Media : SEX! SCANDAL! TRIVIA! : Is this news? To Britons it is. Read all about it in the London tabloids, those feisty, irreverent purveyors of sin, society, sob stories--and occasionally even news. To millions of daily readers all over England, the mixture is irresistible.

What to splash?

The morning is passing quickly, and the editors of the tabloid Daily Mirror can’t find a story worthy of a screaming front-page headline--the “splash,” in Fleet Street-speak.

“This is truly one of the worst days,” says a perplexed Steve Lynas, the Mirror’s news editor. He has already spent considerable time combing the news wires and dispatching reporters to chase down leads. Nothing looks promising.

Joan Collins says she wants to get out of Los Angeles and move back to London. The Mirror has photos of her lounging around her mansion. It’ll make a nice spread inside the paper, but not on Page 1.

Police say they’ve identified a suspect in the George Harrison death threat case. But the Mirror splashed the story on the ex-Beatle when it first surfaced and wasn’t going to do it again.

Critics of the government charge that poor people’s homes are being repossessed in court cases that last less than 90 seconds. Lynas sends reporter Bill Akass off to observe some of the lightning foreclosures and to interview the dispossessed families. But it’s unclear where these court cases take place, and it’s already getting late in the morning.

Meanwhile, everyone wonders what they’re planning in the newsroom of their archrival, the Sun.

It’s another day in the Tab Wars, as Britain’s brassy working-class papers fight a never-ending battle for scoops, readers and the catchiest splash.

The Daily Mirror and the Sun are not only the top tabloids, they’re the biggest of all Britain’s newspapers. While the daily circulation of each paper--the Mirror count includes the readers of its Scottish cousin, the Daily Record--hovers at around 4 million, the Sun has the edge. The biggest daily “broadsheet,” or full-size paper, the Daily Telegraph, has a circulation of just over 1 million.

A smashing lowbrow success for owner Rupert Murdoch, the Sun is the place where the Page 3 girl was invented and continues today in all her toplessness.

The Daily Mirror, owned by media baron Robert Maxwell, dropped Page 3 girls as a regular feature some time ago, but by no means has the paper barred nudity from its pages.

“There’s certainly no ban on long legs and slim figures,” says Brian Bass, the Mirror’s bow-tied assistant to the editor. “But we like to have them in the context of a story.”

In this day’s paper, the Mirror and most of the other tabs have just such a story--and accompanying photo. A nurse is filing a lawsuit because she caught a bad case of food poisoning in a hospital cafeteria. The illness allegedly caused her bust to shrink, ending her “lucrative” part-time career as a topless model. Her picture appears to have been taken before she caught the bug.

The tabs are racy, opinionated and purple, filled with tales of sex, crime and Hollywood. Human interest stories are a major staple, and there are always lots of contests. The tabs routinely run their front-page photos in color and sometimes print color inside as well.

Each page is crammed with stories, headlines, boxes, photos and drawings. “We never waste an inch of space anywhere,” says Mirror Art Editor Ric Papineau. “You cram everything in to give it a feeling of newsiness. There has to be a feeling of energy about the paper.”

In an industry where terseness counts in headline writing, the British tabloids are nevertheless in a class by themselves. Always short and punchy, their headlines descend at times into bursts of slang and shorthand that would leave a non-tabloid reader thoroughly mystified.

“Beats Rocked by Clash Backlash” (the Daily Mirror): A legal dispute between two rock ‘n’ roll groups, Beats International and the Clash.

“Sex-Swap Girl Tula in Wogan Show KO” (the Sun): A woman named Tula who underwent a sex change faints while waiting to appear on a television show hosted by Terry Wogan.

“Dog Women in Cat Fight” (the Mirror again): Two rival female dog breeders tussle at a canine competition.

“Sotheby’s Ms. Gross Nets Her Piers of the Realm” (Today): Pamela Gross, secretary to the chairman of the Sotheby’s auction house, will marry Piers Butler, son of Lord Mountgarret, thereby gaining a title.

Unlike American supermarket tabloids such as the National Enquirer, the British tabs contain serious news as well as more frothy fare. It’s just handled differently than the treatment one finds in what the Brits call “the quality papers.”

World and national events are generally encapsulated into a few paragraphs. The headlines are often larger than the stories. In headline shorthand, Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev is always “Gorby.”

At the Mirror, the editors try to create a balance in the types of stories they present. “The story you do biggest is the one they’re going to talk about in the pub that night,” says Bass. “Then we put Gorbachev on Page 2 to make sure we’ve got him covered. Page 3 is always light-hearted and fun--the bride whose knickers fell down on the way to church, that sort of thing.”

The tabloids are politically opinionated in a way that would shock American readers accustomed to detached, objective journalism. The Sun, which supports Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her Conservative Party, makes every effort to find stories that boost Thatcherism while ridiculing the opposition Labor Party.

The Mirror has taken the opposite stand. “I’m determined that this newspaper will do all it can to evict Mrs. Thatcher from her current job,” says Mirror Editor Roy Greenslade. But he says the Mirror is not “slavish” to the Labor Party. “We can be critical.”

“If they get a bit loony, we tell them,” Bass says.

