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• 24 Sep 2009 23:07

  He called it looning. We saw it as panache – and were thankful for it. – Bill Hagerty remembers his chum Keith Waterhouse     Issue # 114 September 25, 2009   Following the editor’s rant (September 11) about the lack of obits, prompted by the passing of Keith Waterhouse, we report the eulogy by Bill Hagerty from Keith’s funeral. Geoff Mather had followed up the rant (last week) with a belated obit to a former colleague, Brian Duff. Now he follows up his own follow-up, with Duff memories of visiting the big city with his snapper friend in tow. Back to reality, and Grey Cardigan, recently elevated to the leather swivel chair (but still blogging occasionally for Press Gazette), discovers some of the problems of being editor, one of which is forced attendance at local focus groups. What do the readers think of the Evening Beast? And what does the editor think of his readers? Even further back, and before some Ranters were born, some of Fleet Street’s finest were engaged in a foreign job. As Stan Blenkinsop reports, 65 years ago this week they were covering Arnhem So, Christiansen obviously admired Alan Wood, but how much do you (or did you) love your boss? Things are obviously a bit different at the Washington Post, says Michael Wolff in October’s Vanity Fair. We have his intro, and a link to the full piece. relates how he missed the opportunity to become a Fleet Street millionaire. Missing you already By Bill Hagerty Of all occasions such as this, where it is emphasised that those gathered are celebrating the life of a relative or friend, rather than mourning his or her passing, today must be the absolute exemplar. For while I am already missing a friendship of around 40 years, Keith’s was a spectacular life to celebrate. Not just because in his 80 years he wrote 16 novels, more plays than – as he might say – you could shake a stick of greasepaint at, plus other books, films, TV series and, of course, almost 40 years-worth of wonderful newspaper and magazine columns. That’s a formidable body of work, even if its creator thought it not enough – the last time I saw him he said he regretted not having written more. He was worried that he’d wasted so much time in pubs and what he described as looning about. Yet is was his particular brand of looning that, for family, friends and colleagues, often enhanced the tapestries of their lives by weaving into them vibrant, unpredicted colour. He called it looning. We saw it as panache – and were thankful for it. Some of the looning was chronicled in the widescreen coverage his death rightly attracted in the media, so I shall turn my back on that almost irresistible avenue of memory lane today. I am not going to recall the hilarious lunches and dinners, or the annual New Year’s Eve parties that he and I, and fellow men Mike Molloy and Paddy O’Gara, would once co-host, and where, one year – I have the photographic evidence – Keith spent most of a long night wearing a boater and with a balloon stuffed up his jumper. I shall not mention the night in the then Norbreck Hydro Hotel in Blackpool, when, requiring service the establishment seemed reluctant to provide at 3.30am, he telephoned the sleeping night manager and stridently observed that, as it was night, he should be downstairs managing. And I shan’t even venture into the cul-de-sac where lurks the egg trick, immortalised in Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell but memorably performed in bars, pubs and clubs all over London and, I expect, anywhere in the world where a raw egg and a biscuit tin were readily available. That’s not looning. That’s art. Instead, I would like briefly to recall some of the work that made Keith celebrated as a novelist and playwright and one of the most influential journalists of the second half of the 20th century. He once told me that although Arnold Bennett was the writer he most admired, he hoped his place in literary history would be just behind J B Priestley – you could take Keith out of Yorkshire but you couldn’t take that competitiveness out of Keith. Personally I’d rate him streets ahead of Priestley as a novelist of quality – for Billy Liar, yes, but also for classics such as There Is A Happy LandMaggie Muggins. As for drama, although An Inspector Calls is a very special play, it doesn’t have an egg trick. And then there were Keith’s columns, far more enriching and funnier than Priestley’s essays and in volume an absolute torrent of journalism of the highest class. When, six years ago, the British Journalism Review invited its readership – practitioners and academics from the top end of the trade – to nominate who they believed to be Britain’s best living columnist, it came as no surprise when the name Waterhouse bobbed comfortably to the top. After a very jolly evening at which the award – a bottle of champagne, I think – was presented, Keith wrote a piece for the journal in which he nominated his own favourite columnists. Ranging from Bill Connor to H L Mencken, they all, he noted, displayed the odd eccentric tendency. Yes, the words pot, kettle and black spring to mind. Attributes required for columnists, he wrote, were Nicolas Tomalin’s oft-quoted ‘rat-like’ cunning, the ability to read documents upside down, and a stockpile of information, useless or otherwise, except – I quote – ‘nothing is useless to the