Following several beyond-glowing write ups in major car magazines the Mini Cooper S is to replace sliced bread as the best thing ever. The compact BMW sports hatch has been declared so good that from now on it will be the benchmark for excellence for everything in the future, leading linguists to coin the phrase 'the best thing since the Cooper S'.

However, news of this new twist on popular cliché has been met with anger by sliced bread makers. 'We in the bread industry have been proud to set the standard for things that are good,' said spokesman Floweree Bapp. 'If BMW think they can steal our delicious, conveniently pre-cut crown they've got another thing coming.'

Baking sources suggest that bread manufacturers will soon take on the British-made supercharged hot hatch at its own game with a number of innovative new features. Sunblest are already planning to reduce the size of their standard white medium sliced loaf so that it appears quite big on the shelf and yet is disappointingly badly packaged making it hard to fit more than two typical sandwich fillings inside a sandwich.

There are also strong rumours that Mother's Pride plans to mimic the Cooper S to the extent that popular features such as wholemeal grains and tasty thick crust will become optional and, despite a tempting 49p sticker price, a full specced loaf of sliced bread could end up costing a rather less attractive £3.75.
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TVR's brand new Tamora may be a classic straight-six powered British sports car, but it also has a dangerous design fault, according to one early customer.

TVR fan Peenus Envie of Screaming-in-Agony near Camberley claims that since taking delivery of his new shiny red Tamora just three weeks ago he has been attacked by Hamadryas baboons on five separate occasions. 'Whenever I go out for a drive a whole troop of them just swarms over the back of the car,' moaned Mr Envie, a bit pathetically. 'They either want to attack it or shag it,' he continued.

'This is perfectly explicable,' says Dr Monkee Teniss, Head of Baboon Studies at Su Pollard College, Cambridge. 'The Hamadryas baboon is well known for its brightly coloured and extremely ugly arse. Rather like the TVR Tamora. These animals clearly view the car as a threat or a mate.'

Dr Teniss also had a dire message for other Tamora owners. 'After these first baboon attacks I would be careful. These are viscious, primitive and unpredictable things,' he warned. 'And so are the baboons. Badoom-tish! Ithangyoo.'
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Hot on the heels of the 'comfortable' Elise 111, Lotus is launching two new models precisely targeted at wealthy customers who might otherwise have bought a Boxster or TT.

The first new variant, dubbed the Elise Banker, is set to offer a range of features to appeal to wealthy city workers. Each car will come with a satellite navigation system pre-programmed to take the driver straight to Henley, Oxford or Fulham. This system has been carefully recalibrated so that in the latter case it will refer to entering London as going 'up to town', irrespective of the direction of travel.

Taking advantage of the new on-board computing power, this Elise will also offer a dashboard-mounted counter which will allow the driver to see a running total of how much money they have made this week, expressed as either 'grand', 'gees' or 'large'.

As a final touch, every Elise Banker will come with a free Lotus branded Hackett rugby top and Timberland boat shoes. Plans to complete the set with matching socks were shelved when it was realised that for some reason these twats never seem to wear them.

The second newcomer to the range is the Elise IT which will target overpaid nobwits in the computer industry. Coming complete with a raft of pointless carbon fibre components which do absolutely nothing for the performance and handling yet will give the owner something to misguidedly brag about, the IT is set to cost lots of money.

Although much of the fancy technology on this model is designed purely to snare geeks there is said to be one genuine weight saving - since most buyers are unlikely to have any mates Lotus has been able to remove the passenger seat. In the event of an owner, for example, getting a girlfriend, a second seat will be a retro fit option though Hethel sources don't expect much take up on this.

As a final sop to the target market the IT will come with a unique buy back scheme which will enable owners to return their cars to the factory at short notice when their employer invariably sacks them, having realised the sheer stupidity of paying a laughably huge amount of money to a greasy haired nobber whose only basic skills are farting about with jumped-up calculators, snorting derisively when asked for technical advice, and driving his stupid little sports car really quickly into the work car park under the misguided assumption that other employees think he's cool.