Media Broth: Sizzlin’ hot, or maybe not?

IT was Scotland versus England last night: men’s football, at Celtic Park, with the hosts losing 3-1.

And, in time-honoured fashion, the match was preceded by the Scots media corps taking on their English counterparts, this time at an adjoining pitch to Hampden Park, Lesser Hampden.

We’ll let the Daily Mirror’s chief sports writer, Oliver Holt, report how he and his fellow English media team performed… He tweeted: “Oh, and the Scottish boys were quite good, too. Did I forget to mention the result? 1-7.”

That’s a 7-1 win for the Scots team with Press Association sports reporter, Andy Newport, netting twice.

In fairness, it is said the England team was ‘injury-ravaged’, meaning appearances for them by The Scotsman’s Alan Pattullo and the Daily Record’s Gordon Parks (once on Dundee United’s books and who played a couple of seasons for Clyde FC).

But it wasn’t the only match of its type, with The Drum media and marketing magazine last week issuing a call for players for a Scotland versus England advertising and marketing sector clash. Said the mag, the Scotland team was to be captained by its managing editor, Cameron Clarke, who is based in Glasgow.

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STAYING with football. And something tells us that football writer, Frank Gilfeather, might not have been best pleased, when he began his piece, in Thursday’s edition of The Herald, thus: “It was arguably the best non-football good news story to emerge from Pittodrie in years.

“Yet, Aberdeen [FC] were either coy or downright anti-media when they announced via their website – at 4am yesterday – that their £14.5m debt had all but been wiped out.”

Read more, here.

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BROADCASTER, Kirsty Wark’s heart will have no doubt skipped a beat had she picked up copy of The Scotsman or The Herald last Thursday, to begin reading that her debut novel – The Legacy of Elizabeth Pringle – had been bracketed alongside the winner of the prestigious literary award, the Man Booker Prize.

But she will have been very quickly dismayed; because this particular nomination was for – in the opinion of the judges – singularly failing to set pulses racing.

Organisers, the Literary Review, have announced – here – that Wark’s work has been shortlisted for the Bad Sex in Fiction Awards.

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THE BBC continuity announcer on Monday evening might have thrown a few folk when – following the Strictly Come Dancing show, It Takes Two – she trailed an upcoming show on BBC Radio 5 live, about sex and dementia.

Surely, you don’t have to be suffering from dementia to not remember when you last had sex…

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ANYTHING tickling your tastebuds? Send in the strictest confidence, here.