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FRITZL Watch: Anorak’s look at Josef Fritzl, Elisabeth Fritzl, Nazis and assorted Frtizls in the news
Josef Fritzl, who locked his daughter in a cellar dungeon for 24 years, has asked permission to leave his prison cell after admitting he can no longer stand being cooped up.
FRITZL Watch: Anorak’s look at Josef Fritzl, Elisabeth Fritzl, Nazis and assorted Fritzls in the news
EURO 2008 – Who are you not supporting? Today we’re cheering on the Fritzls.
Says the Star:
Fritzl was a big football fan and the secret family he kept locked in his cellar in Austria also grew to love following the game on TV.
But, although Austria is hosting the tournament with Switzerland, his daughter Elisabeth and the six children Fritzl fathered with her had been banned from watching live telly.
Because:
Medics issued the order, fearing they would see news reports about themselves.
But Austria never progressed to the tournament’s latter stages, and for them ze competition vas over when zer Germans routed them at Ernst Happel Stadium.
“Shot-shy Austria frustrate coach,” says the BBC. “Germany are bombing on,” opined the BBC’s Mark Lawrenson, although on whom was not said.
The Beeb never got time to mention the Fritzls, but had Austria progressed to the quarter-finals it surely would have…
“CELLAR coma girl wakes after seven weeks after being played Robbie Williams songs,” says the Mail.
Josef Fritzl’s granddaughter and daughter Kerstin Fritzl has woken from her two-month coma after being played Robbie Williams songs, says the Mail.
There seems to be something intolerably cruel in playing Robbie Williams to a comatose patient, and we would say it were further evidence of innate Austrian barbarity and how Williams is just a shorter Richard Wagner in knickers.
Sadly, the Mail’s headline is somewhat undone by Doctor Albert Reiter, who says Kerstin opened her eyes naturally from her medically-induced coma
He tells us: “We smiled at her and she smiled back. One night I had to order her to finally go to sleep at 3am as she kept listening to Robbie Williams CDs.”
Anorak recalls another coma incident, this one starring Geri Halliwell who performed unplugged for Jessica Knight: “Geri sang a couple of lines of one of their songs and Jessica started moving her arms and legs,” said mum Jill Walmsley in the Mirror.
Legs twitching, arms flailing – a desperate bid to run away?
In light of these star-led miracles, Anorak has put together a tape of the Top Ten Celebrity Coma Tracks – EVER!
1. Let Me Entertain You - Robbie Williams
2. Candle In The Wind - Elton John
3. Carrie - Cliff Richard
4. My Heart Will Go On – Celine Dion
5. Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da – The Beatles
6. We Didn’t Start the Fire – Billy Joel
7. Cotton Eye Joe – Rednex
8. The Final Countdown – Europe
9. You’re the Inspiration – Chicago
10. I Wanna Know What Love Is - Foreigner
SERVING TIP:
The album should be played down headphones to the patient at full volume. Every three hours a medic – preferable one with an Austrian accent, although a Swiss or German will do - should bend down and whisper in the patient’s ear: “Want to wake up? Or do you want some more…?
MADDIE WATCH - Anorak’s at-a-glance guide to press coverage of Madeleine McCann
Ben Affleck has a new panic film – Gone Baby Gone - in which the lead child is blonde enough to remind all reviewers of Madeleine McCann. The film – a work of fiction - cannot be mentioned without also making mention of missing Madeleine.
It is the 12th Rule of Journalism.
THE OBSERVER: “The cruellest crime of all -Delayed by the McCann case, Ben Affleck’s intense and gripping thriller is well worth the wait”
Crimes involving children touch on our deepest emotions and though we’ve seen numerous films about infant abduction over the past 50 years, ranging in tone from Seance on a Wet Afternoon to Murder on the Orient Express, the subject is peculiarly affecting at the moment in the light of the publicity given to the cases of Shannon Matthews in Dewsbury and Madeleine McCann in Portugal… To add to the anxiety, there is an uncanny physical resemblance between Madeleine McCann and the film’s four-year-old Amanda McCready.
It’s tabloid bingo, in the broadsheet Observer! Can anyone mention Fritzl and get the prize?
