Page 3
Review of the Year 2007
Another year goes by in the
world of Page 3 and it has to be said that even with the odd blip or three as the months
went by, this has been one of the best years for Page 3 for quite some time.
So once again it is time to
sit back, relax, pour yourself a really nice refreshing cup of tea and read once more the
Review of the Year.
2006 was the year when The
Sun’s Page 3 output reached one of its highest standards of quality in many years and
in 2007 the quality was maintained as we had week after week of full sets of pictures,
many of them of outstanding quality.
The location shoots once again
predominated and indeed the lovely sunny Ibiza pictures of which there seemed to be a
never ending supply were still being run well into December when back in the UK it was
decidedly cold and damp!
Whilst outside it was a
freezing cold New Year's Eve, this is the lovely picture of Danni Wells we had to warm us
up that morning! If she had been wearing that little outside in the UK right she
would have turned blue.... |
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Once again Alison Webster
was behind the lens for most of the pictures but we also continued to see some very nice
contributions from time to time from Zoe McConnell as her career as a photographer began
to gather pace noticeably.
The alleged Page 3 Lesbians
(Becky Rule and Melanie-Jane Boorman) broke up which was duly ‘celebrated’ by
The Sun with a Lodge set and a Page 3 special despite the fact it was patently obvious the
whole story was bollocks from the start.
Interestingly unlike last
year, there were less gimmicky pictures, no Page 3 Girls dressed as plumbers or anything
silly like that, indeed the nearest we got to anything of that sort was this rather nice
Halloween themed picture of Vikki Blows in October. |
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Unless of course you include the annual 'Royal Navy bans Page 3'
story so cue two girls in naval hats (Ruth and Melanie-Jane doing the honours this year) Meanwhile Danni Wells found herself in a very large hat for Royal Ascot week
marking a rare return these days for The Sun to a Page 3 themed for a major sporting
event. |
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2006 was by far and away the
worst year the Daily Star had ever had, their picture quality both in terms of photography
and presentation was little short of abysmal and the future looked bleak.
Evidently something happened,
at about the same time as my 2006 Review of the Year went online suitably lambasting the
paper for basically being crap, socks were noticeably pulled up across the board, pictures
appeared that were far better presented, the old common habit of chopping arms, legs and
tops of heads off reduced dramatically and the Star became worth buying again.
Of course they were far from
perfect but they have begun the road to recovery from a point so low that I almost gave up
on the paper completely.
Although still a bit tightly
framed, this shot of Stephanie (of whom little was seen towards the end of 2007) shows a
nice airy outdoor shot. |
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There were still some problems
though and most of these were due to Lucy Pinder of which more anon…. There
were also still some presentation issues still creeping in from time to time and there
were noticeably a few reprints (or using very similar shots from the same shoot) along the
way as well.
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There were also a few major clangers too, not
as serious as for example last years infamous football team poster but even still this
‘Birthday Suit’ feature of Sunday the 16th of September which
featured hand bra’s a go go was an horrendous own goal which should have been
produced as a proper full topless shot on a weekday, a huge missed opportunity to produce
something really special. |
One thing that was noticeable
was the definite decrease in Page 3 being pulled for whichever reject from ‘Big
Brother’, ‘I’m a
Non-Entity…’, ‘Celebrity Pogo Stick Dancing’ or whatever the Reality
Show fad of the week was milking their fifteen minutes.
This didn’t stop the Star devoting endless acres of newsprint to the likes of
Danielle Lloyd or the equally talentless (and pointless) Chanelle but at least they were
confined mostly to other areas of the paper, leaving Page 3 largely unpolluted.
So the recovery for the Daily
Star’s Page 3 output has begun (lets face it, it could not have got any worse) and it
will be interesting to see if they manage to continue improving into 2008, preferably by
ditching Lucy Pinder!!
Other
Publications:
The Weeklies:
What was the point? After a glimmer of improvement in 2006, Zoo and
Nuts fell back back to being little more than expensive loo paper as their sales figures
continued to plummet, indeed Zoo and a number of the monthly ‘Lad’s Mags’
in the EMap publishing stable were sold off to a German company in late 2007 which means
that their future must be called into question.
