In Praise of the Printed Page, Newspapers

Newspapers, it is reported on teevee, on the wireless and online, are in decline.

Newspapers have been in decline for years, in terms of quality there has been a shift from journalism to comment.  Newspapers had something of a reputation of never letting the facts get in the way of a story, but now it is a case of never letting any facts get in the way of an opinion.  Comment used to be serious writers writing about what they knew, then moved to essentially being blogs that somebody could be bothered to print out, and are now repackaged extended tweets.

There has also been a decline in quantity, declining budgets, declining circulation.  Most importantly of all, a decline in the size of the newspapers themselves.

Broadsheets used to have gravitas.  Sure, they didn’t always print the truth, and maybe the facts weren’t always right, and there may have been libels and damaging speculation, but the page was fifty inches wide and who can argue with a headline that is rendered in Time New Roman 400 point?  No matter what it says.

The introduction of the tabloid newspaper heralded a new age, with the printed page becoming more accessible to the working man, who wanted to read the news in a way that spoke to him in his own language, about issues that mattered to him, and had a picture of a dolly bird with her top off.  Serious journalism still mattered in the tabloids, yes, there were pictures of topless women, but you got their name, age and learned that they enjoyed pottery in their spare time.  Gone now is such journalistic rigor with some hack just getting their ‘facts’ about Jane, 21 from Stevenage off Wikipedia.

From boardsheet to tabloid to mobile telephone screen, the news has gotten smaller.  Which is a shame, because issues like environmental problems, economic crisis and challenges to our security and democracy remain as big as ever.

There is, still, arguably, a place for newspapers in our culture.  That place is on line.

Kidding.  There is something about an actual physical newspaper that remains important.  What exactly that is, I’m not entirely sure, I think it has something to do with the crossword and other puzzles but I’m sure it must be important to all those who read the ‘Metro’, a newspaper that is given away for free at train stations and, on examination of the content, can be described as ‘overpriced’.

The Metro is owned by a rich proprietor.  This at least is a tradition that has endured in the newspaper industry when others have not.  If you are a normal human being with forthright views that you think others should know, you set up a blog that nobody reads.  If you have immense wealth and want to influence society, you either train your private army in an undersea volcano base, or buy a newspaper and exert subtle influence over first the editorial policy and then in turn over the population.  Remember, it’s not fake news if it’s your news, and if you are reporting what people want to know, where’s the harm, even if the news you print is not in total alignment with the facts?

The weekend though is when newspapers come into their own.  That’s when the majority of the newspaper can be given over to sections that are not already out of date by the time they are printed, like teevee listings.  It’s also the time when the review sections are published, and authors who had their last novel trashed by a reviewer can exact terrible revenge by describing the new work of their nemesis as ‘insipid’.  The same review can be recycled, not unlike the newspaper’s destiny, in the restaurant section where any restaurant in the whole of London can expect a dull rave review or a terribly witty crap one.  Places to eat outside London may be found in the supplement about rural gastropubs.

I gave up on reading the weekend newspaper some time ago, when it became like the opposite of a guided meditation.  The weekend is too short for fits of rage, except when reading the Telegraph, when it’s a perfectly normal, healthy reaction.

Jumping the snark

Some years ago, I wrote on G&P of my decision to stop reading ‘The Guardian’ newspaper.  This was, for the avoidance of doubt, the newspaper formally known as ‘The Manchester Guardian’, a publication beloved of liberals, lefties, vegetarians and the sort of people who criticise your lifestyle choices as if you were Cruella DeVille rather than a bloke in a shop contemplating the purchase of a pot noodle.  I read The Guardian back in the day because, before the launch of iPlayer, Netflix  and digital downloads for programmes like ‘Game of Thrones’ meant all we had to do to enjoy ourselves was watch teevee, I enjoyed its arts coverage and being informed about what books I should, and would fail to, read, what moving and improving foreign language films I would decide to see the latest instalment of the ‘Transformers’ franchise instead of, and particularly what new video games were coming out.  The newspaper was also the only thing in print with anything like a social conscience.