columnist’. He proved that to me years before. One weekend we decamped to so that he could show off the best of the county to a Philistine southerner. In a particularly beautiful spot on the Moors, with a small waterfall cascading and trees preening themselves in the expectation of a landscape painter’s imminent arrival, I observed that the scene would be an ideal backdrop for a TV cigarette commercial. Nowt was said, but the following Monday morning I found an unnamed me lampooned mercilessly in a column headlined ‘The Piccadilly Kid’. Did I mind? Absolutely not – I frequently boast that I once starred in a Keith Waterhouse column. He would not, however, offer advice to aspiring columnists, writing: ‘It’s not up to me – it’s up to it. For once a columnist has taken control of his column, or thinks he has, it can be whatever it wishes to be, until its supposed controller is fired, expires or is poached.’ So there’s a lonely column joining us in missing a generous friend and stimulating companion today. Actually, in that same piece Keith did offer a morsel of advice: qualities that come in handy for columnists, he said, are to know everything and always to be right. Some of you will have heard him admiringly tell a story to prove this – how, in 1924, an historic Democratic Party convention in ran to 103 ballots, practically bringing the party to its knees. After 16 days H L Mencken filed to the Baltimore Sun a column that began: ‘Everything is still uncertain in this convention but one thing: John W Davis will never be nominated.’ With the column gone to press, Mencken then repaired to a bar – returning later only to find that Davis had indeed been nominated on the 103rd ballot. Back in the bar, he was heard to say: ‘I just hope those know-nothings down in Baltimore have had the nous to take out the word never.’ Keith had his failures, too, of course. Despite his unflinching efforts over the years, the aberrant apostrophe continues to breed. And another campaign, to remove the expression ‘pee’, meaning penny, from the language after decimal currency was introduced, is long forgotten by all except those of us whom it continues to irritate. But the successes – the books, plays and the columns, remain as testimony to a giant talent – one that has attracted, and will continue to do so, a stream of young wannabe Waterhouses to write and perhaps to enter journalism, the branch of his professional life I believe was most deeply rooted in his heart. We offer condolences to Sarah, Derek, Bob and Stella, benefactors of his talent and his love and his looning and all centre-stage admirers of Guys and Dolls, as you had to be if close to Keith. In his and my much squabbled-over selection of the 20 Best Stage Musicals of All Time, Frank Loesser’s interpretation of Damon Runyon was the undisputed number one, no matter how many times the list was revised. So thanks for the memories, Keith – of words and jokes, and eggs and excitement, of lunchtimes of laughter that seemed to last all day and into the night – which sometimes they had – and of Soho after hours, ‘when the street belongs to the cop and the janitor with the mop’. Those last words are Frank Loesser’s. but I’d like to finish with a couple of quotes from Runyon, a fine journalist himself, the first of which I’m sure Keith would have been pleased to have written: ‘The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong – but that’s the way to bet.’ The other is: ‘You can keep the things of bronze and stone, and give me one man to remember me just once a year.’ For us, and for all those whose lives were touched by his writing, or his looning, or both, Keith Waterhouse will be remembered a lot more frequently than that. Bill Hagerty is editor of British Journalism Review City lights decided that we are on terms of near-intimacy. ‘Dear Geoffrey,’ it wrote. ‘It may be time to put away your picnic baskets and hide your sunglasses, but that only means that there are more hours in the day to enjoy the finer things in life: the latest West End play, an interesting film or a fascinating exhibition and we have them all for you here in Culture+. The Times BFI London Film Festival, now in its fifty-fourth year, is starting next month and Culture+ members can win tickets to attend an exclusive preview screening of The Men Who Stare at Goats, starring George Clooney.’ I am not clued up on entertainment these days, unless you count Boris Johnson, and on the face of it George Clooney staring at a goat would not be anything new to someone based, as I am, on the edge of a Lancashire field. So the relationship between provinces and capital is, I find, tenuous as ever. Dancing in their fountains is no longer for me. I have, of course, visited often in search of something to write about, always with good intent, often with embarrassing results. Having decided at my hotel which of the two cupboards I slept in and which I put my small belongings in – not always easy – I was free to be a Man about Town. Except that I was never quite sure what Men About Town do. It was all there, the city's thrusting heart, a square mile of powerful heat rising 20,000 feet into the air from massed radiators, music throbbing and probably other things, and I usually made my choice quite quickly – a drink at the hotel bar, followed by another. There were always Australians there asking about the location of the nearest