I date the end of our association from the moment when Louis Jourdan, that smoothest of Bond villains, asked me if I would be on hand for the shooting; I said I thought not, Cubby cried on a rising note “We can’t afford him!”, and M. Jourdan, who is charm and tact personified, steered the conversation effortlessly into other channels.
Octopussy had a gala opening attended by the Prince and Princess of Wales (she making the Bond dollies look like also-rans), and to Cubby’s delight in the ensuing weeks we wiped the box-office floor with the competing Never Say Never Again. My own satisfaction was, and is, that I worked on a Bond picture. I’ve watched it since, and when it comes to the gorilla suit bit I feel slightly guilty as I hear in memory that anguished cry of incredulity. Sorry, Cubby…and thank you a thousand times.
*
It was only when I saw a documentary about MGM twenty years later that I realised how lucky I’d been, seeing the very last of the great film empire. At the time of Octopussy, MGM had just merged with United Artists, and that was really the end of it. Now all that is left are some of the buildings, I suppose, but of vastly greater importance, all those wonderful films which with luck will last forever.
I used to wander round the corridors of the huge headquarters building, once the home of Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg, where Cubby now occupied the main suite of offices, first on the left after you got through the reception area where two pleasant but eagle-eyed young ladies screened visitors. The corridors were MGM’s last will and testament, the walls covered with blow-ups of stills from past productions, star portraits, enormous group photographs with all the famous faces ranged in alphabetical order, so that you got Clark Gable and Errol Flynn side by side, for example, all making an extraordinary record presided over by an aged janitortype who lived in a distant cubbyhole which, like the corridors, was plastered with star photos—but these were all autographed to the old man himself: Tracy, Lombard, Gable, Hepburn, the Barrymores, Powell, Loy, you name it, every big Metro name seemed to be there, and I wonder if there is a collection like it anywhere.
And not only MGM people. He had worked at various studios since the silent days over fifty years earlier, but Warners had been his favourite, and his gallery included Cagney and Raft and Bette Davis and Ann Sheridan. Sometimes, he confided, he would sneak a “foreign” portrait on to the corridor walls among all the MGM ones, “Eddie Robinson, maybe, he was a real gentleman.” I got the impression that he was doing this to spite the shade of Louis B. Mayer.
I don’t remember his name, or what function he had apart from taking care of his beloved pictures. Looking back, he seems like some Phantom of the Opera flitting along the passages of MGM, mysterious, watchful, jealous of his domain. I remember him saying something ever so corny, ever so Hollywood, and yet ever so moving as he surveyed his gallery of stars. “All my friends,” he said. “Every one.”
He’ll be long gone now, like Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
ANGRY OLD MAN 9
Dumbing Down, Down, Down…
JOURNALISM, WRITTEN AND BROADCAST, has sunk to a shockingly low ebb, for several reasons. The first, of course, is the decline in education, brought about by the politically motivated reformers who wrecked a splendid system, especially that foulmouthed Labour Minister who vowed “to destroy all those—ing grammar schools”. Just the man for the education portfolio, obviously. He and his Socialist fellow-theoreticians did a terrific job in degrading scholastic standards in the name of equality, which meant dragging down the good to the level of the mediocre. The war has been waged against private and selective education—and I have lost count of the number of Socialists of my acquaintance who, while lauding the State system, have taken damned good care to get their children into private schools—or, the ultimate hypocrisy, into schools which are State-run but private in all that matters.
A frequent excuse is that their children have “special needs”, but more often than not the loyal Labourite makes no bones about admitting that he (and especially she) couldn’t care less about party policy, their kids are going to be all right, Jack, and get the best affordable, and sod the workers.
But we must not digress into the fascinating reaches of the Socialist conscience. The point is that the decline in educational standards is manifest in our national newspapers and magazines, and in the broadcast media. Our national press appears to be staffed by people who don’t know “may” from “might”, “he” from “him”, “who” from “whom” (the latter word seems to have vanished from the popular papers altogether), “like” from “as”, “enormity” from “enormous”, “compunction” from “compulsion” (this in a leading “quality” broadsheet), and have no idea of the meaning of “decimate” and “oblivious”. Worse still, modern editors don’t spot these errors—or more probably don’t recognise them as such.
This is not mere pedantry; I hope I’m not a nit-picker, and bottle up my emotions about a related subject, the sloppy use of jargon and clichés. I am tired of those who pursue a strategy in search of a solution within broad parameters on a level playing field while singing from the same hymn-sheet, and who use “summit” instead of “meeting”, “loved ones” meaning “relatives”, “monitoring” meaning “watching”, and “task force” meaning “pack of official clowns”, to say nothing of the dumber Americanisms, such as “free up”, “meet with”, “check out”, “lose out”, and “state of the art”. I think if I see “vibrant”, “dynamic” or “former glory” again I shall feel it is “time to move on”, or possibly even “move forward”. All right, I shall desist; I’d never get to the end of them. I return to simple grammar, and wonder where it went. Not to the Fourth Estate, that’s certain.
