We love Private Eye

From its media pages, this story (not online) had me laughing my way through an office lunchtime today, to the growing consternation of workmates:

Another week, another victory for citizen journalism at Sky News… As storms battered Britain at the beginning of last week, presenters on the rolling news channel begged viewers to ‘help us put together the fullest national picture possible’ by sending in their photos of the damage.

Hundreds took up the invitation – including posters on the Football 365 web forum, who, finding that such pisspoor efforts as a shot of a watering can (‘the wind blew it round all night’) were being featured on the Sky website, rose to the challenge and began to send in increasingly outlandish scenes created using photoshop and snaps lifted mostly from the rival BBC website.

By 11:30am on Tuesday, despite a solemn promise that ‘your photo will be checked by moderators before it can be displayed’ the 408 photographs in Sky’s ‘Wild Weather’ gallery included a shot of a young Norman Wisdom dismayed by a car crushed by a tree; footballer Carlos Valderama in flooded New Orleans captioned ‘it’s windy here in Widnes’; a still from environmental disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow captioned ‘Whitley Bay’; a suspicious number of scenes of destruction featuring either teddy bears or the athlete and television presenter Kriss Akabusi; and several shots of fallen trees and flooded streets in which missing toddler Madeleine McCann was clearly visible in the background.

Sadly the fun was terminated after a mere 24 hours when moderators caught on and deleted all the images.