THEY’VE been at it again. I’m sure newspaper headline writers are permanently embroiled in some private contest to see who can come up with the wackiest offerings with which to make readers smile – or groan.

The latest antics revolved around Samantha Cameron’s pregnancy with the Sun taking the dubious top slot with the tortuous “Wham bam! Sam Cam to be a mam (she’ll need a new pram).” Catchy, eh?

Not one of the paper’s better efforts. The Sun subs have done much better than that. Who can forget, for example, the 128pt screamer that topped the 1998 story about George Michael caught with a man and his trousers down in a Los Angeles lavatory – “Zip me up before you go go”?

And continuing the pop track theme, what about the time that Police band frontman Sting got stopped coming out of a place of ill-repute while on tour in Germany? The Sun’s offering that time was “Sting’s massage in a brothel”.

Then there was the tale about the underdog football team Inverness Caledonian Thistle trouncing Celtic in the Scottish cup, prompting the Sun sports subs to come up with “Super Caley go ballistic, Celtic are atrocious”.

But chortle-inducing headlines are not the sole province of Rupert Murdoch’s flagship rag – local newspapers have been known to have their moments, too. Some years ago, The Press’s sister paper, the Northern Echo, ran a feature on the demise of Redcar Pier, which was badly damaged in a storm. There was a particularly fine organ in the ballroom at the end of the pier and there was local angst about how the town was going to save it. The headline? “Wurlitzer crying shame as town sheds a pier.” Classic.

The Plymouth Evening Herald ran a tale about a group of youths who pinched the Mayor of Torpoint’s car and drove it into the River Tamar and topped it with “Citroen on the dock of a bay”. Thanks to Otis Redding for that one. Meanwhile, a local story about the lack of library services in Essex prompted “Book lack in Ongar”.

But punny headlines (groan) can get reporters into trouble, too. One local paper that shall remain nameless ran a story about a cat called Chutney that was attacked and killed by a dog. The headline “Mangled Chutney” did absolutely nothing to soothe the grieving cat owner, who really had her claws out over that one.

Enough! On a more sensible note, I do confess to being very interested in the exploits of explorer Sir Vivian Fuchs who, as the founder and head of the British Antarctic Survey spent a lot of time plodding his way around the globe’s frozen wastes.

His exploits were keenly followed by the media of the day, and he became something of a newspaper hero with stories such as “Savage cold could halt Fuchs” and “Sir Vivian Fuchs at Palace”, along with “Sir Vivian Fuchs for Antarctic” gracing their columns.

Thankfully, the headline writers behaved and let their offerings speak for themselves… • SLEAZE and politicians are like peaches and cream, fish and chips, rhubarb and custard – they fit together. Yet again our news bulletins have been filled with unedifying tales of jollies abroad and has-been Government ministers charging five grand a day for their dubious advice. So this joke that winged its way into my inbox from a pal the other day is very fitting. Read on… Five surgeons are discussing the best patients to operate on. The first surgeon says: “I like to see accountants on my operating table because when you open them up, everything inside is numbered.” The second responds: “You should try electricians! Everything inside them is colour-coded.”

The third surgeon says: “No, I really think librarians are the best – everything inside them is in alphabetical order.” The fourth surgeon chimes in: “I like construction workers. They always understand when you have a few parts left over at the end, and when the job takes longer than you said it would.”

But the fifth surgeon shuts them all up when he observes: “You’re all wrong. Politicians are the easiest to operate on. There’s no guts, no heart, no ****s, no brains, and no spine, and there are only two moving parts – the mouth and rear orifice – and they are interchangeable.”

What was that about never a truer word spoken in jest? I rest my case.