PresentTense:Shane HegartyThis must have been a fun week to work in the Sun newspaper. But not a good one to be a marine biologist, lifeguard or mayor of a small-town beach resort. This week a monster arrived in Britain. It was called silly season. And it swallowed all before it.
Last Saturday, Irish readers of the Sun will have noticed a toothy shark leaping from the front page, and the promise that a great white had been spotted "off Irish waters".
My God, readers must have thought. Should I avoid the morning dip? Should I take a shower instead of a bath? But then they would have read the detail and realised that a great white shark was spotted off Irish waters only if you consider "Irish waters" to mean a spot 600ft off the Cornish coast and "great white shark" to mean something blurred slapping around in the sea.
The Irish media wasn't too interested, partly due to the Lotto winners, and also because its eye was on the annual silly-season story that is the gathering of sharks in Ballybrit. But the story gripped the British press. The Sun certainly believed the story - at least it believed it in the way that the Weekly World News used to believe that aliens had taken over the US presidency. So, it threw all its might at the story. It opened a hotline to the most authentic-sounding expert it could find: Dave "Sharkman" Baxter. He is, of course, Australian. He probably flosses his teeth with shark bones.
Then it got some Robert Shaw-type to "vow" that he would "hunt down the maneater", and sent him and a reporter out on a boat armed only with a bucket of chum and a disposable cameraman.
Meanwhile, in the broadsheets, marine experts - without, admittedly, the bona fides offered by a macho nickname - coughed politely and said that it wasn't a great white but a basking shark or porbeagle or possibly an escaped lilo.
But the great white has become the Loch Ness Monster of the 21st century: a terror lurking in the deep; seen only in grainy footage caught by giddy tourists. And there are more readers to be gained from scaring the swimming trunks off them. So, the Sun carried on regardless.
There was more footage and a further "sighting" off Devon, followed by rumours that it had a mate close by. There were pictures in which "unworried swimmers defy shark", as if nature's deadliest killer can be thwarted by Blitz spirit alone.
Finally, the Sun broke out the big guns: page-three stunner Danni. She was asked to keep watch over the sea.
"It's scary to think the shark could be amongst people paddling," she said. "Luckily I've not seen any-fin suspicious." Thank you, Danni. Keep safe.
By Wednesday, with the shark story all over the media, the paper could claim with some justification that "shark mania grips Britain".
And it brought out a headline of ferocious brilliance:
"DER-DUM, DER-DUM (dum-dum, dum-dum, dum-dum, dum-dum, der-dum, dum-dum)."
Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, the Australians enjoyed the spectacle. "Panicky Poms in hysterics over pathetic sea creature - that's not a shark!" laughed the country's Daily Telegraph - although it really should have added, Crocodile Dundee-style, "That's a shark".
The Irish media has previously fallen for this story. Last year the Sun promised its Irish readers that "experts fear that man-eating great white sharks are prowling our waters after sightings off the British coasts of Devon and Cornwall". As if our marine biologists are waiting, fretful on our beaches, with binoculars in one hand and a speargun in the other.
And in 2003, an Irish Sunday paper reported an English sighting as having come from "marine biology student Chaynee Hodgetts, 14". She wasn't actually a marine biologist - she just wanted to be - but the word of a saltwater Nancy Drew was considered enough to give the story a splash.
So this great white story isn't the first. It previously hit the news in the summers of 1999 and 2003. And, right on time, it's back in 2007, suggesting that it is the story's, rather than the shark's, life cycle that is most pertinent. On each previous occasion, there were also shark hunters, stoic swimmers and cynical broadsheets, meaning that this week's event was not so much a sequel as the latest in an increasingly dodgy series.
Still, the brilliance of the Sun forced the entirety of the British media to follow up. And that brazenness was nowhere more obvious than in its insistence in turning a British non-story into an Irish non-story.
But the big lesson was that if we think we can escape the jaws of the silly season, then we're only codding ourselves. We're going to need a bigger boat.