genuine English pub. That choice easily took precedence over , Nelson's Column and their didgeridoo championships. I was their booked-in signpost to unconfined joy. I did once make it as far as Jeffrey Bernard's pub in Soho but he wasn't in. Nobody of any particular note was in: they were drinking, straight-faced, in a perpendicular position, always a sign of lack of character. I also visited the pub used by one of my favourite drinking actors, Ronald Fraser, and viewed the landlord he described. This sad looking little figure was seated beneath a large period oil painting which bore a reasonable facsimile of his own head. Bizarre. Ronald Fraser wasn't in either. But then, Ronald Fraser was bizarre. He once led me into a Soho basement for out-of-hours liquids and lined up at one end were actors from all the horror films I had ever seen. I was introduced to them as being ‘all right.’ Mr Duff, the photographer on these occasions, always tarted himself up in a clean shirt and inexpensive scent, and was off into the night in spite of what he claimed was exceedingly poor health. I wondered where he ended up. ‘Guy's or Bart's?’ I asked next morning when he was negotiating his full English breakfast with all the bartering instincts which so distanced himself from other diners in the Metropolis. Once, we reached Euston, and I was heading the half mile or so to our usual hotel on foot. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘it's all right for you. I have this camera bag to carry. We need a taxi.’ I thought that a bit odd. It was not like him to have a taxi to actually travel in; they were for expense sheets. Months later, he asked me to lift his bag, which was still worrying him. It was like trying to lift an elephant. So we took out all his stuff and found the base double-lined with the heavy lead blocks compositors melt down and use for type. ‘Bloody Jeff McGowan,’ he said. Jeff McGowan was high on his list of office jokers and had, he claimed, once built a fire round his feet in a phone box as he talked with the office. never seemed to go right for us. Joe Hyman was head of Viyella and biggest mover in the textile industry at the time and we went to see him at his headquarters. He had three different-coloured bell-pushes on his desk and used them to summon various secretaries. Brian Duff observed this for some time and then uttered his first words. ‘My Hyman – I like the red one best.’ At six o'clock the drinks came out and for us, at any rate, it was mayhem: large ones, served, I think, by the Red One. Beautiful. We didn't get hosts like him up North. Joe Hyman was saying that he rather fancied buying the Spectator. Or was it the New Statesman? ‘And what would you do with it?’ I asked. ‘Have a headline every week on the front page – 'Joe Hyman Says...’ I decided that this vision was not the best that had ever come out of the capital. It lacked the Northcliffe-Beaverbrook touch. It lacked any sort of touch. it was doom-laden, but I did not wish to give him the sulks in case it stopped the flow of drink. ‘Wonderful idea,’ I said. ‘My word, yes! Cheers.’ Newly inspired, I mentioned that I would like to buy the Guardian, and he thought that reasonable. ‘You are always worth three times what you think you are worth,’ he said. ‘It is idea that counts. Money always follows idea.’ I liked the advice. He said he went to for the week-end when he needed a charge of adrenalin. It did the trick. Grand. I fancied that, too, although I did not quite understand why, if New York was so full of adrenalin, half its population was driving taxis. No matter. A rapid calculation showed that I was worth, not the trivial amount I originally had in mind, but all of £1,100. Not quite enough, perhaps. I returned home with good intent but never actually made an offer for the Guardian (Much later when I met Joe Hyman again, he asked me what I had done about the Guardian. We were in the back of his Rolls and he had a TV aboard featuring its favourite programme, jagged lines. ‘Bought it,’ I said. ‘And what have you done with it?’ he asked. ‘Sacked the lot,’ I said. ‘Good,’ he replied. ‘Quite right.’ I thought it best not to ask about the Spectator. Or the New Statesman.) When we tumbled down the flight of stairs at his office, he headed for the BBC where he was appearing on, I think, Panorama. We aimed for Harley Street , not to fulfil Mr Duff's most ardent wish – to be examined there, declared free from infection, and assured on the highest possible authority that he would live to be 150 – but to see Wilf Greatorex, who wrote Planemakers, a rather splendid TV series at the time. Brian Duff set up his equipment. I attempted to master various pitfalls of the English language, which had suddenly turned difficult –  ‘Yes, we left Viyella some time after sis (sic) o' clock, Wilf.’ Every time Mr Duff turned his back his camera flashed. He could not believe that it had taken on an identity of its own. It was plainly mocking him. As he rushed to tame it, he fell over his trailing leads and the flashing started all over again. It was like a barrage on the Western Front. Anyway, we did what we could with the result and went back North. God knows what happened at Panorama. I daren't ask. I next travelled South to see Derek Taylor, then press officer to The Beatles, I found that he had acquired a house whose garden path led straight onto a green at, I think, Wentworth golf course. So that was all right. He was an old friend anyway. Mission accomplished. We went to London next morning by train, which was crowded. All the toffs turned towards the city. Only two went in the opposite direction, to Apple HQ. Us. I felt quite raffish and began to think, tentatively, about a guitar. When I next went to Apple headquarters, by his invitation, I was all ready for the grand entrance. But strangely, an Express woman reporter was orphaned on the pavement. Quite morose, she was. ‘George,’ she said, ‘threw us out.’ Seems he had the strange idea that Fleet-street people called in just for drinks. We had a quick council of war and went in anyway. George Harrison was on a stair landing, looking grumpy. ‘Mornin' George,’ said Brian Duff brightly as we by-passed him swiftly. George looked bleak. They knew each other from days. Derek Taylor, unconcerned by all the fuss, was in his high-backed raffia seat, all welcoming. When I travelled South again to interview at some length a computer genius who was turning the world around at the time, I finished after three or four questions and said 'Thank you, must be off, very kind,' and Brian Duff stared in disbelief because he had not even finished unpacking his cameras. It was impossible to interview the man. He, too, looked pole-axed. When I had said, ‘How will computers transform our lives in the next five years?’ I hadn't any idea what an answer might be. I assumed he could carry me through with some soaring vision. But no. ‘Many advances will have been made,’ he decided, and stared woodenly back at me, mute. Now what can you do with that? I interviewed Maureen Lipman – and accompanied her to school to pick up a child. I was more than happy with the result. Bright woman. Talented husband. Good quotes. Until I discovered that she had been interviewed two days earlier by some London female from my own newspaper. I had to wait three months to get mine published. It was slipped in furtively to universal acclaim. Mine and the editor's. I got into a taxi at Euston with Sir Cyril Smith – then a Liberal MP big enough to use Big Ben as a wrist watch. The driver said, ‘Who's going to get us up this ramp?’ One of Cyril's legs was about my waist size, but he was a wow with the secretaries at the Commons. They loved him. He liked to get back to Rochdale on a Friday where he headed for the chip shop. That's the trouble with London, we agreed: No proper food. When I talked to Dick Taverne – a very bright QC and politician I thought might end as Prime Minister – he said, ‘I won't be a minute. Read this newspaper and see what they are saying about me. We'll discuss it later.’ And I found the newspaper was all in German, a foreign language which in my philosophy can remain so. Guten-bloody-tag, thought I as a slumped on his settee. Of course there were heady bits, too. London is like that. I made regular trips to cover the making of a film and a big black studio car called for me each morning at the hotel. I felt like a cabinet minister, and since I seemed to be sleeping in a cabinet the impression was strong. Always there were coaches at the door ready to ferry bucketloads of Americans around London. They were up to their gunnels in prunes for breakfast and liked to give their bowels an airing. What could you say of London then? Back-stabbing, wallet-nicking, smiling, fashionable, always on the go, 24-hour, jammed up, rumble-tumble London? I had lunch at the Caprice with Robb, the fashion artist, and a features editor and was offered a wild strawberry specially flown in from Algeria or somewhere like that to take its place on a huge plate of tiny goodies. As I was a native from foreign parts in need of missionary aid, the head waiter pointed it out to me for my personal delight. And Robb went off without paying the bill as he was intended to. I had dinner at Peter Stringfellow's club. Seemed an odd career move for a lad who sold Austin Reed ties in Sheffield, but it looked more profitable. A back-bench man had some sort of tizzy with his colleagues. He was taken out to a London restaurant and plied with the most expensive meal they could think of. He ate it quietly, saying not a word. They waited expectantly. Would the sun shine? Would his frown dissolve? Would there be the slightest glimmer of a smile on those pursed lips? The verdict came, I am told – ‘Nowt to what you can get at Dudley Hippodrome.’ So much for London cuisine. Walking in what I thought was dignified manner to return from London after one trip, I heard this great, bellowing voice dominating the Euston platform –  ‘Oh, effing hell! Look who it is!’ It was Rita Webb, a little squat woman with great personality, often seen in comedy shows on TV at the time. She continued to make good, resonant use of the sixth letter of the alphabet as she pursued Mr Duff and myself to our compartment. Where she remained. I have to be truthful, though it spoils the story: it was a pleasure. Rita Webb was not just a character actress, she was character, a national treasure. After one visit we returned to Piccadilly, , to be met by the only office transport available: official driver Ernest, in a van. We sat in the back, without seats, and Mr Duff was sometimes in a state of total elevation, like a Hindu guru, with his camera bag now relieved of its weights. Ernest drove at his maximum speed, hurling us round corners, and looking through his rear mirror with great joy and cackling with laughter as he saw the ricocheting mayhem in the back. So London? No. I'll keep the sunglasses on hold, and the picnic basket, and George Clooney can stare at goats as long as he likes. Come to think of it, you can keep Ernest the office driver, too. Geoff Mather nurtures his own weekly blogsite at www.northtrek.co.uk Focus all By Grey Cardigan I’d rather spend a day in John Prescott’s underpants than two hours in a ‘focus group’. These instruments of torture for any newspaper editor are forced upon us by a management seeking answers, but rarely result in anything constructive and can often be downright dangerous. The concept is simple. We pay a dozen punters (a mixture of regular readers, occasional readers and non-readers) £10 an hour to sit in a shitty Travelodge conference room, consuming warm white wine and soggy Hula Hoops, and ask them to tell us what they think of our newspaper. We then go away and implement their suggestions, sales soar, advertisers flock back, and it’s doubles all round in the boardroom. The reality is somewhat different. The first stumbling block is the make-up of the panel. We haven’t got the money to recruit a demographically accurate sample, so it’s a case of a couple of ads in the Evening Beast and a card in the local JobCentre. Anyone who manages to respond without using letters cut out from our pages then goes into a hat. The arbitrary dozen are then selected, as in six regular readers, four occasional readers and two non-readers. (I’ve never really understood why the non-readers are there. What on earth are they going to contribute? ‘I’m a scaffolder and I’d buy your newspaper if it carried pictures of Big Brother Sophie’s shirt potatoes ’) So what kind of people are going to respond to this glittering opportunity? Well there’s a grumpy old man who was once a proof-reader at a local printers, a single-issue pressure group nutter, a man from the local pigeon racing association, a BNP campaigner, a former copper who is probably a BNP campaigner and a few normals. Back in the day when we had a few bob, this exercise would have been carried out by professional market research experts in a specialist facility. You’d have sat behind a one-way glass window and listened to punters talking honestly and constructively about your newspaper. These days it’s just a bear pit. You’re out there, sat amongst them, and you’re not allowed to say that you’re the editor, even though you’re the only person in a suit and tie. With eyes that don’t swivel alarmingly. It really is a nightmare. The BNP are first in to bat. How dare the suede-loafer-wearing Leftie in charge of this rag write a leader just before the local elections accusing a perfectly legal political party of being a bunch of foam-flecked, fascist fuckwits? Surely there are laws against this kind of thing? Why hasn’t the editor been hauled before the courts for showing political bias? Next up is the single-issue nutter, who would obviously prefer to express herself through the medium of modern dance. Unfortunately, mere words will have to do. It’s Burma, you see. Why aren’t we carrying more coverage about what’s happening in Burma? Do we even have a Burma correspondent? I’m afraid not, love. We don’t even have a correspondent covering the town eight miles down the road, never mind the ructions in Rangoon The pigeon-racing bloke just wants one thing – more pigeon racing in the paper. So he’s asked what sort of thing he wants. Results, he says pigeon racing results. And where might we get these results? From the secretary of the local pigeon racing association. And who might that be? Well, it’s him, actually. He draws up the results of every pigeon race, emails them to all the contestants within minutes of the finish of the race, and would be quite content for us to publish them. I can contain myself no longer. If he’s already emailed all the members, what would be the point of printing, two or three days later, several inches of 6pt gibberish that has already been communicated to anyone remotely interested in it? He’s not happy at this outburst. His feathers are ruffled. And then it gets really bad. One of the normals kicks off. She’s late fifties, what would formerly have been working class before we were all gentrified, and a typical regional evening newspaper reader – the kind of profit-generating person we should have been nurturing for the past decade, rather than constantly shitting on. Why, she wants to know, have we closed our city centre office, where she used to drop in the occasional classified ad? Why have we moved all our reporters (!) out of town to an inaccessible industrial estate? Why have we stopped printing in the town and sacked all those local people who used to work for us? Why is there no live news in the Beast? Why was the stabbing in the High Street last Monday not reported until Wednesday’s paper? Is it true that we print overnight now? Why are there so many spelling mistakes? Why is there so little news? Why is there a three-quarter page advert on Page 3? What has happened to the court reports? And the council meetings? And why couldn’t we send a photographer to record her mum and dad’s diamond wedding anniversary? All the family were there – almost 50 of them. It’s just horrible. She’s so right on every point. If only I could lock her in a room with some of our