I first became aware of this as deputy editor of the Glasgow Herald, a paper which fifty years ago was second to none in its journalistic standards, the training ground of Alastair Hetherington, Peregrine Worsthorne, Alastair Burnet, and many other distinguished newspapermen. We had a policy of recruiting university graduates, and I was alarmed at the poor quality of education, general knowledge, spelling, grammar, and general literacy of many, but by no means all, of the applicants I interviewed in the 1960s, when compared to that older generation of journalists, many of them largely self-educated, who had been the backbone of newspapers when I entered journalism after the war.
I must be careful about this, or I shall be accused of envious prejudice, not having been to a university myself, but those interviews and my general observation led me to question whether a university education is the best springboard for a journalistic career. It depends, of course, on the individual; no doubt there are many distinguished graduate journalists to stack against the Kiplings and Shaws and those wonderful editors who came out of the North, especially Dundee; no university could compare to training with D. C. Thomson.
Graduates laboured under a certain disadvantage: many tended to condescend to journalism rather than aspiring to it, assuming that they were fit simply by virtue of their academic training, and that they had little to learn, especially about writing, which was their goal rather than the mundane business of reporting and subediting. The production of elegantly phrased and trenchant “pieces” was what they had in mind—and many of them eventually became competent leader-writers, after an apprenticeship at the subs’ tables, where they learned the hard way how to condense five hundred words into fifty and cut Alistair Cooke to half a column. (It wasn’t really fair to give them Cooke; quite apart from the fact that cutting him was a crime, it was also damnably difficult, thanks to his almost narrative style.)
Some university men, by the way, made first-class subs; the best stone-sub I ever knew was a Strathclyde University drop-out who later managed a great publishing house.
And most of them turned into good newspapermen and women, once they had learned the basics and been educated out of some of the more bizarre notions they had picked up in academe—one aspirant told me that university had taught him to think, and I forbore to tell him that I co
uld see no sign of it. Another spoke of “three years’ exposure to excellence” and I was reminded of Peacock’s Dr Foliot who spoke of a well-balanced sconce polished without and picked clean within; to do the lad justice, three weeks’ exposure to an acid-tongued chief sub-editor wrought a wonderful change; he was made to understand that what-who-where-when (and if possible how-why) must be given priority in a news story, and that the first paragraph of almost any leader or “think-piece” is almost always expendable (try it on your own morning paper). He also developed a fine dirty mind, which is absolutely essential in a journalist.*
If I seem to harp on about graduates it is probably because I got my adult education in the Army and in that wonderful world of weekly newspapers and police courts, council meetings, garden fêtes, funerals (get the initials right), sporting events, fires, accidents, and Acts of God. I always feel a glow of comradeship when I hear a media interviewer or chat-show host remarking, invariably with pride, that he began on the Heckmondwyke Sentinel or the Tillicoultry Reminder; I know that he too has thrust his foot into doors, importuned impatient officials, wheedled policemen, and fought defensive rearguard actions against citizens outraged at having their privacy invaded. Incidentally, it’s the finest training imaginable for a writer, especially at the subs’ table, as Graham Greene, former sub on The Times, has testified.
It was a good newspaper generation that came up in the forties and fifties, trained by wise and wonderfully informed old hands who knew the works of Dickens and Hardy and Scott and Trollope backwards, as well as every personality and concern and scrap of gossip for thirty miles around and forty years back. Perhaps they’re still there; I hope so, but I see little sign of it in our national press, popular or “quality”.
I’ve spoken of the falling-off in basic education; even more worrying is the decline in what I can only call newspaper ethics. It used to be that news and comment had a great gulf betwixt them; you never, never mixed fact with opinion. No longer; front pages carry hopelessly loaded “news stories”, and fair, objective reporting seems to be a thing of the past. On the Herald, as on all the great provincial newspapers of fifty years ago—Scotsman, Yorkshire Post, Manchester Guardian (before it got ideas beneath its station), Birmingham Post, Western Mail, Liverpool Echo, and all the rest—fairness was gospel. We were a Tory paper, and our leader columns were sometimes to the right of Genghis Khan, but our news pages were sacrosanct: I’ve seen the chief sub lay his rule on proofs to make sure that a Labour candidate got exactly the same space as his Conservative opponent.
