Paper Monitor
11:10 UK time, Wednesday, 29 December 2010
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
Economic woe, public service cuts, ongoing travel chaos - none of it matters much to Fleet Street, for once.
England has retained the Ashes for the first time in 24 years, and joy is unconfined. At least in the English editions.
"In war, resolution; in defeat, defiance; in victory, magnanimity." So quoth Winston Churchill.
It is advice gleefully spurned by who, drunk on triumph, embarks on a splenetic denunciation of all things Australian that is truly breathtaking in its immoderacy and political incorrectness.
"Just what is the point of Australia?", the headline proclaims, and the article seemingly takes this as its cue to display increasingly petulant splutterings of glee at the overcoming of this once-great sporting nation.
Coren asks: "For now that we have taken cricket away, what does Australia have left?" Not rugby, he concludes, since England's union world cup victory on Australian soil in 2003 and the league side's repeated besting by New Zealand.
"They don't play soccer with any seriousness and nobody else plays Aussie Rules, so we have no way of telling how good they are at that," he smirks. "Probably rubbish."
And so the theme develops. "They have no art or literature worth speaking of, they barely even have an ozone layer any more, so you can't go outdoors in daylight without a radiation suit," Coren beams.
"The best Australia can offer in reply to Shakespeare and Dickens at the moment are the TV soap operas Neighbours and ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ And Away - both of which have been relegated to Channel Five."
Even pop music, gloats Coren, has no place anymore for Australians. Kylie Minogue? "Pretty much retired." Her sister Dannii? "Made out of plastic and prefers television panel shows." Jason Donovan? "About as much chance of making a comeback as Michael Hutchence."
He saves the most barbed jibe for the final paragraph: "I only wish I had the sort of job that brought me into contact with lots of Australians I could gloat over. But I'm a bit old to be a barman."
is more whimsical in his appreciation of the series.
With England-based cricket supporters having to stay up into the very early hours to listen to the Ashes live, he says, "a beautiful, shadowy, nocturnal community developed in recent weeks, similar to those in which people go into the woods in the middle of the night to bet on dog-fighting, or meet in a basement under a launderette to worship the Devil, of people ringing and texting each other to enjoy another Australian collapse, while we fight to stay awake amidst flickering Christmas tree lights, occasionally wondering why Rita out of Coronation Street is umpiring until realising you must have nodded off and had a little dream".
Still, there has been a Corenist rather than a Steelian sensibility predominantly on display among the Barmy Army, England's travelling fans in Australia, according to Stephen Bates of the Guardian.
Whereas listeners of the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's Test Match Special would once have "tut-tutted from Antigua to Calcutta" at the sound of the Barmies' barracking, they are now learning to appreciate their compatriots' chants,
He adds:
Test Match Special newcomer Michael Vaughan, the former England captain who won the Ashes in 2005, and is no stranger to being barracked by Australian fans, was taken by the taunting, regaling Radio 4 listeners with the opening bars of the Barmies' song about Johnson, although wisely recognising that the scatological ending was best bowdlerised.
It's just not cricket.
The 