Nuts meanwhile scored a huge
own goal, initially the setting up of their own digital TV channel sounded like a great
idea until it actually went on air! It was
then that it was revealed that the only features from the mag which would make the channel
worth bothering with - topless girls and lots of them – was the one thing that would
not feature!! Idiots!! Instead all you got was Lucy Pinder (Yawn…)
reading stories at night in her nightie.
The
Monthly’s:
Dismal, dismal, and dismal. Did I mention dismal? With the aforementioned plummeting sales figures and
also plummeting quality girlie content, it is a small miracle that none of these titles
have sunk in the last year but surely it must be only a matter of time before the market
for these publications implodes beyond repair?
The Sport:
Under new ownership, the Daily
and Sunday Sport continued to provide potential alternative Page 3 style entertainment,
indeed I purchased the 31st of December edition just an hour ago and I must say
I was pretty impressed. The main problem for
the paper however continues to be poor availability in many areas with increasingly fewer
newsagents now stocking it.
Online Media
Page3.com:
Even though it continues to be
the Flagship of the online Page 3 Community for many, the site continued to suffer lots of
technical problems. The Archive is crammed
full of errors, the Gold section breaks down frequently and still links on the website are
out of date. Get it sorted please!
The one area where Page3.com excelled however was The Lodge
Shoots.
2006 featured rather too much
recycling of often seen before (and sometimes boring) images but with only a few
exceptions (the awful two week 'Great at 8' Lodges in December for example) 2007's Lodge
output was outstanding with the first four months of 2007 in particular being very good
indeed week in and week out.
Right are just four examples
of the quality on offer with Page 3 Veteran Nikkala Stott (receiver of my Lifetime
Achievement Award last year) featuring in two outstanding fully nude Lodge shoots.
Also there were more two girl
Lodge shoots such as the one with Amii and Danni Wells whilst Becky Rule on her own has
been doing some magnificent shots as well. |
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Lodge Shoots aside, the main
problem is that Page3.com has no real competition to chivvy it along, and until someone
takes up the challenge, Lodge Shoots excepted, it will continue to be the slightly
stagnant mess that it seems to have slipped so comfortably into over the last couple of
years.
Megastar.co.uk
The only other source of fresh
Page 3 style material online, www.megastar.co.uk
got bought up by Bravo and whilst the site did get a much needed makeover, annoyingly they
turned all their images into devils sputum format that is Macromedia Flash which is nigh
on utterly useless for image collectors.
Other Sites:
Other than that, online Page 3
style content is largely confined to the lads mag sites (all pretty much as poor as the
printed equivalents) or the increasingly excellent online forums such as the highly
recommended www.x-site.co.uk
Sam was crowned the 2007 Page
3 Idol in late December of 2006 replacing the previous holder Freya who promptly vanished
never to be seen again (not that she was around that much in the first place, a mystery
still never fully explained.)
Unlike her predecessor, Sam
has been extensively used by The Sun throughout the year with multiple Lodge shoots of
high quality as well. Indeed it looks like Sam
will become one of the longest serving Page 3 Idols so far as the 2008 competition seems
to have been forgotten about until the New Year. |
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The search for the 2008 Idol
began back in October and once again Page3.com published every single entry received and
dear oh dear, there was some serious problems. Much
like the 2007 competition’s gallery of horrors, we had daily updates of some truly
dreadful pictures with only a handful of possibilities in amongst them.
The fact that the voting
rounds proper of the competition seem to have been delayed to early 2008 does not bode
well as the last time this happened we got Freya and look what (didn’t) happen to
her!
The Girls:
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The Sun once again kept a closed circle of
carefully selected girls to which just three were added.
Sam the Page 3 Idol (shown
above) in fact started in late 2006, Katie-Marie (left) was the runner up in the same
contest and was hired as a Page 3 Girl proper from March and later in the year the stable
was joined by promising new girl Amy-Lu (right) although her appearances to date have
sadly been very few and far between. |
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One girl more than worthy of mention in The
Sun’s stable is Vikki Blows who made her debut in February of 2006 only to disappear
from view later that year. All was not lost however as she duly reappeared in 2007
and has become a regular and popular (unless you are the simply gorgeous webmaster
apparently!!) feature of Page 3. She also did a couple of nice Lodge sets as well. |
Balancing the three arrivals
were the departures of Freya, Krystle and Neval all of whom little had been seen of in
2006 so their farewells were not totally unexpected. It
is also noticeable that Melanie-Jane Boorman and Ruth have been making fewer appearances
as 2007 rolled by so I suspect they may not be around for much longer.