Something, however, changed for the worse.  Always somewhat self centered, the tone of the newspaper became smug and it was soon spouting claptrap in a manner that defied challenge in the same way the right wing tabloids, or a mate who has given up drinking and insists on joining you in the pub straight from the squash court with racquets protruding from a kit bag and opinions on the benefits of sobriety protruding from his gob instead of joining in conventional discussion in the bloke’s salon such as naming all the principal characters in ‘Bergerac’.

And so I stopped reading it, preferring instead to get my news from the BBC website, and Twitter.

The exception is Saturday when, because the newspaper, sports business and lifestyle sections come with the only teevee guide you can rely on not to have a picture of Danny Dyer gurning like a simpleton passing a satisfying stool gracing the front cover, is the teevee guide and so newspaper of choice.

Selective reading ensures incredulity and outrage at the breakfast table is kept to a minimum, like flipping channels when an upsetting story appears on the BBC News, or hitting the ‘mute’ button on the remote whenever Boris Johnson appears on television, allowing one to do the voices yourself as when one watches Crufts, or pretend that one is watching an ill-conceived spin-off of ‘The Muppet Show’ where the puppets are grotesque rather than lovable, or a play about one of those ugly but anatomically correct dolls they get kids to use when describing sex offenders, come to life, not so much dressed as a human as rolled around in a donations bag left outside a middle class charity shop, and decided to use its magic powers for evil.

But even a straightforward teevee guide is not safe from the tone of the newspaper as a whole.

Teevee listings should be a straightforward publication.  I want to know what is on and when, and I want anything related to ‘Doctor Who’ featured heavily.  Not much to ask.

For a while now though, the back page has featured a snarky regular feature about ‘when good teevee goes bad’ titled ‘Jump the Shark’.  In this feature, a writer or writers I’ve never bothered to check, briefly discuss the pivotal point where a hitherto beloved telly programme went shit.  The title is taken from the internet, which documents that it was the eponymous episode of ‘Happy Days’ where that show went from being cool to, well, not quite so cool.  As the internet is never wrong about anything, though I have yet to see a piano playing cat in reality, we must accept this as fact.

‘The Guardian’ have taken a half-arsed opinion and weaponised it.

The trouble is, of course, that the shows that jumped the shark number one, ‘Happy Days’.  This would make for a very short series in a teevee guide, and one that bore a tremendously close resemblance to the Wikipedia entry for ‘Jump the shark’.  The solution, if you are a hack unafraid of flogging the greasy spot where the format used to be, is to randomly pick beloved or obscure television shows and explain why they stopped being good.

The sense of regret that one experiences on reading one of these snarkly spiteful pieces is not even offset by the overwhelming realisation that you made the right decision swearing off this newspaper many moons ago.  There is a shame to not seeing that commitment through, not unlike the shame of falling off the wagon, of an illicit fag ten years after giving up, of murdering a badger with a hammer, of in the performing of an act of self pollution realising, at what should be the moment of unconfined joy, that one has Googled, safesearch off, an indecent image not of Katie Price, but of Katie Hopkins.  The shame and the self loathing rise as the bitter tears of regret begin to flow.

Ironically, this series of affronts will never itself jump the shark.  To do so requires a thing to be good before it can go bad, and this sad affair was never that.  Essentially, what we have here is the result one can only presume of somebody attending one of those meetings where ‘there are no bad ideas’ but missing the crucial point that yes, there are.  Do Walls do a Cornetto with fox shit in the bottom of the cone?  No, because that would be a bad idea.

Maybe be I should switch to ‘The Sun’?  Clarkson writes for it I understand.  Bet he wouldn’t criticise ‘Happy Days’.

