What a load of pap

Not the best night for press relations last night with BBC3’s somewhat repetitive mini-doc Paparazzi: Next Generation. Camera crews followed a group of young bucks with telephoto lenses, driving with one hand, jumping red lights and sticking their cameras in the faces of everyone from Amy Winehouse to Goldie Hawn.

Narrator Lee Williams did his best to big them up by referring to them variously as Top Gun, Lone Gun and Sharpshooter and pondered what it must be like “looking down the barrel”. There were shoulder-cam shots of chirpy chappies running around in pursuit of prey and one or two of them came over well; waiting for hours in one spot, giving it large when the moment came, and downloading £££-a time shots from their laptops.

But it was worth it to see the hapless Ryan Essex standing outside a Thames-side hotel waiting for the prime Minister emerge from credit crunch crisis talks. Somehow he hadn’t sussed that while shouting “Paris” outside Stringfellows may elicit a pout in his direction, shouting repeatedly “Gordon” would not.

Having failed to snap anything of value he complained: “It would have hurt him to turn round. Why is he so moody?”

He may have got a few pix in the papers, but it wouldn’t hurt to read them….