he's had a team with the bad boys. It was the bad boys. But he said, OK, we got 125 pounds a week. They signed a 1 million pounds contract every three months. Every three months it went up 25 pounds.
That is just unbelievable. So one of the other guys, John, who was like before the band, he was a roofer. And when he was a roofer, he was earning 350 pounds a week. It's like, this is unbelievable, really unbelievable. And also, he just basically says, look, it was just completely ruthless. And their kind of schedule was really unbelievable. So Richie, who you might remember from Five, they had two days off in two years. He says, and they were working 18 hours days. And he was 16 when he joined Five.
We all know what it's like when you get what you think is going to be the dream job. And then two days in, you're like, oh, god, this is not what I thought at all. And they were trapped in that. Yeah, they were. And as well, especially talking about E-17.
I had the tabloids sort of ros about them. There was such class snobbery. It was awful, especially how they treated Brian Harvey and Daniela Westbrook. They were just two kids. They were children and this real sort of snobby
aggressive need to just destroy them, destroy their lives, turn them into this punchline, when you could see from Bright, so he wasn't interviewed in the documentary, but the other members of the band spoke about him. He just was this, there was something magical about him, he had this beautiful voice, he had this charisma, and he was just working class kid from East London, and they took pleasure in just like turning him into this ridiculous buffoon.
Yeah, it's very sad. Do you have on a lighter note, as someone who, or a band, that just the sight of them makes you instantly 12 again? Because we were watching an old episode of Top of the Pops from the 90s the other day, and Boys to Men came on, and I actually squealed like a child. And my partner was like, what's happening here? I was like, oh, sorry, I'm 12. I'm 12. For the next three minutes, I'm 12.
I think all of them do that though. There's a really brilliant thing that Robbie Williams has done and so on Instagram he's clearly watched the documentary and he has responded particularly to Nigel Martin Smith. Do you remember him? So Nigel Martin Smith was the manager of Take That and in the documentary he says, this is a quote, he's smart as Robbie and it's quite clever, you know, like I did drugs because I was in this band, he's kind of pretending to be Robbie.
when I couldn't have girlfriends, I couldn't go out. That evil twat Nigel is his fault that I'm behaving like a wanker, right? So he's basically saying Robbie Williams is blaming Nigel, but it was his own behaviour. And Robbie Williams has done a kind of five
page Instagram post in which he says, yeah, I was. It was my choice to, he calls itself Medicaid, how I did, but actually what you could have said was, oh, we didn't really know what we were doing. Maybe we could have looked after these children a little bit better, but he didn't do it. He's just awful.
They were like watching it, they kind of remind you of an Oliver, and Vagan's little street gangs. That's what they were like, all these like little fresh-faced little boys. And I think like Robbie Williams, people who are damaged.
be annoying. Like in their adult life they're complicated people but just because Robbie Williams maybe on a one-to-one basis can be a bit annoying doesn't mean that he wasn't incredibly damaged and very sort of pivotal agent as his development. I know the one thing that is quite good about this is in the article it does say that so Richie from
five bumped into the manager of One Direction at a V Festival in 2013. And he basically says, look, in our pictures, in five pictures, we just look ruined because we're just knacking all the time. It's really terrible. And then he had noticed that One Direction always look, I mean, they're very good-looking boys on one direction, but they always look kind of fresh and gorgeous. And he said, well, how is that to the manager? And the manager said, actually, we learned from your generation, they do a month, they work really hard, and then they have two weeks off.
So they were trying to look after one direction. That must have been so bittersweet. Yes. He gets upset. He gets upset. He starts choking up. Oh, God. Anyway, we love boy bands. And we want them to be happy.
Now, it's good day pun shine. No, it's Monday Punday, which means it's time to find out who's won Fix the Headline. Fix the Headline is the world's best and possibly only podcast-generated headline-based competition. Every week we find a great story with a bait-header and we get you, the paper-cuts listeners, to think up a better one.