1 Across, F**k

Famously, the internal telephones at MI6 during the fifties and sixties were always busy for the first hour of the business day, as pipe smoking men with initials instead of names ‘phoned one another for assistance with the that day’s Times crossword.  That, at least, is how the story is reported in Peter Wright’s memoir ‘Spycatcher’.  One would hope, of course, that this is, if not an outright case of a writer being ‘economical with the truth’, then at least having the courtesy to disguise the real purpose of the exercise, that during those decades crosswords were used by the security services to, not as you might imagine communicate hidden messages to agents, but rather to keep Oxbridge Commie Pooftas preoccupied with matters cryptic rather than Cyrillic, and above all prevent them doing the will of their red paymasters.

I fucking hate crosswords.

And they hate me.

But I hate them more.

I am also truly awful at them.  This is possibly (probably) because I lack the education and the lateral thinking abilities to realise that ‘Trojans mince with alacrity’ means ‘Effervescence’, but is more likely the result of their being situated towards the back of the newspaper.  This means by the time you reach the crossword, you will have read about who has been doing what to whom on an international, national and personal scale.  Then it’s the horoscope ‘No chance of getting nine across today, you fuckwit’ and onto the puzzles.

When did the puzzles become so difficult?  Crosswords?  Sodyouto?  What happened to join the dots?

Get angrier and angrier and angrier, give up, turn page.  Sports.  Set controls for ‘incandescent’.

There are, it’s fair to say, different types of crosswords.  Mixed ability, so to speak.

General knowledge.  If you can answer three questions on round two of ‘Mastermind’ or any question, at all, in any series of ‘University Challenge’, this is the one for you.

Quick.  By far the most satisfying, but can go very wrong very quickly.  The thing about quick crosswords is that those that set them like to establish a theme.  So once you realise that all of the answers are the surnames of characters from the popular soap ‘Crossroads’, you’re away.  However, if the theme of the day is ‘something other than ‘Crossroads’’, you’re fucked.

Cryptic.  The only one that matters.  A proper crossword.  The clues are things like ‘Lakes sailed by cheeses’. And the answer will probably be something like ‘Buzz Aldrin’.

How?

How the fuck is that even possible?

I once went through a period (‘Moon river’ (6)) of buying a daily paper, keeping it, then the next day sitting with the crossword, and the solution, to see if I could work out how ‘angry owls’ becomes ‘defenestrates’.

The answer?  It fucking doesn’t!  I am now convinced that the cryptic crossword is a ruse perpetrated on us by people, and I’m not saying they are all working in the intelligence community, to do two things.  To keep us busy, and to keep us in our place.

That’s why I make a point of, just now and again, picking up a copy of ‘The Times’ and, in the space of a ten minute train journey, ‘completing’ the crossword while chuckling to myself.

Of course I don’t, I’m not fucking insane.  But I would be, if I had to work out what ‘Woodland folk’s banquet, enjoyed quietly’ (9) means.  (I check the next day, the answer was ‘Archbishop’.  ‘TWF!’ (Anag.)).

Of course I admire the mental agility of the sort of people who set these things.  And indeed those that solve them.  But I can’t help but think that they are in competition with one another, or even cahoots (Mr Toad’s exclamation! (7)) and that the whole thing is a male-dominated attempt to find the dominant male, judged on who has the biggest lexicon.

That being the case, the only setter I continue to look on with favour is a red one, and until the news gets so unpalatable that they start using cryptic clues for headlines, I’ll leave the puzzles to men who measure their masculinity by how hard a clue is, and how long it takes them to solve it.

Open letter to 'The Guardian'

Dear 'The Guardian',

It's not me, it's you.

I'm leaving you.

There's no easy way to say it (actually there is, it's 'I'm leaving you', three simple words that economically convey an important message but which you would no doubt spin out to a five page splash in your weekend magazine or a themed special supplement or, even more likely, a recipe special featuring comfort food, meals for one and a way to make pot noodle using tears - and that's part of the problem), but there it is. Recently I've felt that we have less and less in common.