IRISH INDEPENDENT: “It’s a film that examines the media hysteria and prurience that happens when children are abducted — especially pertinent themes in our post-Madeleine post-Austrian crazies times.”
FRITZL Watch: Anorak’s look at Josef Fritzl, Elisabeth Fritzl, Nazis and assorted Frtizls in the news
BRIAN Reade: “AUSTRIAN doctors trying to make the Fritzl kids feel better about themselves. Why not feed them 24-hour footage of Big Brother 9 to show them there are worse holes they could have been trapped in?”
SYDNEY MORNING HERALD: “Fritzl, who locked his daughter in a cellar for 24 years and fathered seven children with her, has received over 200 letters from lonely women offering him romance”
DIGITAL JOURNAL: A Canadian site championing “Citizen journalism”
So far, Fritzl has received about 5,000 love letters. But, it has been revealed that Fritzl has received hundreds of love letters from lonely women looking for love. Yes, there are lonely women looking to receive love from Josef Fritzl.
HARD NEWS (India): Painful memories of Nazi Germany
FRITZL Watch: Anorak’s look at Josef Fritzl, Elisabeth Fritzl, Nazis and assorted Frtizls in the news
DAILY TELEGRAPH: “Global warming inertia ‘as bad’ as Josef Fritzl, says Bishop of Stafford”
People who fail to act over global warming are “as guilty” as Josef Fritzl - denying our children a future, a senior Anglican bishop has warned.
The Bishop of Stafford, the Rt Rev Gordon Mursell, said a refusal to face the truth about climate change was akin to locking up future generations and “throwing away the key”.
But with global warming, won’t the cellars flood?
Writing in his local parish magazine delivered across the Diocese of Lichfield, the bishop says: “Josef Fritzl represents merely the most extreme form of a very common philosophy of life: I will do what makes me happy, and if that causes others to suffer, hard luck.
“In fact you could argue that, by our refusal to face the truth about climate change, we are as guilty as he is - we are in effect locking our children and grandchildren into a world with no future and throwing away the key.”
He tells the paper:
WELCOME to Austria’s Got Talent, and say hello to Elisabeth Fritzl, who spent years living in a cellar, skiier Michaela Dorfmeister and…
Oh for those halcyon days when the names of internationally known Austrians tripped off the tongue like ack-ack fire.
Natascha Kampusch, a post-war Austrian famous not for skiing, so therefore chiefly known for living in a cellar - eight years, folks! - has her work cut out finding notable Austrians to talk to on her new TV chat show.
In ‘Natascha Kampusch meets…’ the show’s producers discount those elderly gentlemen living in Paraguay and see the star of the show chew the fat with Niki Lauder, the former Austrian F1 racing champion best known for being horribly burnt in an accident at the 1976 German Grand Prix.
“CELLAR KIDS MOVE TO UK,” says the Star, which leads with news that Josef Fritzl’s family are to relocate to Blighty.
“Sex slave mum wand family get secret new lives,” says the Star. And why the UK? Well, “because people here have been most sympathetic to their plight”.
And the UK is ideal because: “It is also unlikely they will choose a hot country because of their sensitive skin and eyes.” The Fritzl story is now a British story, and so worthy of the tabloids’ front page.
The Star says that in Nazi-stained Austria the family has been “hounded by the media”, something that would never happen here.
“EXCLUSIVE,” says the Sun, “BRITISH FRITZL’S VILE CRIMES.”
MADDIE WATCH - Anorak’s at-a-glance guide to press coverage of Madeleine McCann
DAILY MAIL: “Ben Affleck has something to shout about -
Romancer of J-Lo, husband of Jennifer Garner, beefcake specialist of Hollywood blockbusters… and director of sensitively handled film echoing the Madeleine McCann case. Ben Affleck is all these…
And maybe not even in that order. As Affleck said in Pearl Harbor: “Not anxious to die sir, just anxious to matter.”
Ben Affleck’s first film as a director, Gone Baby Gone, a harrowing tale of child abduction, received rave reviews when it came out in the US last year, but its release in Britain was postponed because of chilling parallels with the Madeleine McCann story – and the young lead actress’s strong resemblance to the missing British girl. Now, more than a year since Madeleine’s disappearance, the film is finally about to be released here.
