The tabloids? They don't pull their punches

Amy Winehouse at Glastonbury and the mystery "punch"

Did she or didn't she punch a fan? Glasto 2008 was the perfect example of how the words 'media' and 'reality' rarely sit together. It's not the first time that Amy Winehouse makes their day, but this time a fleeting scuffle with someone in the crowd turned into the singer "lashing out" and "throwing punches at the audience". Some accounts almost depicted her as Southgate's own Hulk Cogan. Make no mistake, at Hagley Road to Ladywood we despise the woman, but looking at footage available on BBC online (watch it here), we don't think she actually punched anybody. The Telegraph was the most cautious, with only a fleeting glimpse of "a scuffle" with [a] fan. "[S]he appeared to swing a punch at a fan", writes today's Independent, adding that "as she sang "Rehab" towards the end of her hour-long set, she clambered into the pit in front of the stage and got into a scuffle with a member of the audience". Yet, according to The Guardian, it all "look[ed] suspiciously like a quick succession of punches" and there you are, reader, picturing that poor sod on the receiving end of a Tyson-like knocker treatment.

The NME sports a proud "Watch Amy Winehouse 'punching' a fan at Glastonbury" headline (along with Glasto boss Michael Eavis pointing out that the singer reacted to someone in the crowd "touching her boobs"), and the Daily Mail can hardly conceal their delight with a sequence of shots that leave us even more puzzled. In their online version, Winehouse becomes a graduate from the school of hard knocks. She both "punched", "elbowed", "charged in" and "aimed blows" at a fan. If they had more space available it'd probably turn out that she alone battered a whole mob... But for moral lecturing -as usual- no one can outdo The Sun. This is their perfect territory: "Winehouse on the warpath" is the UK's best-selling paper's headline, the plot further thickened by the statement that "Amy Winehouse made Pete Doherty look angelic after punching a fan" and, with every other word reminding us of her drug abouse, more castigatory stuff about her "obnoxious" behaviour. What a bad woman this Winehouse is.

So obnoxious that not a single day goes without them devotedly talking her up. Boy don't they need her.