Behind the News: Silly season, annual visitor

Deadly seagulls stealing our lunches, killing our sheep and threatening to swoop off with our children in their malevolent beaks have made a big splash since the middle of July.

Alan Shatter’s €12 passport-photo expenses claim was the lead story in a tabloid newspaper one day this week, and his response to the claims about his claim made the front of broadsheets a day later.

An inflatable Minion broke free from its shackles, flew on to a road near Dublin Airport and earned itself the column inches an attention-loving Government Minister could only dream of, while Lonely Planet, the travel-guide company, earned blanket coverage for publishing a list of little-known tourist attractions across the world, among them the Great Wall of China, the Taj Mahal and the Colosseum.

Silly season is coming close to its climax, and not before time. The phrase was coined in the Saturday Review, way back in 1861, and it has been used ever since to describe the weeks from the middle of July – when our dear leaders start their two-month summer jolly – to shortly after the Rose of Tralee is carried away with her crown. As the years have passed, the stories that have come under its umbrella have grown ever more desperate.

A colleague recalls a photographer once being dispatched by the Irish Press news desk to photograph the face of Jesus, which had magically appeared in a wardrobe door in the midlands in the dog days of August. Jesus surfaced again this summer – this time on a bathroom wall in Mexico – while the face of Vladimir Putin made an unpredictable appearance in a flock of starlings – a startling development which gave an excitable tabloid subeditor the green light to shoehorn "It's Vladimir Flew-Tin" into a headline. Oh, and Miss Piggy and Kermit the frog are splitting up, an announcement that CNN treated with real gravitas.

Silly season suggests an element of fun, but there's little that's enjoyable about most of the stories. The French name – la morte-saison, or the dead season – seems more appropriate. Perhaps the stupidest of this season's silly-season stories came this week from the world of British politics.

David Cameron was the man making the "news". No surprise there: he is prime minister of the UK, so is no stranger to headlines. But did the BBC, the Daily Mail and all the rest really think it necessary to solemnly report that he likes Pringles – paprika-flavoured Pringles if you want to know? (And you really shouldn't want to know.)

Cameron was filmed horsing into the potato snacks by a teenage girl sitting opposite him on an EasyJet flight to Portugal. She tweeted the footage, which was picked up by almost all of Britain’s leading media organisations.

Even the high-minded Guardian carried the story, although it finessed it slightly by relying on the tried-and-tested "we're just reporting on how silly the others are for reporting this" angle.

We’re no strangers around these parts to this approach, to be frank. And, to be franker still, that’s probably what we’re doing now. Sorry.