MediaGuardian wonders if the tabloid hoaxers featured in London Film Festival entry, Chris Atkins’ Starsuckers have done us a favour.

One view is that stories about celebrities are so unimportant (yes, they are) that it doesn’t matter if journalists lie about them and make stuff up.

It matters.

Every lie and piece of fictional ‘news’ published by the Shag Rags does further damage to the credibility of the press as a whole, and thus its value as a purveyor of news and truth. That’s serious at a time when conditions are so harsh for the printed media. It has become more important than ever that those papers who wish to be seen as ongoing providers of reliable, in-depth investigative journalism maintain the highest standards. Only that way can they maintain their worth in comparison with online news services.

Of course it’s only one section of the press who regularly abuse the truth and their readers’ trust, but as long as the whole industry insists on identifying itself as one type of medium, the less reckless press will suffer.

Most tellingly, the Redtops are seen to consider the PCC as a very minor irritant, who don’t even have the power to penalise miscreants. A reporter from the People - an ambitious, pushy little woman – dismissed the sanctions that can be imposed by the PCC as utterly trivial and not worth worrying about. “All it means is a little apology somewhere in the paper. You get a slap on the wrist; you get recorded on the PCC, but there’s no money [fine to pay].” Self-regulation is starkly revealed as the sick joke most observers consider it. The new chairman, Baroness Buscombe has barely uttered a squeak in the aftermath of The Screws admission of guilt over grossly illegal hacking of Gordon Taylor’s phone. The PCC is a toothless, gutless busted flush – a sham to which editors like Paul Dacre pretend to offer obeisance in a bid to keep a proper, independent regulator off their backs. [See my earlier blog on PCC]

There is also a strong case now, in the public interest, for newspaper employees to be officially qualified and rated as reliable purveyors of news – in the same way that only qualified nursing homes, or law firms or accountants can go about their business. No one would seriously challenge the concept that only qualified professionals should be allowed to dispense law, medicine or tax advice.

At present, any compulsive liar can enter the realms of journalism and be welcomed with open arms if an editor thinks their stories – however they are acquired – will sell newspapers. Take for example, the News of the World management, who have allowed Mazher Mahmood, their Investigations Editor not only to make up stories but to set them up and cast them,in such a way, time and place that the police can be called to make arrests (which have frequently led to costly, abortive prosecutions ) after the critical moment on a Saturday evening when it’s too late for their ‘scoop’ to be discovered and spoiled by their rivals.

Perhaps only those papers consistently meeting the required standards should be allowed the luxury of self-regulation. While the feral beasts of the tabloid press should be subjected to all the restraint, regulation and chastisement they deserve.

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I imagine every community must have its share of hard-core moaners and I wouldn’t be surprised if there are a few in Ludlow who think there are disadvantages in living in a town which functions as a kind of open air museum – a medieval street grid, some half a mile square, of well-preserved historic dwellings and public buildings, headed by a near perfect perpendicular church and a Norman castle (with its own C12^th circular chapel). These are the people who object to the May Fair (a centuries’ old tradition) taking over the town centre for 3 days (and making it smell strongly of un-nutritious hamburgers), or to the rock concert that is held in the castle at the end of the summer festival – small-minded people who do not recognise that the less erudite, ordinary Ludlovians have as much right to a little community fun as those of us who go to see obscure French films or string quartets in the Assembly Rooms.

Even when the castle is opened up, as it often is, for diverse festivals and events, and the town’s streets are choked with charabancs, it’s good to know that the town’s delights are being more widely shared. For the bright, blue-sky weekend just past, Ludlow hosted its 15^th Ludlow Food Festival – a Foodies’ nirvana, reflecting the wonderful revival of interest in traditional English food and drink – ales, goats’ cheeses, muttons, ciders, smoked ducks’ breasts – the diversity on offer was astonishing .

Of course, there had to be an element of competition, too, with local brewers, bakers, butchers and chefs vying for accolades. One frankly unscientific competition was hosted by Mr Graham (Floyd) Wilson-Lloyd, Ludlow’s ubiquitous landlord, former town mayor and operator of the Church Inn and the Charlton Arms. Seventeen beers and ales had been submitted by local pubs (not, on the whole, the crummy ones owned by Pub-Cos), and judging them fell to exhibitor and brewing maestro Alex Barlow, who was exhibiting in his ALL Beer stand to promote his excellent new ALLBeer Guide to ales & beers. As often happens in Ludlow events, there had been some confusion, and the poor chap hadn’t been told there were to be winners and losers. He arrived to be handed what he (perhaps unfortunately) described as a poisoned chalice, though, having drunk from it, he did survive – only just. For with so many variables (the disparate skills of the cellarmen at the various submitting pubs) to cloud his judgment, it wasn’t surprising that in his preliminary blind tasting he rejected some of the Ludlow ale-drinking community’s firm favourites (including mine – Hobson’s Best) and provoked some rowdy booing. A memorable commentary and condensed history of Britain’s relationship with ale was provided by Sarge, the cellarman from the Church Inn. Sarge is a published poet, chronicler of the town’s lore, and a man of surprisingly diverse erudition who can talk with equal fervour about Bach, Glenn Gould or Django Rheinhart, and who summarised the reaction of the audience as pisspotical. He had by then plied them with pints of Ludlow Gold (the most local of ales) as he explained how the relationship between the Saxon Hengist and Horsa (cunning because they were ‘foreign’) and the British King Vortigern hinged on the ale-swilling characteristics of his people. I didn’t know that. But in the end, the beer judged the best was the best, with temporal and geographic relevance, Darwin’s Origin, by the Salopian Brewery – a real joy of a bitter, and on offer at the Unicorn.

