Amy Winehouse Round-Up: And You Should Be Ashamed Of Yourself, We’ll Give Your Mobo Award To A Starving Child In The Sudan, Go To Your Room, Etc

It seems the UK press are in the same bind that Winegums Watch finds itself in: all revved up and nothing to report.

Thank goodness, then, that we can always count on the Daily Mail to come up with the goods – in this instance, a story so emotionally manipulative it makes Today Tonight look like a PBS doco on the Peace Corps. In short, they’ve found some poor lass who overdosed on class A’s, melting her brain, whose parents’ “only wish” (yes, even more than the recovery of their daughter) is for Amy Winehouse to come and have a look at their vegetative daughter, in the hope it might scare her (Winehouse) into cleaning up.

Honestly, you can’t make this shit up.

Should parents be worried that their daughter is listening to Amy’s records or queueing outside Topshop to buy Kate Moss’s latest designs?

That their son is listening to Babyshambles? Can you really catch a drug addiction (or alcoholism or anorexia) from a magazine or an iPod?

Well, I am here to tell you that you can.

A few weeks ago, I received a letter from the mother of a beautiful young girl called Nina.

The story details the sorry downfall of Nina, before pulling out the big guns – childhood room untouched since she left it, wardrobe full of clothes she can’t wear in hospital room, photo of boyfriend who never came to visit – and closing with this doozy:

Her parents’ only wish is that Amy Winehouse will come to visit Nina, and that she will decide to get better.

Only then will Nina’s life not have been a complete and utter waste.

And there you have it, ladies and gentlemen. If you ever wondered whether Winegums Watch was teetering on the nastier side of intrusive commentary, now you know we’re as lily white as Audrey Hepburn cradling a war orphan.