And on Friday, we gave you a story from The Sun about how Gen Z absolutely love Christmas classic carols. The Sun's headline was, it's Gen Z-MUS, it's Gen Z-MUS, which is just terrible. We knew you could do better and you did. On Blue Sky, Helen W gave us, we wish you a merry Rismus. Nice, very good.
Matthew Griffiths tried with in the fleek midwinter. David Wyttham had a good go with O come or ye youthful. And Daniel Van Buren with TikTok merrily on high.
On threads, Queer Hana offered dreaming of a snowflake Christmas. And on X, Duncan Barrett gave us sleigh in a manger. But the winner is animatronic from blue sky with in-dislay, we're all fam. Well done, animatronic. Just send us your address and t-shirt, size, and soon a papercase t-shirt will be yours, just in time for the peripum-pum season.
So what about today? Have we got any good headlines? Natasha, what do you have there? I have the mirror. OK. And the mirror has run a story about Danny Jones pointing down at a giant snake, which has slithered into his shorts on I'm a celebrity. Oh, my God. And gone with, I'm going to say this is quite a predictable headline trouser snake.
Then also in the mirror, there is a story about a grandad who's been buying the bino nearly every week since he was a 10-year-old paper boy. He's now 60. And he's kept all of these binos. Oh, right, great. And the headline is Dennis the Menace and Stata.
Oh, that's really good. That's very good. That's very... That's really good. An award for that one, that's great. That would deliver if I meet. I think once you start something like that, you know, that is high stakes if he goes away in a holiday and forgets. Yeah, the completion and also the virus. This is my favourite one, I think, also from the mirror. They have been rating Christmas sandwiches in the supermarkets.
Can I just say here that ultimately no one likes cold bread? This is the hill I'm prepared to die on. Doesn't matter how nice a supermarket sandwich is, it can never be that good. Because it's been in the fridge. It's cold bread. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway. The headline is... When you said cold bread, I thought you meant just like not toasted bread. No, refrigerated bread is not the one. The headline is ding dong merrily on rye.
That is beautiful. They've got a new sub of the mirror. I know, I'm great. All of those are really good. Well done, the mirror. Okay, Gronya, you have the sun, right? Well, so I'm a celeb theme to a lot of these headlines. So, Colleen Rooney is in the jungle, and she created a called name to keep secret the fact that she was going into the jungle.
Okay. And we also know she's a smart girl because she was able to find out who was selling stories about you. So she is a very clever. And the headline is, it's smart pull. It's smart pull. So I think it's like the snake in the jungle and killing being clever. Okay, so we squash all that together and we get his smart pull. Why does the quincy be careful?
Other headline, Matt flies Danny Jones squirms in terror after a snake slithers into shorts on the first challenge referenced early. Headline is, a black member? Instead of a black mumbo. I was a little bit rude.
Remember, the Gomforch, the tabloids are Gomforch, and then also a Sashti Knight Entertainment singer, Win Evans, was booted off strictly last night, a spoiler, and a month after group gate rocked the show, headline is, no win situation. That's good, that's good, it's solid, no win, okay good.
Hello, I'm Rose Taylor with news of the latest Oh God what now? The Politics podcast from the makers of American friction, the bunker and jam tomorrow. In this episode, with the budget finally here, is it an opportunity for Labour to get on the front foot and show us how it wants Britain to be different?
Plus, MPs are worried they don't have enough time to debate the assisted dying bill. Are they about to bottle one of the most difficult decisions that a Parliament can make? Polly Toynbee, columnist for The Guardian, joins the panel to get into it all. That's Oh God what now? With Zoe Grunveld, Rachel Kanliff and me, Ros Taylor. Out now, wherever you get your podcasts.
Now, in the times of the weekend, there was an interesting little featurette in the science section about being bored. The headline was, in an age of endless entertainment, why is boredom on the rise? So, Natasha, this was a much better article than we thought it would be.
is really interesting. So it's based on two studies, one of which was this longitudinal study that was done on 100,000 US adolescents over the course of a decade. And they had to rate on a scale of one to five. I love that one was that they were feeling that they were engaged and entertained. Five was unremitting on we.