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The Daily Star lost several notables through
the year, Selina, Kerri and Zuzana all either had reduced appearances as the year went on
or bowed out altogether. Also we seem to have
seen the last of Michelle Marsh although Sophie Howard did unexpectedly reappear towards
the end of the year. There were a
whole host of new girls though, many of them promising but then again many of which making
only one or two appearances and then never seen or heard of ever again. |
As an example of these one
hit wonders (and a wonderful example of the Star shooting itself in the foot!!) here is
the feature the Star ran on the 28th of March about new girl Hannah Claydon who
got the annual dubious honour of being declared the ‘New Sam Fox’.
Unfortunately someone at the
Star didn’t do their homework as she was a Sport regular. Embarrassingly for the Star, despite this big
launch feature that was the last we ever saw of her!!
It was also noticeable that
quite a few Sport girls turned up in the Page 3 Idol contestants including the much hailed
'Essex Twins'. I take it no one at The Sun has noticed this yet either... |
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Other girls have either made one or two appearances and never been
seen again or alternatively look set to become regular Star Birds if the Star can give
Lucy Pinder a rest for a few minutes! Sam (Left) seems set
to become a regular after a promising debut in October whilst Libby (right) appeared just
the once in May and like a number of others to have graced the Star's pages, has not been
seen since. |
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Three big arrivals (in more
ways than one) were from left to right above, Polish model Eva (or Evie, or even Iga) who
is a stunning girl who can also be found in Playboy and other publications, Seren Gibson
who after some initially poor features by the Star using recycled mag pictures settled
down to become a regular and popular girl and finally Lindsey. Still signifying that the Star really do like their
big breasted brunettes though!!
Unfortunately there was also
the small matter on one Ms Lucy Pinder….
| The 5th of July 2007 – Mark
this day as the day the Daily Star got something to get really obsessed about! After years of silly hand bra’s, Lucy Pinder finally decided to go fully
topless, a move that was greeted with… shrugs of the shoulder mostly as many felt it
was too little at least two years too late. |
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After that, having had a
diet of nearly constant pictures of Malene for the first half of the year (at one point
averaging two a week!!) for the second half of the year we had a constant diet of centre
page posters, recycled mag pics and some really rather poor Page 3 photos proper of Lucy
ad infintum.
Many Page 3 fans got truly fed
up of her being pushed on us a couple of years ago in constant hand bra poses and now she
was topless, the Star (and the weekly rags as well) used her endlessly, three times in a
week (often doubling up with Malene) and in any feature article they could make up became
the norm in the second half of the year.
Now Lucy Pinder has signed up
to become the new face of Television X, they are welcome to her!! |
Those Predictions
for 2007…
So what happened to
those predictions I made in 2006 for this year then?
Nikkala Stott is still going (although with slightly fewer appearances this
year but boy have they been good) Zoe McConnell has also appeared noticeably less of late
and her last two pictures towards the end of 2007 were pretty awful. Michelle Marsh
is long gone now, Sophie Howard looked like she had gone too only to make a couple of
surprise appearances in the Star towards the end of the year and Zuzana departed Page 3 to
apparently have a baby.
We had a few bad days but nowhere near as bad as some of the wall to wall
dreck that was forced upon us in 2006, indeed there was only one day in the whole year
with no Page 3 of any kind in either paper.
The Daily Star did however use every opportunity they could think of to fill
their pages with Danielle Lloyd and Chanelle wherever possible whilst the over dominance
of Lucy Pinder is discussed (ranted about more like!) above.
Well
none of them have gone but the Lad’s Mag market is now in such a state that it really
is only a matter of time before something gives. Nuts
had the right idea by launching a Freeview Digital TV channel but blew it completely by
not packing it with lots of topless lovelies from their mag which was the only thing that
would have made it worth watching. Come back
Men and Motors on Freeview is what I say!!
The Predictions
for 2008...
The Lucy Pinder bandwagon
will outstay its already overworn welcome and move on.
