A New Dimension of Banal Celebrity Bullshit

On the scale of mindless and unimportant celebrity bullshit there are four key benchmarks for ridiculousness:

1) Something happened. This is the type of article which purports to be about X's new music video or Y's new movie or Z's show in _____land, but usually actually just spends 5 paragraphs recounting in a tedious and dry fashion the last two weeks of X/Y/Z's life. Still, at least it's about the work that they do, i.e. the supposed reason people know who they are in the first place.

2) Really? Wow. This type of story - though about someone you've never met and wouldn't ever think about were they not plastered all over magazines and tabloids - is nevertheless intriguing. It usually concerns fairly major developments in a celeb's life like a divorce or an injury - personal stuff that affects nobody but is still, for whatever reason, interesting.

3) Nothing happened. Kim Kardashian crossed a road. Avril Lavigne was wearing a bikini. James Corden had a takeaway. These stories are the filler, the real gossip, the real dross; they're the completely empty and vacuous tales of absolutely nothing important or with wider consequences or even with small consequences to the celebrity in question. They're like those crisps that don't taste of anything and don't have any calories either; people just eat them because they want to feel like they're eating something at that moment in time.

But wait, because there's something worse than that:

4) Nothing happened. Literally.

Today the Daily Mail is carrying an article whose headline boldly asserts:

Reigniting the flame: Ashley and Cheryl Cole get intimate on a romantic day out

Got that? Ashley Cole and Cheryl Cole are getting intimate. On a romantic day out.

But the Mail don't just tell you so: they include 3 brilliantly clear photographs of the loved-up couple because the cornerstone of celebrity bullshit is photographs. One is the pair in a restaurant, another is of Ashley lifting his ex-wife into the air, the last is of a romantic embrace in the street.

In the second paragraph of the article the Mail's anonymous byline Daily Mail Reporter asserts with the utmost confidence that:

now it appears there is confirmation that the relationship is back on track

Got it?

Cheryl Cole and Ashley are back together?

Understood? All clear, now?

Are you ready for the twist?

It's not them.

It's a pair of lookalikes.