Credit where credit is due.  Having wound up the Crawley Observer a bit last month when they got caught out by events, it is only fair to comment on the way they included the story about falling masonry on the front page this week.¹The events happened, according to them, at 1:10pm on Tuesday and they got it on the front page of the paper that was on sale the next morning.  Some might say “big deal” because all the daily papers manage this every day, but they are geared up for that sort of thing.  Weekly local papers tend to have everything put to bed a lot earlier in the day.

It is even possible that the front page was all laid out and ready to go when the incident happened, and they managed to get a fairly long story, with quotes from interviews, photos of the scene and at the hospital.  In my over-active imagination I  like to think that somebody actually got the chance to to yell “Hold the front page!” early yesterday afternoon.

Surely everyone would love to have the chance to be able to yell that.  It must rank up with “Follow that cab!” as one of the most satisfying things to yell.  The only thing better than that must be Gene Hunt’s now-legendary line “Come out. You are surrounded by armed bastards” which I was pleased to see was left in the US version of Life On Mars, even if Harvey Keitel didn’t really do it justice.  Or is there something even better than that?

1. Also fair to point out that the Crawley News also managed to get this in their paper [↩]