the grauniad

My starring role in Revenge Of The Super-Cold this week kept me from my usual Saturday routine: coffee, more coffee, a cigarette and the best newspaper in the world. I only buy it once a week because, with nine supplements and a free DVD of a movie they helped fund (such as The Madness Of King George), it takes me that long to get through it.

The Guardian is no stranger to criticism. It's definitely leftist though rarely partisan. It thinks like me. Or, possibly, it has indoctrinated me into thinking a certain way! It's won awards for its online content and yet still has a reputation for schoolboy errors. Satirical magazine Private Eye coined the nickname "The Grauniad" due to the alarming number of typographical mistakes and also, I suspect, a desire to avoid lawsuits by referring to every thing and everyone by fake names. (I once sent a hilarious article from Private Eye to a colleague in Belgium and he responded dryly, "That was very British." Link followers, don't say I didn't warn you.) Legend has it that the paper once mis-spelled its own name, though in the top corner of a page and not on the masthead. In truth, the typos mostly ceased in 1988 when the publishers switched to an electronic typesetting system but jokes that good don't go away overnight.



They tried to fool me by launching a major redesign on the very day I returned to these shores but me and my Saturday Guardian are not so easily parted. What do you do when you can't find the font you want and don't want others imitating your success? Make your own, that's what! Helvetica is out and the new font is called Guardian Egyptian. It's now the only British national printing in full colour and the first to use the Berliner format - which is a new mid-size, halfway between the traditional broadsheet and the modern tabloid, and not in the shape of a doughnut at all. It's certainly a lot easier to control on a windy day yet not so small that you look like a pleb when reading it in public. (Snobbery 1, Everyman Complex 0.)

I'd pay the cover price just for the T.V. guide. Where else can you get programme descriptions as sarcastic as this?

BBC1 11.40pm FILM: Net Force (Robert Lieberman, 1999). Scott Bakula heads an F.B.I. team dedicated to solving crimes that take place on an outlandish computer system called "the internet" in the futuristic year of 2005.

Sky Movies 8.00pm FILM: The Chronicles Of Riddick (David Twohy, 2004). Chronically ridiculous.

Not helping its reputation is one of the more entertaining parts of the paper, Corrections. All newspapers make mistakes but mine has no problem admitting to them where others might require a court order before printing an apology. (Appearances can be important, I hear.) I'll end this thinly-disguised sales pitch with a quote that's so old it's probably apochryphal: "The omission of a Corrections section in yesterday's Guardian was due to a printer error and not a sudden onset of accuracy."