Probably the last year on
Page 3 for Zoe McConnell (mind you I have been saying that for two years now), expect
three new Page 3 Girls in The Sun for 2008 (the new Idol if they ever get around to
electing one, a new girl in March/April time and another in September/October).
The Daily Star builds on its
gradual improvement that it has shown through 2007 with less concentration on now out of
fashion celebrity reality crap.
Page3.com gets a complete
makeover as its current layout is getting dated and stale.
At least one (probably two)
of the monthlies and one of the weeklies goes to the wall with Nuts TV forced to either
cram in loads of girlie content or face being confined to a forgotten corner of television
history.
High Points:
Steady increase in quality
from the Daily Star, there is still a long way to go but it’s a start.
Lots of nice new girls
especially Katie-Marie, Amy-Lu and Eva/Evie/Iga.
Continuing excellent
photography from messers Webster and McConnell in The Sun
Decent Page 3 Idol
competition and a very worthy well utilised winner in Sam.
Much improved Lodges with
far less recycling
Low Points
Total stagnation of the
Weekly and Monthly Lads Mags market, time to put a lot of these failing publications out
of their misery quite frankly.
Too many new girls being
introduced by the Daily Star who are then completely forgotten about whilst the likes of
Malene and Pinder are used ad infinitum time and time again.
Huge own goal by Nuts TV
with their choice (or not as the case maybe) of no girlie content.
The Star’s obsession
with Lucy Pinder…
Page 3 2007
– The Awards:
Best Newcomer:
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Eva/Evie/Iga
In every picture the Star have
printed of her, she has not failed to impress once.
Others considered were Sam who
has had an excellent reign as Page 3 Idol (and I hope continues to be a regular Page 3
Girl once her reign is over) and Amy-Lu, however her appearances have been so few and far
between that there has been little to analyse! |
Best Page 3 Girl
of 2007:
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Becky Rule
Now that she is appearing on
her own a lot more, she had come on in leaps and bounds (She has also done some very nice
artistic nude work elsewhere under another name).
Other names in the frame for
this award included Hayley-Marie Coppin whose Daily Star and other work have been
breathtaking, also Katie Downes who has matured a lot as the year has progressed. |
Best Picture of
2007:
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Difficult to call this one. The Sun's
constant stream of Ibiza (and other location) shoot pics were almost without exception
breathtaking. There were numerous
candidates including this shot of Nikkala Stott (I particularly liked the framing with
whatever that triangular archway thing is) also the shot of Becky above was breathtaking
but to pick a definite winner this year was impossible.
Sorry.... |
The ‘Is the
Picture Editor off his Medication?' Award:
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This is the award for the daftest, wackiest or just plain 'WTF?'
Page 3 picture of the year and the winner by a long shot was this truly awful Page 3 piece
from the 21st of June when they put Keeley inside a light bulb. On the right is the image that appeared on Page3.com that day which was used
as the source for the horrible mess of which no one would be aware until they opened the
printed version over their breakfast that morning.... |
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| Second place for this award went to this appallingly crap idea
that the Daily Star had to 'celebrate' the return of the Spice Girls to the UK on the 19th
of November. If you can recognise all the girls posed to
replicate (topless style) the group shot of the Spice Girls then you are doing well.
It took me some time before I realised that lower left is Hayley-Marie Coppin!
There was also up for consideration the rather awful 'Brazil v
England' body paint flags Page 3 in the Daily Star on the 1st of June featuring Selina and
Porchia which was equally awful. |
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Page 3 Lifetime
Achievement
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Zoe McConnell Last year's winner was Nikkala Stott who despite being on Page 3 seemingly
since the stone age, has continued into 2007 to look fabulous. This year's winner is
the other long serving Page 3 veteran Zoe McConnell who not only has appeared in front of
the camera for nearly eight years (three of which she was still aged 23 for!!) but also
looks set to remain in the Page 3 fold for years to come behind the camera.
Hopefully when she does go full time behind the lens, she can still
be persuaded to nip out in front of the camera from time to time |
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And so that is it for another year. All of
the images used here are for illustration purposes only and the copyright of the
originators is acknowledged. I am sure that the publications mentioned will welcome
the support and publicity that the growing loyal band of Page 3 fans gives it year in and
year out, even with dodgy computer generated light bulb pics!
Happy New Year!
FRED