So somewhere between those two states. And then 28,000 Chinese students as well in another study. And what they found essentially is that they are more likely to be bored, which is surprising considering the amount of entertainment at the disposal of young people. And so they're more likely to be bored than previous generations.
And they've got YouTube, they've got Netflix, and so much more to choose from than previous generations had. There is a brilliant quote in it, which I made a note of, which is by Professor Andreas Eldorfu.
We like him already. He's not his work, I love him. Well, he's a philosophy professor and he says social media is interesting enough to entertain but not meaningful enough to fulfill. Yes, that is the truth. So the idea is if you're scrolling and scrolling, which a lot of younger people are, it's enough to entertain you but you're not getting connection, you're not getting purpose, you're not getting belonging, all these kind of key human psychological needs are not truly being fulfilled.
It reminds me a bit of, do you remember the weakest link? And the weakest link? It's worth not expecting you to say that. Okay, but you know in the weakest link, right? So what would happen with the weakest link? Was people ask questions and they would, like, bank, you could bank the answers. And so what would happen is you get one, two, three, and then they just bank it.
Because you would panic, because you would think, okay, the next question would be the wrong answer. So you would never get to five or six. Social media is a bit like that, isn't it? It's interesting, it's okay, but you only ever get to three. You never get all the way in depth to like six or seven proper, like, I don't know, proper money, proper meat. But is that okay? So most teenagers are bored.
And is it not that they're more bored than the past, but in the past they didn't have boredom scholars interview teenagers? You know, I think teenagers, it is quite a tedious time. You have to study. You're not really very interested in your subjects. You don't have a lot of control over your life. So you are bored a lot of the time. And maybe this is just the first time.
that people know. There is a thing here that is said, this was actually in 1930. So it's Bertrand Russell, who's flosser. He said, we are less bored than our ancestors were, but we are more afraid of boredom, more afraid of it. I think it's actually the situation now. So it's like, maybe teenagers are really like, I cannot be bored. Like this is appalling.
We're less bored, like when he was talking about we're less bored than our ancestors, just because, you know, his ancestors were bloody in a factory when they were 30. Yeah, exactly. So if you're working 12-hour days, you are going to be less, you know, filled with on-we than current generations.
I also think that there's something in this idea that we're not getting as much from our entertainment because I heard from somebody who works in TV that now when they're in meetings about whether they're going to commission something, they talk about whether it's too screenable. So whether you would be able to follow the plot whilst also looking at your phone. So when you're making entertainment at that level, I mean, it's not going to make your brain fire up in the way that something very engaging is. Yeah, no, that's true. I do quite like some of the experiments mentioned in this piece, though.
Okay, so in an experiment published in 2014, volunteers chose to give themselves painful electric shocks rather than sit still in an empty room. That's some dark though, isn't it? The idea of somebody shocking themselves and going, this is less painful than the thoughts in my head. But isn't that like every relationship in your 20s?
where you're like, you know, could I look after myself or I'm just gonna text them back and see what happens. This is terrible.
And that's the end of today's paper cuts. Thanks, Natasha. Thanks for having me. Thanks to Gronye. I want to join a boy band. We could have a girl band. The three of us. This is going to be great. The paper cuts, but it's cuts with a Z. Yes. And don't forget to join the paper cut supporters club for fewer ads, more laughs and fabulous extra bits, plus
Why not send in your questions for our amazing live stream episodes this Thursday to 21st of November? Pop them over to at PaperCutsShow with the hashtag PaperCutsClassifieds. Our live stream is supporters only, though, so if you want to find out the actual answers to your questions, you better join the club. I've been Miranda Sawyer, and you've been listening to PaperCuts on a day when the star tells us that the meat in burgers could soon be replaced by seaweed! Lord Kelpazoor!
See you next time! Papercuts is written and presented by me, Miranda Sawyer with Natasha Devon and Granny Maguire. All Joe production and music by Simon Williams. Production by Liam Tate. Designed by James Parrot. The managing editor is Jacob Jarvis. The executive producer is Martin Boyd-Tosch and the group editor is Andrew Harrison. Papercuts is a podmaster's production.
