Freddie Starr ate my hamster

Best ever headlines (and some bad ones)

A lighter post this Friday with just two references to the big orange idiot currently ruining the world. One at the end, and one here, praising the headline “The Abominable Showman” in the New European. Very good.

It got me thinking about other great headlines, so here is a selection.

PUN-TASTIC

Super Caley Go Ballistic, Celtic Are Atrocious

Amazing tour de force from the Scottish Sun recording Inverness Caledonian Thistle’s shock defeat of Celtic.

Foot heads arms body

The Times on Michael Foot chairing a nuclear disarmament committee in the 1960s

Headless body in topless bar

New York Post classic from 1983

Antiques rude show

The Sun in 2018, on pole dancers performing at an old people’s home

Zip me up before you go go

Famous Sun headline after George Michael’s arrest in a Beverley Hills public toilet

Champagne Super Over

After England’s super over win over New Zealand in the 2019 cricket world cup (shared by Financial Times, Daily Mirror, The Guardian and Daily Star)

I’m only here for De Beers

The Sun in 2009 after gem thieves try to steal De Beers diamonds in an under-visited Millennium Dome.

A man. A plan. A canoe. Panama

A 2008 Guardian headline on John Darwen faking his death in a canoe accident and then fleeing to Panama with his wife. It’s a riff on the famous palindrome (canal, not canoe)

Over the shoulder bowler bowls over an over the shoulder boulder holder moulder

The Sun (trying a bit too hard maybe?) on Shane Warne’s fling with bra-designer Michelle Mone, later elevated to the peerage by David Cameron and accused of defrauding the government with a £200m dodgy PPE contract. Around the same time Warne died after a massage in his hotel room in Thailand - no happy ending for him, and hopefully not for Mone either.

ICONIC

Freddie Starr ate my hamster

The Sun’s factually accurate headline for its factually inaccurate story that comedian Starr ate a live hamster in a sandwich. Voted Sun readers’ favourite ever Sun headline in 2019.

Titanic sinks…

I kicked burning terrorist so hard in balls that I tore a tendon in my foot

Visceral and unforgettable from the Daily Record in 2007

War on America

Daily Telegraph, 12 September, 2001

Up Yours, Delors

Obnoxious but iconic Sun headline in 1990 - perhaps the start of the Eurosceptic movement and the eventual descent into Brexit

Sydney Sun, 1945.

Other horrible but famous headlines include: Hurrah for the Blackshirts (Daily Mail praising the Nazis in 1934), Gotcha! (the Sun’s headline in 1982 celebrating the sinking of The Belgrano and the loss of 300 lives), Eastbenders (the Sun in 1986, outraged at gay characters introduced into Eastenders) and the extraordinary Enemies of the people from the Daily Mail in 2016, attacking three judges for the sin of ruling that giving notice of Brexit required parliament’s consent rather than use of the royal prerogative.

DOUBLE ENTENDRES - DELIBERATE OR ACCIDENTAL

Republicans turned off by the size of Obama’s package

Eastern Michigan University newspaper

Tired Gay succumbs to Dix in 200m

Reuters 2010

Young Boys Wankdorf Erection Relief

Soccernet 2005 headline on Berne soccer club being allowed to play at the Wankdorf stadium. They still do.

And these two, probably unintentional..

TYPICALLY BRITISH

Heavy Fog in the Channel. Continent cut off

Famous 1957 Times headline emblematic of our UK-centric outlook at the time (and now as well, who am I kidding?)

My 2016 resolution was “no more blowjobs” but by half past midnight I had a cock in my mouth

Sunday Sport 1 January 2017

A mash-up of Ian Duncan Smith in the Daily Telegraph and a Sunday Sport headline from 2015.

Golfers free seagull from nets before reviving it with the best Greggs pasty

Metro, 2024

JUST BAD

Homicide victims rarely talk to police

Express Times in 2009 (13 years after the launch of Silent Witness incidentally)

Breathing oxygen linked to staying alive

Mason County News 2015

A nuclear explosion would be a disaster

Observer 2006

At last! A true Tory budget

Daily Mail 2022, on the budget that led to Liz Truss’s downfall a few weeks later

Justin Webb, still masquerading as a pseudo-intelligent journalist on the Radio 4 Today programme. Hold your head in shame.