Shadowy figure on a Holy mission

THE Holy Moly website is the necessary alternative to Heat magazine. A scabrous, iconoclastic look at the contemporary parade of stupid and ignorant fatuous fame seekers, it rips open the under- belly of trashy, meretricious "celebs" with a rusty but deep- cutting blade.

It's operated solely by one person ("a shadowy figure" according to reports) who is a "senior figure in the media industry" but prefers to keep his identity well hidden. Mr Holy Moly was recently voted the 99th most influential person in the UK media by the Guardian - a lowly placing that would no doubt have thrilled him.

The site (www.holymoly. co.uk) operates on a very casual "you can make a donation if you like, but if you don't want to, that's OK" principle. Not many people make a donation, preferring instead to pass off the site's stories as their own.

Or in the case of certain tabloids, pass off the site's stories as "exclusive showbiz revelations!" According to Mr Holy Moly, the amount of donations that come in each week is "a figure with two noughts on the end". Considering the hundreds of thousands of subscribers the site has, there's more than a bit of a gap there. Sponsors are nervous about associating themselves with such a slanderous, expletive-ridden site, so that's a no-go. There was a plan last year to launch some sort of desktop alert service, but that never got past the planning stage.

Now, though, Holy Moly is in what is called the "brand extension" business. Except it's not much of a brand extension, he's simply brought out a book. The Holy Moly Rules of Modern Life is a compilation of the best bits of a regular feature on the site where Mr Holy Moly himself or voluntary contributors spell out necessary edicts of modern etiquette.

In part it is a parody of those tedious and piss-poor "what's going up/what's going down" features that magazines now routinely use to feign an appearance of being with-it. This book expertly subverts the sub-genre.

Take Rule Number 52 from the book: "Don't bother with the elaborate effort of wearing a too-large suit jacket with artfully distressed jeans, huge turn-ups, expensive trainers and expensively tousled hair. A simple sign saying "Prick" will suffice."

Some of these Rules of Modern Life are succinct: "Everyone has a great novel in them. Except Dan Browne." Some a touch surreal: "Never try to teach a pig to sing - it wastes your time and annoys the pig." Some just state the obvious: "People with white earphones may bore you." Some are spot-on: "There's nothing you could wish for in life that you can't buy off a man in a pub."

A good lot of the Rules are given over to fashion/style. There is the straightforward: "Camouflage clothing is rendered useless in towns and cities", but there are also the inspired ones which lacerate the whole neo- Boho/post-Hoxteth scene.

On rap music: "Rappers, avoid having to say "know what I'm saying" all the time by actually speaking clearly in the first place." There's an essential Rule here for people thinking about phoning in to a radio programme: "Radio phone-in callers: don't waste precious time considering evidence and formulating a coherent opinion about the subject under discussion, simply buy the audiobook of Mein Kampf and play it into the telephone mouthpiece."

All the Rules are accompanied by some very dark illustrations, which add to the overall effect.

Given the amount in the book, and the hilarity to be had, you'll find that this must-have urban etiquette guide comes very cheap at the price. If you want to continue your support of Holy Moly, you could do a lot worse than pick up a few of their specially designed T-shirts. The newest one comes with a picture of Pete Doherty ("Come in, your time is up. Children of the revolution? Fuck off. You were shit at Live 8") and bears the legend: "Maximum Exposure, Minimum Composure".

The Holy Moly Rules of Modern Life is published this week, available on all good online bookshops