We used to have a lot of shared interests: incisive reporting, informed comment, Posy Simmonds. I'm still interested in all of those things but you appear obsessed with speculation, 'lifestyle', oh-so-funny columns, recipes and fucking, fucking, fucking Will Self.

There's something else you should know. For quite a while now I've been seeing 'The Telegraph'. We kept bumping into one another at friends' houses and it seemed that we had more and more in common.

Of course, we disagree about a lot of things, and at times I'm not at all sure if The Telegraph's views are sincere or ironic or simply intended to provoke reaction (usually spluttering disbelief) but The Telegraph has kept up to date with current events, knows what is going on in the world beyond a few South London post codes, and is more likely to print a story about rising tensions in the Trossachs than, say, a review of a DVD box-set of a tee vee show from the eighties that concludes that it was not as good as you remembered. Really? Well hold the fucking front page.

(I just want to make clear that I've never been with The Times. Well, a couple of occasions. But I never paid for it, it was derived free with my groceries. And it was overpriced.)

So I've been seeing another newspaper. But you've hardly been an innocent party in this yourself, have you?

Over the last few years you've had all sorts between your sheets. I could understand when they had something interesting to say, but when it became meaningless, that really hurt. 

As for your friends. Jesus Christ, I've seen the letters that they write to you. I thought that the columnists you hung out with we're spectacularly devoid of something to say, but the letters page is breathtaking - especially when a chain of correspondence involving bad puns runs over a number of days, or weeks. It's like being trapped in a car on an interminable motorway journey to hell where somebody has invented the shittest car game ever and you don't know whether to lunge for the door handle, the steering wheel or the gin.

But that's as nothing compared with 'Comment is free'. Three categories: people out to make a point about how clever they are; people who are happy at last that they have a place to leave uninformed political comments without being challenged; and the sort of person who thinks that white bread leads to global warming.

So that's it. You remain on the newsagent shelf and you have been deleted from the 'favourites' on my browser.

And here's the reason why. Even when, a couple of years ago, you published a column with no apparent trace of irony by somebody who said that they would push somebody under a train for eating a burger or something - the week after a woman was pushed under a train - I was prepared to overlook such behaviour. But last weekend you published an interview with a man who, after buying a too-tight pair of shoes, wears them painfully but does not walk in them, calling them his 'barstool shoes'. That's right, instead of throwing a bucket of shit over him and screaming 'REALLY?', you publicised what can only be described as twattery on a grand scale.

This is what Richard Littlejohn is talking about when he refers to 'Guardianistas' as being self-regarding twats. You made Littlejohn right! Fuck you!

Goodbye.

 PS. I would try to get custody of Steve Bell, but I don't want to take him away from his home.

Read, and hear, all about it

Now that we have a bit of distance from the ‘phone hacking scandal, it’s clear to see that the whole bloody disgraceful affair is even worse than anyone thought. The thing was like one of those news shots of a natural disaster, such as a flood, you start out focusing on one bloke on the roof of his house and pull back to eventually reveal that shitty water stretches from horizon to horizon. Such a toxic lake has engulfed News International.

Back when the News Of The World phone hacking scandal engulfed people in film and television, the public took the suffering of glamorous people with a pinch of salt or stardust. The second, and I mean the second, it transpired they had hacked the ‘phone of Milly Dowler, you could almost sense a mood of national disgust. Like a mass tequila burp.

The players in the pantomime, NI execs, lined up to be castigated. What was interesting is that while the Murdochs and Rebecca Brooks-Wade have power, money and influence, nobody seems to envy them, and this is not just because they are now about as popular as meningitis, but rather because despite working in, despite actually being, the media, they lack glamour. More than that, they have reverse glamour. They are successful in the same way that Sauron was successful in Lord of the Rings. Undoubtedly powerful, but not someone you’d admire, and prone to torturing hobbits. And RBW looks like Lady Macbeth. A dragged-up Lady Macbeth from an all-tranny production, but Lady Macbeth all the same.