many consultants until they saw sense. An hour after they’ve all gone, I’m still there, sitting in a soulless Travelodge function room weeping quietly into my warm white wine. This is what we have become. http://blogs.pressgazette.co.uk/greycardigan/ A duty too far By Stanley Blenkinsop It was one of the greatest despatches from the battlefront by a war correspondent. Sixty five years ago this week these words crackled over BBC short wave radio to 30,000 British and Polish troops encircled by much greater German forces around the ‘bridge too far’: If in the years to come you meet a man who says: ‘I fought at Arnhem’, take off your hat and buy him a drink, for his is the stuff of which ’s greatness was made. The message from war correspondent Alan Wood sent by morse code had been transcribed by the BBC so that it would boost the morale of the outnumbered ‘Red Devils’ who had arrived by parachute and glider – still the biggest ever wartime ‘drop’. As Wood’s words echoed across the slit trenches under a hail of German shells and bullets, the airborne forces tossed their red berets in the air, shouting to each other: ‘Get your hands in your pocket, it’s your bloody round!’ It was a massive boost to morale. Alan Wood, pictured here typing his copy, was an Australian, who had been a leader writer at the Fleet Street office.When WW2 broke out he volunteered as a war correspondent – one of two at Arnhem. Their reports were circulated to all British newspaper channels and radio stations. His final message to his editor – the legendary Arthur Christiansen – before Wood escaped by swimming across the Rhine was: ‘How about a rise now, Mr Christiansen?’ As ‘Chris’ later recalled; ‘When he got back I gave him a rise, a long holiday and then a four-day week. But he never recovered from the ordeal of Arnhem and years after the war he committed suicide. I salute the memory of this brave man who told no-one at the office of his troubles as he went his own lonely way.’ After his post-war failure to settle back at Fleet Street’s ‘BlackGlass’ Wood became press officer to the ill-fated East African ground nut scheme of the late1940s. But he his depression deepened – and bachelor Wood killed himself with a British army revolver he had smuggled back from Arnhem in 1944. Said Christiansen: ‘In my view war correspondents of WW2 were shabbily treated. Men like Alan Wood should have been knighted instead of being fobbed off with OBEs or MBEs. They served their country, as well as their newspapers.’ I have long been fascinated by the Battle of Arnhem. I first visited the area in 1948 – four years after the battle. The traditional British headstones had still not been installed in the military cemetery – the graves were marked by temporary crosses of white-painted steel strips At the time I was a 16 year old schoolboy who prided himself on his impersonations of Winston Churchill. To amuse my schoolmates I was doing one in an Arnhem café when an announcer from Hilversum radio sitting at a nearby table heard me. He invited me on to a Dutch news review that night where I broadcast my Winston act live to the Netherlands # Checks in the Post By Michael Wolff Everybody at The Washington Post—this really may be everybody, from janitors and pressmen to reporters and ad salespeople—loves their owners, the Graham family. They love them even when they are being fired by them (or being encouraged to take buyouts). They love them even if, arguably, they’ve devolved from heralded heights to mere ordinariness, if not haplessness. They love them even when they’re being embarrassed by them. Read on by clicking Who wants to be a millionaire? Where is Andrew Morton these days? Anyone know? Soaking up the Caribbean sun on the deck of his yacht somewhere, I suppose, or ski-ing down his own private mountain. I’ve heard it said that he won’t look at a woman these days unless she’s won three Oscars, is still under 22, and has been marinated in Dom Perignon. Even his NUJ card is in a Louis Vuitton crocodile-skin wallet. Makes you sick, doesn’t it? Makes me sick, I can tell you. That should have been mine, all mine. At least you’d think Morton would offer to split it with me, but no, I’ve not heard a word from him. As soon as the tears stop splashing on my keyboard, I’ll tell you about it. At the time, I was doing a piece for the Mail on Sunday YOU mag on William Bartholomew, the man who organised parties for those who live at the junction of society and show-biz. When Prince Charles wanted a party, he rang Will. So did Tina Turner, Diana Ross, and Prince Edward. I did too, but that’s a slightly different story. He was a lovely chap, a sort of 16-stone schoolboy with floppy hair and a shy smile. When I chanced to mention (chanced? Do you like that?) that in a few weeks time I was proposing to undergo a form of marriage myself, he asked who was doing the catering, and suggested a few big names. I pointed out that I couldn’t possibly afford them, to which he replied: ‘I’ll make it so you can.’ He did. People have been begging me to get married again ever since. Particularly the bride. At one of his parties, he’d posed as a waiter so he could take a glass of champagne to the beautiful young woman who later became his wife. That was Carolyn. She used to share a flat with the woman who later married the man who one day – if he should live long enough – will become king. She didn’t live long enough, of course. About this time, Carolyn and a handful of Diana’s other BFs decided to spill the beans over the royal marriage. Casting about for a suitable scribe, they picked out a chap who wrote about such nonsense for the Star. Why Andrew Morton? Although he certainly wasn’t One of Them, he did sound most of his aitches and occasionally gave his shoes a polish. So, no doubt to his astonishment, they did, and he found himself sitting on a Matterhorn of cash. Four million was mentioned. A few weeks after this story broke, I met Will in the King’s Road. When they decided to make Diana’s story public, didn’t my name cross his mind? ‘No,’ he reassured me. ‘I knew you wouldn’t want to be mixed up in that sort of gossipy trash.’ Ah. I thought of saying he’d be surprised how trashy I could get for four million, but the moment, and the money, had gone. Writing for magazine took you to some interesting places and interesting people. There was always a slightly harum-scarum air about the magazine right from the start. The first issue was due to have an exclusive about Princess Grace of Monaco, but she featured in a road accident that was an eerie prequel to Diana’s, and Julio Iglesias took over the cover. Since it was the magazine that carried the newspaper, the staff were sometimes a little short of respect. At one Christmas party, Stewart Steven took one look at the magazine team and asked: ‘Who the fuck are all these punks?’ A researcher then asked him who he was to which, with some irritation, he replied: ‘Just tell this bitch I’m the editor.’ ‘So you say,’ quipped a jovial commissioning editor. To his surprise, Jonathan Bouquet was still a jovial commissioning editor the next morning. So it was one of those offices where fun played a major part. For their first Christmas party, they presented an Oscar for the best-dressed woman to Bubbles Rothermere, blithely ignoring the soiled knee bandage. Since the magazine was created as a reaction to all those colour supplements with their profiles of unknown Romanian ballet-dancers, it wasn’t surprising that fun was also an essential ingredient in most of their pieces. Which made it all the more surprising when Nick Gordon, the brilliant if slightly capricious editor, told Bouquet that a piece I’d done was too bloody whimsical. Bouquet amputated all signs of whimsy. ‘This is a boring piece,’ Nick said, ‘tell Dunne to rewrite it.’ Bouquet resubmitted the original and the editor beamed with pleasure. ‘Brilliant,’ he said, ‘I knew you could get it out of him.’ But then, we all know about editors. What made this all the more remarkable was that, while there were a handful of sturdy vessels like mag, which were buoyantly bouncing in the waves, the rest of the fleet was in trouble. Those two bold captains, Murdoch and Maxwell, were prodding many of my fellow mariners down the plank and the rest were jumping overboard. This was not a happy time. Older chaps who were within reach of the pension were okay, but for the rest, hard times beckoned. Men who dated their dreams back to the days of fat pay-offs that would buy a small thatched pub somewhere west of Exeter, discovered it would cover a farewell piss-up in the Bell and a taxi home. And you can bet the cabbie offers you a fistful of blank bills when you can no longer use them. London suddenly acquired several dozen reluctant new freelances. Yet here we were, beavering away for a publication where cost was a vulgar incidental and excellence was the only criterion. This wasn’t the first golden age, or so I am assured by older writers like Andrew Duncan. (Older? Make that aged – and wizened). In the sixties, John Anstey’s Telegraph Magazine operated a similar open-handed policy. There was then a sort of aristocracy of writers: Andrew, Geoffrey Wansell, Bron Waugh, Pearson Phillips and Tim Heald were the benefactors at that time. The always described them as ‘leading writers’ so they formed a satirical club called Leading Writers of Great Britain and conned the Evening Standard diary into carrying a piece. These men are indestructible. In the Telegraph days, Phillips, between divorces, was said to be living in an E-type Jag outside the Savoy, which shows a certain amount of style. But since the ‘was said’ came from Andrew Duncan, it may simply be the creative mind at work. Anyway, Phillips emerged 20 years later to be a big name on . Even now, you can still find Wansell’s by-line in the Duncan’s in Radio Times, and Tim Heald’s on various books. I’m not at all sure they haven’t made more money than Andrew Morton. They’ve certainly made more than me, which is in itself very annoying. The story we freelances all tell and re-tell in dark days when hope flags is that of Gordon Burns. He was a great operator who, sadly, died a few weeks ago. When Associated started yet another magazine, this one was called Night and Day, which was about as long as it lasted, they asked him to write a piece for a generous £2,000. He turned it down. He was writing a book that he couldn’t leave. The commissioning editor came back after a few minutes to make it £3,000. His answer was the same. Eventually, when it reached £5,000, he gave in and did it. When times are hard, it’s good to remember Gordon. It’s also good to remember a time when editors were prepared to spend money to back their own judgment, confident they could produce a better publication than