At 11:15 a.m. the first “news budget” meeting begins, with the top editors piling into Greenslade’s office to offer potential stories for the next day’s paper.

The editors discuss the day’s events. Trouble with the Iranians. Victims of a Royal Air Force plane crash have been identified. Serious complaints against the police are up 11%.

At first the meeting sounds positively un-tabloidish. Is this the same newspaper that is running a story with the huge headline “Britain’s Fellas are a Flop in Bed”?

But there’s other kinds of news in the hopper as well. A bride was left in tears when her boss ruined her wedding reception. Back in America, Madonna has told Arsenio Hall that she likes to be spanked and has made a nasty crack about Joan Collins. The editors ponder whether to place the story alongside their Joan Collins photo spread but decide against it.

News Editor Lynas has come across something: A woman in Gloucester learned she had cancer when she was 27 weeks pregnant and was told by her doctors that she could extend her life by aborting the baby. She refused and delivered a 3-pound boy prematurely by Cesarean section before she died.

“Gosh, that’s an amazing story,” Greenslade tells his staff.

After the meeting, Greenslade comments that tabloid journalism is not as racy as it once was.

“There were threats of Parliament restricting our rights,” he says. To stave off government action, Britain’s newspapers adopted a code of ethics earlier this year that frowns on practices such as paying for stories and conducting interviews without identifying oneself as a reporter.

Greenslade, erudite and reserved, believes that some papers have gone too far in pursuing sex scandals and similar stories. He doesn’t approve of kiss-and-tell exposes and says he recently turned down a story from a male prostitute ready to reveal his involvement with a well-known Hollywood actor.

The Mirror editors like to think their readers are more thoughtful and literate than readers of the Sun. “We’ve got to entertain them,” says Lynas. “But we’ve got to inform as well or we’ll lose a lot of readers.”

Mirror readers, he says, want to know that they’re not the only people who think a certain way or are interested in certain subjects or have a certain sense of humor.

“We’re very comforting to a lot of readers,” says Lynas. “We reassure them.”

At lunchtime, the pub downstairs is packed with reporters, editors and photographers gripping pints of bitter. No one is eating. The pub’s clientele long ago stopped using the real name of the place and routinely call it “The Stab”--short for “Stab in the Back.”

Reporter Don MacKay leans against the wall drinking his lunch with entertainment reporter Richard Wallace, who is taking a break from work on the Joan Collins story. MacKay says the pub’s nickname goes way, way back to the night when an editor brought the staff down here and fired half of them. Other Mirror employees, as it turns out, have their own versions.

MacKay has spent the morning polishing a package of stories on a horrifying subject, a child who was battered to death--a story all the more tragic because welfare officials were warned that the child was in danger.

“It’s a very sad story of despair,” he says with a thick Scottish accent.

MacKay, who has been in the British tab business for years, is enthusiastic about his current employer. “There’s great pride in being a Mirror man,” he says. “If we turn up on a story, you can actually see the other reporters looking over their shoulders.”

Back in the newsroom, usable stories are surfacing at a good clip, and the editors seem pleased. “For the Mirror, tomorrow’s going to be a great day,” says Lynas.

Released American hostage Frank H. Reed reports that British hostages John McCarthy and Brian Keenan, who have not been heard from in Lebanon for some time, are alive and well. A British tourist is shot by muggers outside Disney World in Florida but survives.

A dog jumps into a Jeep and releases a hand brake with its teeth, sending the expensive vehicle coasting downhill to crash. Two years ago, the same dog was banned for life from a local McDonald’s for stealing a child’s hamburger. “He’s been in trouble before,” a copy editor notes dryly, giving the story his blessing. “Gnash Bang Wallop! Dog at the Wheel,” the headline will read.

Lynas and picture editor Len Greener are working feverishly to put together the story about the mother with cancer (the “cancer-stricken mum” in tabloid-speak). Getting the story is no problem, but it won’t be exclusive. Greener thinks he might have a national exclusive on photos, however.

“Our policy here is ‘Be quick and think big,’ ” says the picture editor. The local Gloucester paper has announced, via the news wire, that it would sell photos of the baby and the family to any paper that wanted them for 80 pounds ($132). Greener immediately calls the local paper and arranges to pay 800 pounds for exclusive rights to the pictures. Just as he had anticipated, his move sends photographers from the other national newspapers scrambling to the hospital to shoot the baby in the maternity ward. But the hospital turned everyone away.

As a last check on the Mirror’s exclusive access to the photos, Greener calls the hospital and, not identifying himself as the paper’s picture editor, offers to make a monetary donation in exchange for photo access. The hospital isn’t interested.

The next morning, the tabloids Daily Star, Daily Express and Today all splashed the British hostage story. “ALIVE!” yells the Star. The Sun goes with the headline “Dead--But You Still Owe Poll Tax,” over a story about an allegedly heartless Labor-controlled town council. It also included a front-page story about a woman who is bitten on the thigh by a snake while she sunbathed topless.

The Daily Mirror runs a color blowup of a wrinkly baby on a respirator topped by the line “Picture Exclusive on a Story to Touch the Nation.”

Underneath, in bold black letters, the splash: “MUM WHO DIED TO SAVE HER BABY.”