What was fascinating was that when news broke that David Cameron had had dinner at Christmas with RBW and Jeremy Clarkson, the response was not ‘how fabulous’ but rather ‘that’s the winning entry in the ‘name the dinner party from hell’ competition’.

In a desperate effort to deflect attention away from the phone-hacking scum at News International, News International have mounted a spirited ‘they’re all at it defense’ in the apparent belief that guilt is somehow diminished if shared. They want to see any enquiry widened to take in all the media (i.e. their competition too).

Will this include local press? Do they want to see the editor of the Titchwell Gazette giving evidence? That should be a hoot, perhaps that will allow the profession to restore some confidence and pride in the profession by explaining the art of gathering confidential information by propping up the bar at the Sheep Worrier's Arms like a traditional journo.

Silly season

The media has, since Parliament packed up it's bucket, spade, moat filter and duck rented villa and buggered off on holiday, been in the grip of an annually recurring culture so profound that it actually has its own term: silly season.

Silly season occurs as a result of a combination of factors; the lack of political shenanigans handily concentrated in one spot, the ongoing need by newspapers to print a newspaper, the inability of hacks to actually seek out stories rather than have them arrive via a press release from a PR company, the lack of interest by editors in foreign news and, of course, the tabloid desire to paint somebody or something as a villain, be it a mum who leaves her kids at hone to bugger off on holiday, a virus or a new EU directive banning those photographs of kittens playing with balls of wool.

The only sort of story that seems missing of late is 'beast of...' sorts about big cats. I bloody love those stories, illustrated by blurry photographs of what even I can see is a gorse bush, captioned 'is this the big cat of the moors', about how a feral moggie has been terrorising the inhabitants of some distant moor. Possibly this is because the focus has shifted to foxes terrorising our neighbourhoods, possibly because such stories are easier to research from atop a bar stool in a city boozah.

Silly season story of the week is that of a woman who was caught on CCTV putting a cat in a wheelie bin. OK that's pretty grim but this has made the front page of the red tops. The. Front. Page.

If you drink as much as I do as often as I do in as many places as I do you'll know that pubs love front pages. You can also appreciate how important the front page is when you watch a tee vee programme or film set in a bar, or a newspaper, or a bar in a film about a newspaper and you will see framed front pages. Like 'we win', or 'War over', or 'Man walks on moon'.

Not 'we find feline felon'. Get a grip guys, I know that newspaper front pages must be difficult to write but hey, surely somewhere in the world something important is happening. We're still fighting a war aren't we, or is Sangin now trouble free?

It's not that I blame the newspapers, they have to print something to wrap chips in. What amazed me was, when the story appeared on the Guardian's web-site, the number of people who commented on it. And then commented on each other's comments.

A woman, for whatever reason, put a cat in a bin...this is not cause for endless speculation about motive, her mental state of, a favourite, comments about how the media treat women who put cats in bins (a demographic so niche I would have thought their views could be safely ignored). Do these people really not have anything better to do? Have they not heard of lego?

And now I'm doing it. Whatever happens to cat bin woman, the public have evidenced a level of buy-in to silly season stories that's frightening. Comments about a bin cat? Pah! Comments about a big cat, that's more like it. I'm off to take a blurry picture of some threatening looking gorse, e mail it to the tabloids and get that debate rolling.

Who's that girl...or is it a bloke?

Depending on your status as a celebrity and your relationship with the media, if you are famous you can expect to see pictures of yourself in the paper either smiling on some red carpet somewhere or reeling drunk in the gutter showing your knickers.

If you are famous you probably have your own file in the newspaper vault. If you are lucky this has pictures of you in clean, ironed clothes. If you are unlucky this has pictures of your cellulite. If you are really unlucky this has your police mug-shot and if dame fortune has crapped on you after embarking on a high-fibre diet, this will contain those ‘glamour’ shots you did at the start of your career.

