I know this may sound a bit Ian Hislop, but if there are two things that I don’t watch on television its reality shows and soap operas. That’s not snobbery or being out of touch, so far as I’m concerned, its much more a matter of the value I place on my time, and brain cells.

Nevertheless, I am at least dimly aware of the fact that Helen Flanagan is a young actress who broke into television, and the public eye, through a soap opera and that she was, until yesterday, one of the contestants on a reality show, when she was voted off the show by its voyeurs… sorry, I did mean to say viewers… no, on reflection, I got that right first time.

I know this because the appearance of a young, bikini-clad woman with large breasts on television is, in certain quarters, considered to be front page news.

So, on wandering into the newsagents this morning, I discovered that the Daily Mirror had chosen to greet this ‘news’ with a modestly sized bikini shot which the paper had captioned ‘She’s out’ – short, descriptive and to the point.

The Sun went with a somewhat larger photograph, again a bikini shot, which they captioned ‘They’re Out”.

They? Were there two Helen Flanagans on the show?

Did they do the bushtucker trials in shifts, perhaps?

Or is the The Sun perhaps trying to suggest that Ms Flanagan has developed a severe dissociative disorder while stuck in the jungle with Ant and Dec and now has a ‘Three Faces of Eve’ thing going on?

If so, that does strike me as a perfectly natural reaction to Ant and Dec, one that’s well within RD Laing’s contention that mental illness is a natural human response to a sick society, but no.’They‘, in this case, are the large pair of tits to which Ms Flanagan is attached, although seemingly only as an incidental detail in the eyes of The Sun, if its caption is anything to go by.

How delightful.

Next to The Sun was, of course, the Daily Star – large photo (bikini shot, of course)  and a headline that, taken together occupies at least two-thirds of the front page.

The headline reads ‘Helen’s Melons Out in Telly Jungle Shocker”.

What? Only her ‘melons’?

I know ITV needs the money, but has it really stooped to allowing viewers to vote off bits of people’s anatomy just to keep the phone vote revenue rolling in?

Is the deal that she can stay in the show as long as she undergoes a double mastectomy?

That would be taking the concept of bushtucker trial to a whole new level, although not to the level I’d personally like to see – that would involve a live 30 foot Saltwater Crocodile, a trial that I strongly suspect the croc would be unlikely to fail as long as Eric Pickles isn’t amongst the bushtucker… sorry, contestants.

No, sorry, again I think I was right first time. Oops my bad.

Ultimate, I suppose, it should be obvious to everyone, except The Daily Star’s regular readers, that Ms Flanagan’s ‘melons’ are only ‘out’ in the sense that the newspaper is trying its usual bait and switch approach to boosting sales.

Nevertheless, it would appear that The Star, in common with The Sun, regard Ms Flanagan not so much as an actress or model, but rather as something which is, purely as a matter of coincidence, attached to the large pair of tits.

The moral of this story is simple.

If you’ve ever wondered what feminists mean when they talk about sexual objectification then the answer you’re looking for is on the front pages of today’s Sun and Daily Star.

Footnote.

Not uncoincidentally, the front page headline in today’s Daily Mail reads ‘Vomiting Virus Sweeps Britain’.

You don’t say.