Paper Monitor
10:35 UK time, Monday, 2 October 2006
“Personally I’m pleased with the 1970s. It’s been a decade of general upward progress.” Who summed up an entire decade with such sparkling and amusing words? Comedy legend, and the nation’s uncle, Michael Palin.
The Daily Telegraph has coughed up for the Palin diaries, with extracts spread across a couple of pages illustrated with copious Python pictures.
Except, the difficult thing to say, is that they’re not exactly very funny. For example, Nov 24 1976, planning Life of Brian: “John and Graham have a good idea for a Brian storyline – writing Go ˿ Romans on the wall is going to be a classic. I wish I’d thought of such a neat idea.”
Perhaps the most surprising detail from Palin is that at a nightclub Mick Jagger “warns me against the poofs here”.
Palin is the first in a line-up of male celebs appearing on the morning’s mastheads. These top-of-the-page faces are the paper's selling points at the newsagents - and the Daily Mirror features the childhood memories of comedian Peter Kay, while the Sun pitches in with DJ Chris Moyles.
Meanwhile the Guardian’s man on the front cover, Mick Davis, has a very big smile – not surprisingly perhaps, because he’s named as topping the league of high-paid chief execs, pocketing almost £15m last year.
The story shows that average directors’ pay rose by 28% last year, while average earnings increased by 3.7%. And it reports that Mr Davis earns 544 more times than the average of his employees at Xstrata. Presumably this statistic will figure prominently in the firm’s what-a-great-team-we-are e-mail to staff.
Meanwhile, the Daily Mail took its own small step towards clearing up a longstanding mystery.
It reports that an Australian sound editor has found a missing word in one of the most famous quotes of the last century. When Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon in 1969, he said: “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” which, if you think about it, doesn’t quite make sense.
Armstrong, in his autobiography, says he meant to insert an “a” – so that it would say “One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind”. Armstrong wrote: “Certainly the ‘a’ was intended, because that’s the only way the statement makes any sense.”
But now the tapes have been re-examined and sound man Peter Shann Ford has found an acoustic wave that represents the missing “a”, spoken so quickly and quietly that it was inaudible, but is now detectable. Does that mean that all those quote books will have to be re-written?
The 
