boreders

Suicide bombs. Unrest in Chad. Public sector pay cuts. And Holly Willoughby’s cleavage. I had to raise them again, because another tabloid did yesterday, with another front page picture and a claimed plethora of complaints. To be honest, Holly wore a nice dress with dropped frontage, but nothing eye-watering… nothing like Jodie Marsh’s number from ‘The Mirror’ last week.

Quite why this poor woman has drawn such ire from the press beggars belief – I mean, these articles question her judgement and highlight the distress she’s causing (to about four people)… while selling more papers with some nice colour photos. The paper noted that Phillip Schofield complimented Holly on her dress as a veiled reference to all the media coverage and that Holly appeared to look down towards her cleavage as if acknowledging what he co-presenter really meant. To me, the picture looked like Holly had decided to refer to her script in a moment of amnesia bought on by embarrassment.

Of course, you know if she comes on next week dressed in a burka, she’ll still get a couple of pages coverage in all the gutter press…

I was less than shocked to discover today that The Mirror has managed to stretch out Holly’s cleavage to a further day of discussion with a 2-page article discussing the right and wrong amount to show in public. Obviously just a chance to show a dozen or more pictures of celebrities in flesh revealing dresses, from the tasteful and currently highly popular Angelina Jolie to the utterly deranged and hardly dressed Jodie Marsh. With death in Kenya, incompetence and nepotism in Parliament, and street violence on the rise in the UK – you can see why women and their breasts demand so many front page inches.

Dancing on Ice was flooded with complaints after host Holly Willoughby showed off her cleavage in a skimpy dress.

Flooded. Cleavage. Skimpy clothes. The shock of it all. What has saturday evening entertainment come to when a young and attractive woman wears a dress. Damnation and brimstone rain down on her satanic soul!

I read about this with incredulity, because I know what papers will do to sell copy. It would appear the ‘flood’ amounted to five complaints that Holly showed a little too much skin this last Saturday. What do these five people do as a day job? In truth, they’re probably professional complainers. Reminds me of a sketch from ‘Saturday Night Fry‘ where a woman (played by Phyllida Law) blurts all sorts of obscenity in a discussion about dirty minds (with Hugh Laurie) and then promptly sends a letter of complaint about the poor standards and language just in time for the end of the show (she complains they used the word ‘penis’ twice in the course of the show, three times if they read out her letter…).

Holly used to be a model. She’s an attractive woman. Women have been known to wear dresses and use their appearance to their advantage. That rubs off on the success of the show. People who feel that seeing cleavage constitutes some level of uncalled for nakedity really should just pack up and go hold a 24/7 vigil with placards outside their local lap dancing club… Maybe they could go down the newsagents and tear the topless ladies out of the tabloids, to save people from themselves. Revealing dresswear and pornography occupy quite different points in the spectrum of decency – and judging by the pictures of Holly and the dress, there’s nothing wrong here.