And Affleck has views, too. Having had his film – a work of fiction - compared with the disappearance of a real child, Affleck enjoins the Mail in a game of Tabloid Bingo.
JOSEF Fritzl is an Austrian characature come true:
Fritzl existed in literature before he existed in life. We should attend more carefully to those critical writers – Nestroy, Anzengruber, Nabl, the Canettis, and numerous others – who are too readily dismissed as caricaturists. Their monstrous and grotesque characters, from Gundlhuber to Benedikt Pfaff, actually turn out to embody some of the twisted energies at work in Austrian society.
FRITZL Watch: Anorak’s look at Josef Fritzl, Elisabeth Fritzl, Nazis and assorted Frtizls in the news
THE SUN: “Monster paid for ladyboy hookers”
Fritzl stayed in Pattaya, Thailand, where he “sickened” British holidaymakers, in the resort for the sun, coconuts and noodles Thai style.
British families suspected he was a German - not Austrian - because he would reserve sunloungers with his beach towel.”
The swine hund!
FRITZL Watch: Anorak’s look at Josef Fritzl, Elisabeth Fritzl, Nazis and assorted Frtizls in the news.
THE SUN: “Fritzl-STEIN”
CELLAR monster Josef Fritzl was branded “Dr Frankenstein” last night as psychiatrists began tests to determine whether he is mad.
Dr Frankenstein, the Swiss Germanic character conjured by the mind of an English novelist?
Top psychiatrist Dr Christian Ludke rejected that claim, saying: “The criminal energy of this man is unbelievable. He is ice-cold and is still playing power games. We can only separate him from society.”
Dr Ludke compared Fritzl to the fictional Dr Frankenstein, who created a monster he thought he could control.
FRITZL Watch: Anorak’s look at Josef Fritzl, Elisabeth Fritzl, Nazis and assorted Frtizls in the news.
TONY PARSONS (Daily Mirror): “For my parents’ generation, the Nazis were their worst nightmare. To Fritzl, they were role models.”
What’s every parent’s worst nightmare these days?
And you still want to tell me they the fact that he is Austrian had absolutely nothing to do with the unimaginable crimes of Josef Fritzl?
FRITZL Watch: Anorak’s look at Josef Fritzl, Elisabeth Fritzl, Nazis and assorted Frtizls in the news. With special guest star, Princess Beatrice…
A NEW TV soap storyline involving incest between an aunt and a nephew has been branded “sick” and “opportunistic” by a leading family group. The latest Neighbours plot features Nicola West (Imogen Bailey) and nephew Riley Parker (Sweeney Young) in a secret intimate relationship.
Turns out you can live too close to your family.
It comes after the world was sickened by news that Austrian father Josef Fritzl had imprisoned and raped his daughter for nearly a quarter of a century.
The Australian Family Association has accused producers of using the recent news events to try to attract viewers.
The Australian Family Association has been accused of using recent stories to further its own cause.
GLASGOW DAILY HERALD: “Being a chip off the old block isn’t all it’s cracked up to be - ask Beatrice”
It’s Kaye Adams: Princess Beatrice inherited her mums “great pear-shaped butt of hers? What a bummer!”
Says Kaye: “At first glance there seems nothing positive to be taken from the horrific tale of Josef Fritzl, the Austrian who kept his daughter and three children by her incarcerated in a cellar.”
Well, there’s the Teutonic engineering, the family planning, the…
ANORAK’S’ Tabloid Bingo: With Lorraine Kelly…
The Aim of The Game: To combine the names McCann, Fritzl, Matthews, McGuckin and McKeown in one column. Can the Sun’s Lorraine do it? Eyes down…
WHY do many parents leave their common sense behind as soon as they step on the plane and go off on holiday?
A promising start from Kelly, who has set a scene which should enable her to use all five names, possibly in a single paragraph.
Parents who would not leave their children in the front garden to play on their own happily dump them in the hotel room or villa while they go for a meal. The poor McCanns will never forgive themselves for their tragic error of judgment which led to the disappearance of Maddie.
Tick!
What about the Irish bank chief and his wife who had their children taken into protective custody when on holiday in the Algarve?
You mean the mortgage advisor, Lorraine?
Eamon McGuckin was said to be so drunk that he collapsed and fell through a sofa, while his wife Antoinette threw up in their hotel reception area.