their rivals. Later, less sure-footed editors only competed to see who could pay the least and save the most. We freelances do not care for such people. Back to those days which were the closest I got to writer’s delight. I spent several nights trotting up and down Park Lane sampling dinners in the taller hotels. I was conducting a personal poll on who was the best after-dinner speaker, at the behest – I think – of John Koski. There are worse ways to spend an evening, and some of the speakers were excellent. Brian Johnston – Jonners, the ebullient cricket commentator – had an excellent story about a visit with his wife to Bangkok. While she went off to do some shopping, he fell into conversation with a pretty little thing in a doorway. Her price was £100. Jonners was aghast. He thought probably a fiver would be the local price. He met his wife for lunch and as they were walking back they passed the same girl. ‘See what you get for a fiver,’ she said. We all thought this was very funny. So, to my surprise, did Mrs Johnston. No wonder Jonners laughed so much when Botham couldn’t get his leg over. Peter Moloney, ex-teacher, ex-paratrooper, ex-Trappist monk, had some good lines about the Kerryman who broke both ankles trying to make coconut wine, the Welshman who took his car in for its first service and crashed into the pulpit, and the Scotsman who called the undertaker when his wife was ill because he didn’t like paying middlemen. Our only famous woman cricketer, Rachel Heyhoe Flint, told us some frisky female jokes. Women cricketers, she said, used coconut shells for protection when batting. ‘Two if you’re shy, three if you’re nervous.’ She’d heard a male commentator say that a Dutch woman hockey player had 47 caps. ‘That probably accounts for the way she’s walking ’ The funniest of all, however, was a young barrister who I found addressing a dinner for motor manufacturers. You wouldn’t have heard of Graham Davies then, and you probably haven’t now. He keeps away from television cameras which can kill your act dead in minutes. He had a way with hecklers. ‘Thank you, but when I do a ventriloquist act, I bring my own dummy.’ Or, even more dismissively, ‘See what happens when cousins marry?’ He went to a school where rugby and homosexuality were compulsory and where the bullies would beat you up and make you stand barefoot on the hot radiators ‘but that’s nuns for you.’ When I’d written it, Koski asked me to score them so we had a winner. Although he was the least known – perhaps because he was the least known – I picked Graham Davies. A couple of days after it appeared he rang me to say that his fee had just about doubled and his phone had never stopped ringing. He sent me a bottle of champagne and coached me through a father-of-the-bride speech I was dreading. ‘You can borrow some of my jokes’ he said. And I’ve just borrowed them again. The most surprising people turned out to be good fun. Instructed to accompany Sister Wendy to Rome for a preview of her television arts programme, my main concern was whether I could conduct a conversation which excluded drink and sex. I needn’t have worried. She seemed to know quite a lot about both. At lunch with photographer John Rogers and me, she walloped back a fair amount of wine without showing any signs of tearing off her wimple and dancing on the table. In – I think – the Galleria Borghese, she stood in front of a sculpture of the Rape of the Sabine Women which she then analysed in astonishing detail. She pointed out the men’s fingers sinking into the women’s flesh, and how one woman, even as she tried to flee, was looking back almost with yearning. For a consecrated virgin who lived a solitary life in the grounds of a Carmelite monastery in Norfolk, she seemed to have a more sensitive grasp of the reality of sex than, say, Kent Gavin. Yet was it a subject of which she knew nothing? She smiled and patted my hand. ‘I haven’t climbed Everest but I know quite a lot about it. I read books, you see.’ I drove her around the city and when we came to one of the bridges over the Tiber, I couldn’t resist a bit of showing-off. Dragged from the half-remembered but mostly-forgotten remains of my education, I quoted the opening lines from How Hadrian Kept the Bridge. Lars Porsena of Closium by the nine gods he swore,that the great house of Tarquin should suffer wrong no more ’ She then ran through the next 30 verses, which served me right. On one of the seven hills, she pointed out to us how the city had remained much the same for 2,000 years. ‘Yeah,’ said Rogers, a London boy, rather begrudgingly, ‘but just think what it must’ve looked like when it was new.’ Sister Wendy looked puzzled. Back we went, back down into the city to find a delightful pavement restaurant near the bottom of the Spanish steps, where we ate and drank, and our consecrated virgin was the most entertaining company. Unlike poor old Andrew Morton. He was probably at home counting my money, the sick bastard.                         Flat season Retail sales are going to be ‘flat, at best’, says the boss of Tesco forecasting for the Christmas season. So, what to buy that is value for money? You could buy one (or more) of our books about journalism, written by journalists, for journalists. Or you can mooch around Tesco, flatly. So save yourself the effort and visit our books page

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