We felt very bad last time. We hate blind items (though we did guess Ryan Giggs). But there's this thing in the UK where celebrities can get court-ordered injunctions against newspapers publishing items about their personal lives. They're called injunctions, and lots of celebrities have them, and together the whole thing is some big Super Injunction mystery.
Caught up? Over the weekend, the internet exploded with the alleged naming of names. The specifics of the scandals, which the papers can't publish, went out all over the internet. (It was picked up outside of the UK, and I can't believe I'm taking my legal cues from the Spanish sport tabloids.)
The very first one released? A married Ryan Giggs carried on a 7-month affair with reality TV skank/titty model Imogen Thomas. Just confirming(?) what everyone already guessed in the biggest scandal to hit Wales since Owain Glyndŵr's revolt.
Big couple of days for Giggs, setting up the essentially Premier League-clinching goal against Chelsea yesterday, and now this. The tabloids who've had this for weeks and months are royally pissed that they don't get the scoop, but then this is the same industry that's in trouble for hacking the voicemails of celebrities, including Wayne Rooney. So, pick your sides.
The British papers are delightfully passive-aggressive in their handling of this release. In an odd little Daily Mail article on an actor named elsewhere in the WikiSuperInjunctionLeaks for seeing a prostitute, they throw in this:
Last night Hugh guest-starred in Doctor Who, playing a pirate captain whose ship is in peril from a beautiful siren – an event that made the gossip columns. ‘Where can they have drawn inspiration for such a role?' asked one writer.
But then Hugh's devotion to wife Lulu is so strong it is understood he is known to fellow thespians as the Ryan Giggs of the showbusiness world, after the famously family-orientated footballer.
It's childish, and it's annoying, and it's shitty for journalists who have had to play this stupid little game where they pretend everyone doesn't know who's fucking whom in the privacy of their own homes, even though it was eventually going to come out like this someday. The Super Injunctions could never have stopped information, but it did stop the tabloids from benefiting from their scoops with both publicity and cash. And that was probably the point all along: remove the incentive, and hopefully they'll stop digging. That won't work: a scorned British press is a scary thing.