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Who said hard-copy magazines/newspapers were dying/dead ....? £18m, for this 'idea' ....

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Look. No, Look. It's a new woman's magazine that has a pink logo and Victoria Beckham on the cover and a feature on the new celebrity It-jeans and a double-page spread about black dresses being in fashion and a problem page in which Eve, 24, from Bolton, asks, "I have chlamydia. Do I need to tell my exes?" — might be an idea, Eve, might be an idea — and a zillion pages about what is hot on the high street and a feature about the new A-list affliction (zombie hands, not chlamydia) and it's aimed at the woman who has embarked on her "decade of indulgence".

It cost £18 million to come up with Look. Eighteen million quid. Now that is indulgent. If I was a bigwig at IPC, I would have thought that, for that amount of money, it could have at least come up with a more inventive title. Something like Flicks Listlessly or Reading This Will Liquefy your Brain and Make it Dribble out of Your Ear (much like this column, etcetera).

Eighteen million, and all it can come up with is 108 pages of cheap shoes, cheap dresses and even cheaper celebrities. A glorified catalogue, if you will. Eighteen million, and it took me just two and a half minutes to read, while simultaneously watching Holby City, I might add.

One might even go as far as to suggest that the £18 million would have been better spent paying off the debts of all the women in their decade of indulgence (myself included) who have frittered their money away on clothes they neither need or particularly like, but have been seduced into buying by magazines such as Look.

Really, we need another women's weekly like a dog needs an iPod. Already, the shelves of WH Smith are groaning under the weight of a trillion rainforests chopped down to be turned into neon-coloured pages featuring stories about Posh falling out with Katie Holmes, and Madonna's marriage collapsing, and the £12 dress you can't do without — yes, that will literally cause you to corpse it if you don't buy it.
Indulgent I may be, but educationally subnormal? Actually, no, don't answer that.

But then men fare little better when it comes to magazine publishing. Read a copy of Zoo or Nuts (go on, I dare you) and you'd believe that the only thing the male of the species cared about was breasts and, well … breasts.

Well, of course they do, but I am pretty sure that's not all they care about. Yet take a glance at the shelves of a newsagent's, and you'd think that all men were neanderthals and all women vacant floozies waiting to be clubbed round the head by them and dragged back to their caves.
And there I was thinking we lived in an advanced, post-feminist society: actually, the 21st century is just like the Stone Age, only with Topshop and glamour models.

How rich this must seem coming, as it does, from someone who spent much of this column last week begging for an older man to club her around the head and drag her back to his cave. My only justification is that I don't always write about such matters. Every other week, maybe, but not always.

Anyway, I would like to take this opportunity to thank all the septuagenarians — and octogenarians and nonagenarians, for that matter — who sent me such kind letters and emails in response to the column. To those of you who wrote saying that I made your week, I would like to say: on the contrary, your flattering words made mine.

Special mention must go to the anonymous reader who sent me a Valentine's card, which now has pride of place on my desk. No doubt it will be the only one I shall receive this year, though obviously, should you feel like changing that I wouldn't complain.

Oh dear, I've just realised that this wouldn't look so out of place in Look magazine, would it?


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