Ordinary people pictured in the paper used to fall into three categories. You either looked startled as you walked to court and some snapper papped you, or you looked happy as you lifted some sort of trophy aloft, or you had a blanket over your head and the caption described you as ‘the accused’ or, possibly ‘the beast’.

The saddest photographs on front pages were those posed school photographs. You felt your heart drop into your shoes because you knew that the picture of the smiling child was not on the front page because it was a slow news day and the kid was related to the editor. When you saw a picture of an entire class, with nobody ringed, it was time to reach for the bottle. I guess class photographs were used because these were the ones most available to the journos, either from the parents or an underpaid school caretaker.

The internet has changed all that though. Recently, high-school gunmen have taken to putting their declarations of insanity on YouTube and so that’s where newspapers go for video grabs – although to be honest they could just have been using the same shot of some acne ridden git in a ‘slipknot’ hoodie, as that’s what all these kids look like.

Worse, they have started to comb social networking sites like MyFace for pictures of missing teens, tragic teens or teens that may well have done something nasty to other teens. This is why one should be careful about the photographs one puts into the public domain. Do you really want, next to the headline ‘suspect held in gnome theft case’, a picture of you simulating sex with a soft toy, because you thought it was a laugh to have it on your home page.

Worse still, do you want to rely on a lazy, pissed up journo getting the right image? The last thing you need is to have a name close to that of a notorious donkey shagger so that on his arrest you see that photograph of yourself taken last Christmas when you were playing twister after getting pissed and the caption ‘mule molester busted’.

So one should be careful what one posts, and what one does, and what one is pictured doing. Or simply emboss all pictures of yourself with the watermark: ‘in my defence, I had been drinking’.

Who is Kaiser Soeze?

Like it, loath it or remain indifferent to it, it’s generally accepted that the Harry Potter books are a publishing phenomenon. Speaking as somebody who started reading them before the hype really started (I read about them in The Guardian, the point of the article being that Bloomsbury had taken the unusual step of publishing this book with child and adult covers), I was quite pleased to see them become more and more popular and think that the midnight release thing is quite cool.

After a night on the toot, I was passing Tesco at midnight on the night of the last book’s release and called in, with all the other children high on sleep deprivation and excitement, to pick up my copy. What was fun about it was that the security guard at the store, no doubt used to wrestling people trying to shoplift frozen chickens to the ground for his £5.52 an hour, was standing beside the carton he had no doubt just ripped open with the style of the Queen unveiling a plaque on a new school, smiling and looking pleased as punch. The whole episode was quite charming.

The problem was always going to be the embargo and avoiding spoilers with the last book - with Bloomsbury unable to threaten a Howler or, worse, no access to the following volumes in the series, on anyone who released plot details and so on. The news reports that reviews of the book released ahead of its publication include spoilers, the question is…why?

The answer is, because the people who do this sort of thing are shits. There has always been the sort of people who take their seat in the cinema for a performance of a movie that hangs on a plot twist, and stage whispers that twist it to a friend - from Psycho to the 6th sense, I firmly hope that such people were battered to death with clubs crudely fashioned from popcorn containers and the legs of cinema chairs.

The collection of news to print in newspapers costs money, you have to send journalists to many pubs where they ply informants with drinks until the story comes out (trade secret - shorthand isn’t actually shorthand, it’s just a collection of indecipherable squiggles penned while pissed). So much easier just to flip to the last chapter of a book, piss all over the expectations and excitement of children and go down the pub.

I speak with authority, as the man who told his nephew, on Christmas Day, that Santa did not exist (oops!), that this sort of spoiler is a crass act. Whatever else the HP books may be, they are entertaining for kids. I can, however, understand why certain types would want to spoil that - it’s because the same defective character trait that led them to be the sort of journalist that hates the rest of the world, yet doesn’t realise how much more the rest of the world now hates them, and thinks they have scored a point. By spoiling things for children.

Do you know what they do to that sort of person in prison?