So you think the tabloids just write any old nonsense. It’s not easy, you know. There are lots of skills to master. Like alliteration and differentiation for a start. So here is your step-by-step guide to how to do it.

Schadenfreude and sympathy both start with an “s”. That does not make them the same thing. Schadenfreude is a German word and therefore automatically bad, describing how good it feels about bad things happening. Right? Sympathy is an English word and therefore a good thing to feel for good people, even if they used to be bad. Still with us?

Okay, now G is another tricky letter. It stands for Glitter, but also for Goody. As in goody, goody, we’re in for another Gary Glitter story. As long as you remember that Gary Glitter is a baddy. If it helps, you can call him Gary Gloater, which The Sun did in its interview with the disgraced former glam pop star.

As far as Glitter is concerned we feel schadenfreude andnotsympathy. We feel sympathy for Goody, whose first name is Jade and used to be a baddy when she was racially abusing Shilpa Shetty (both of whose names also begin confusingly with “s”) on British Big Brother (three Bs there), but became a goody again when they kissed and made up and Shilpa invited Goody onto Indian Big Brother, called Bigg Boss – itself an attempt to differentiate and alliterate.

That’s when Goody got bad news on live television, which made a good front page as far as the tabs were concerned: “Jade has cancer”, wailed The Sun. Cancer is a bad thing, even for Goody, and even though she used to be a pariah, which is an Indian word for a really bad baddy. Gary Glitter is now a “pariah”, according to the Daily Mail, which is a useful word in the tabloid alliteration stakes, going nicely as it does with “pop” and “pervert”.

Goody flew back to Britain, as in “Star jets home to fight big C”, which is how The Sun reported developments.

The really bad baddy, meanwhile, tried flying almost everywhere else apart from Britain, becoming, in the Mirror’s words a “club class paedo”. However, the baddy couldn’t avoid Blighty in the end, providing the red tops with yet another chance to give him a really good kicking.

Stats of the week

David Miliband might be more stylish and appealing but that doesn’t make him a better choice for prime minister, according to a poll last week.

Fewer than one in five said either Miliband or Gordon Brown would make them more likely to vote Labour at the next election.

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