Tick!
Damn those flimsy Portuguese sofas.
FRITZL Watch: Anorak’s look at Josef Fritzl, Elisabeth Fritzl, Nazis and assorted Frtizls in the news
The pensioner made the statement in notes to his lawyer Rudolf Mayer, which were passed on, at Fritzl’s request, to News, an Austrian current affairs magazine. Now read on…
DAILY MIRROR (front page): “I CONFESS”
A picture of Josef Fritzl and the news that “I learned to be disciplined from the Nazis”
He claimed he only locked up daughter Elizabeth, who was then 18, out of love and as a result of Hitler’s Germany which instilled “a high regard for decency and uprightness” in him.
Hitler. He never drank alcohol and shunned tobacco. We also hear that he had only one testicle:
He said that by kidnapping Elizabeth and keeping her in a dungeon labyrinth protected by eight doors, he “rescued” her from “going out to seedy bars” and “drinking and smoking”.
THE SUN (front page): “FRITZL: MY STORY”
Mein Kampf:
“HITLER MADE ME DO IT”
There’s picture of Josef Fritzl and Adolf Hitler. They are “faces of evil”. One’s mania led to the systematic murder of 6 million Jews, hundreds of thousands of gypsies, and a war that cost the lives of 20 million Russians (and many more dead and crippled). The other had sex with his kids.
“Adolf Hitler had been given a rapturous welcome in Fritzl’s home town of Amstetten when he visited in 1938, around the time of the cellar fiend’s third birthday.”
FRITZL Watch: Anorak’s look at Josef Fritzl, Elisabeth Fritzl, Nazis and assorted Frtizls in the news
THE GUARDIAN: “The human monster”
When we seek for causes that distance us “nice” people from the actions of those the media likes to label as “monsters”, Nazi or otherwise, we also dilute the very sense of vigilance and awareness that, perhaps, one day might give help to the most vulnerable at a time when it makes the difference between life and death, or a living death.
COURIER MAIL (Aus): “Spotlight on Austrian horrors”
An interview with writer and filmmaker Stefan Ruzowitzky, who directed The Counterfeiters, teh first Austrian film to win an Oscar:
MATTHEW Crompton WILL film Coronation Street’s “shocking CELLAR storyline”, says the Sun.
TV “bosses” have decided to KEEP the story “despite Austrian devil dad Josef Fritzl’s dungeon hitting the headlines”.
Good job Corrie’s storyline didn’t before Fritzl’s crimes came to light, and the show thus forced to answer some awkward question.
Crompton, who plays bookmaker Dan Mason, could do worse than ask Elisabeth Fritzl for her advice as he gets into character…
FRITZL Watch: Anorak’s look at Josef Fritzl, Elisabeth Fritzl, Nazis and assorted Frtizls in the news
THE SUN (front page): “Inside Fritzl’s other dungeon”
To the dungeon room at Villa Ostende, a brothel in Linz where a blonde prostitute says: “I was hired by him many times and he was sick beyond imagination. He chose me because he said he liked young, plump girls who were happy to submit to him.”
Did you know that “Adolf Hitler was among its former clients”?
Barman Christoph Flugel tells us: “Ninety-five per cent of the guests are entirely normal, three per cent are slightly ‘derailed’. Fritzl belonged to the last two per cent of extreme perverts.”
Which group he’d put Hitler in was not enlarged upon, although he was something of a prude and insited on keeping his socks on. Those kinky Nazis.
Meanwhile, back at the house:
“Pipework is also being checked after Fritzl bragged he would turn the cellar into a Nazi-style gas chamber if the kids disobeyed him.”
Those Austrian really are obsessed with Nazis. Perhaps we should invade before it gets outyof hand, again?
THE lawyer representing Fritzl, Rudolf Mayer, yesterday claimed he had received death threats from English soccer fans planning to travel to Euro 2008 games in Austria.
Cue the theme song to Escape To Victory. We’re going in…
DAILY TELEGRAPH: “MPs from Austria’s two far-Right parties, the Alliance for the Future of Austria and the Freedom Party, have demanded castration for repeated sex offenders, plus compulsory examinations of children for the purpose of detecting sexual abuse.”
All kinder will have their genitalia examined and probed for signs of interference and deformity.