Another arena – the whole town, in fact – was occupied by the Ludlow Sausage Trail. No doubt the hard-wired moaners objected to the whole town reeking of Sausage, which the five or six competing sausage makers offered from pitches dotted about the town. The local and visiting punters formed long queues at each, democratically selecting the tastiest sausage and providing a sound endorsement for the winner to shout about for the year to come. I don’t participate as a voter, for I am a firm and faithful fan of the Francis sausage, and don’t want to be confused by too much choice.

As an inhabitant of the town, I was only too happy to see it overun with sausage-munchers from evry corner of the land, and I look forward to seeing them all again next year, and to hell with moaners.

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An archbishop can run the risk of looking dangerously unconnected to the application of modern technologies if he doesn’t choose his words and his topics carefully. And even when he does, he runs a risk of being selectively reported.

Vincent Nichols, recently appointed Catholic primate of England and Wales told the Daily Telegraph that social networking sites and electronic communication can lead to teenagers to build “transient relationships”. He took care to phrase it, “an excessive use or almost exclusive use of text and emails means that as a society we’re losing some of the ability to build interpersonal communication that’s necessary for living together and building a community” These thoughts were linked to the death of a 15 year old girl who took her own life as a result of being bullied on Bebo.

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It is a little shocking that a seasoned news consumer such as myself can read a broadsheet headline: “Jordan fears consequences of Israeli Wall”, and react to it by spluttering between clenched teeth, ‘Who gives a monkey’s what she thinks!’ before realising that they’re talking about the Hashemite Kingdom, not the witless, talentless, faux-poitrined ‘former glamour model’.

Because it is part of my function to peruse the front pages of the Red-Tops and Shag-Rags, it is with growing disgust that I have seen these papers leading every day for the last fortnight with the holiday antics of this sad, ridiculous person. I don’t (though I would like to) know if the editors or the punters are driving this incomprehensible obsession. Possibly, by some bizarre twist in the taste of the public who choose to buy these papers, the former glamour model has taken the place of the late Princess Diana, and is required to be on the front page, because if she isn’t, a red-top will lose out to its rivals in the way editors claimed they did in the heady days of Diana’s roller-coaster sex-life.  Much as I deplored the gross coverage given to the late Princess, for her privacy as well as my own boredom with her activities, at least there was some justification in that she was the mother of the future king.

But that Jordan, vapid nonentity, should justify any space at all could make you think either that the shag-rag editors or their punters are in the last throes of death by trivia. But this is the insidious nature of persistent coverage that seeps by osmosis from the tabloids e’en unto the Journaux serieux. I don’t know what excuses can be made for papers like the Guardian writing about her and her pointless husband. Of course, any reports (like the most recent, under the banner of television review) in that paper are loaded with appropriate irony. But that’s not enough and still produces more column inches. And was it irony that prompted them to give 2/3 of page to the obituary of the late St Jade Goody – if you can remember who she was?

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Last weekend Ludlow festival kicked off its 50^th anniversary in the profound hope that the rain Gods would lay off. The key element of the festival has always been a fortnight of performances of a Shakespeare play – this year, Romeo & Juliet­ – held in the magnificent arena of Ludlow Castle’s inner bailey. On a warm summer’s evening, as the swifts swoop across a pinkened sky, there can be few more lovely settings.

In the cold rain, it is a species of purgatory.

Alongside the play, other shows, concerts and talks have been put on in an attempt to develop the fortnight into a full-blown arts festival, although somehow this has never really evolved into the recognisably cohesive, focused occasion it could be. Nevertheless, some of the individual events are imaginatively conceived, as was a concert performed by English Ayres on Sunday night in the magnificent, west-facing dining-room of Oakly Park House, three miles north of Ludlow. The Georgian mansion, home of Lord and Lady Windsor, was reordered extensively in the 1820s for Lord Windsor’s ancestor, the Hon Robert Clive by C R Cockerell and is one of his and Shropshire’s finest. Before the concert we stood on the lawn in front of the house, looking  across paddocks and parkland liberally strewn with the venerable oaks that gave the park its name, while we drank a few glasses of champagne.

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