Does that happen now? I doubt it, although I’m sure the provincial press still maintains higher standards than the nationals. Some of the distortion and dirty tricks that I see in the so-called quality nationals today make me ashamed of my old profession: I am no fan of Tony Blair, but he deserves a fair shake, and the paper which ran a phoney picture of him on Buckingham Palace balcony apparently upstaging the Queen was guilty of deplorable behaviour. No doubt the defence would be that it was an obvious fake; well, this old hack was taken in until he saw the tiny word “montage” above it, and I’m sure that many readers took it as genuine.
That is a bad case, but no worse than many others. The entrapment of the Countess of Wessex by a tabloid reporter disguised as an Arab sheikh was cheap and disgusting, but the depth was plumbed at the time of Princess Diana’s death, when part of the nation went collectively mad, and sections of the press behaved disgracefully. I’m sure I amin a minority here, but I was appalled at the near-hysterical reaction of the crowds who strewed their floral tributes and metaphorically speaking beat their breasts in a display of lower-deck emotion which was as distasteful as it was exaggerated. I suppose many felt, to use the fashionable jargon, devastated, but was the tragic victim, however beautiful and bewitching, worth the kind of outpouring of grief that no other figure in living memory has received? I wondered at the time, what had happened to the moral fibre of the island race—the stiff upper lip, if you like—to make them behave like professional mourners howling for hire. The Prime Minister was proud. I was ashamed.
But deplorable as the public reaction was, that of the press and broadcast media was worse. They fuelled and stoked the campaign relentlessly, and with unprecedented yobbish bad manners blackmailed the Royal Family not merely into mourning, but into mourning in the way the gutter press dictated. “Show Us That You Care”, or words to that effect, ran one headline: would the writer have dreamed of saying such a thing to a bereaved neighbour? And is the Royal Family not entitled to the same civility, the same decent treatment, as anyone else? Not in Cool Britannia, evidently.
To turn to a less distressing fault of modern journalism, there are increasing signs of amateurishness in production and presentation. Possibly the new computerisation of newspapers has something to do with it; my own experience began and ended with hot metal, so I can’t tell; I know only that the end result is inferior. Design and layout are forgotten arts, and we have the choice of pages which are dogs’ breakfasts in the populars and Saharas of type in the broadsheets. Plainly it has been forgotten that the first essential is to communicate with the reader, and that for this visual clarity is essential—I am thinking, as one example, of the maddeningly inexpert use of the overprint on colour pages, where text and background are so similar in shade that the result is unreadable. But if the appearance is poor, the content is frequently worse; apart from the grammatical lapses which would shame a ten-year-old, there is an increasing sloppiness in the use of language, a lack of precision, a tendency to jargon, and often a quite wonderful ignorance and carelessness.
To give a trivial example: a headline said that the Pope had “refused” to apologise for the Vatican’s attitude to the Holocaust; in fact, as the story which followed made clear, he had merely failed to apologise—and any so-called journalist who asks “What’s the difference?” would be well advised to quit the media and resume his pick and shovel.
I mustn’t be too censorious. Standards in journalism are still as high as those in most other callings, and superior to many (e. g., politics). But I do detect a worrying falling-off—show me a paper, any paper, and before I’m halfway through it I’ll be grinding my teeth over several appalling gaffes. I spot them the more easily because I’ve committed them all myself (though not as a matter of course), and that does nothing for my temper. (I must have been like a dyspeptic Attila to work for.)
Thank God, incidentally, that my newspaper days are over—I hope. Not long ago I looked in on an evening paper where I’d once done Saturday afternoon sport, and it was like a ghastly futuristic sci-fi movie, with pallid slaves pecking away at their flickering green screens in near silence, and no clatter of typewriters, no choking reek of tobacco smoke, and not a laugh or an oath or a roar of rage to be heard. It was curiously lifeless, somehow, and lacking in that element which used to fill newspaper offices, a sort of crazy neurotic joy. Maybe I’m just getting old, and remember a time when everyone seemed to find life more fun.
We were lucky in my day: our newspapers did not suffer from obesity, there were no ridiculously swollen, multi-page, advertisement-crammed monstrosities with acres of space to be filled somehow. We didn’t know when we were well off, writing stories a paragraph long for a four-page paper; even with twelve or sixteen the editorial was fighting a constant battle for space with the ads—and invariably losing.
But with today’s mammoth papers the poor boobs have to write at ten times the length their subject is worth, and apart from overpadded news we have the curse of modern journalism, the proliferation of the commentary, the background exposition, the in-depth analysis, the “think-piece”, all adding up to an indigestible stream of crap which no one wants to read, and no one, to judge by the mechanical repetition and weary rambling, wants to write either. Oh, for the days when people knew what “two sticks” meant, sub-editors were ruthless destroyers, editors actually read their papers, and John Gordon and Hannen Swaffer and Ian Mackay and James Agate could say it all
in a few good paragraphs.
Note, too, that the men I have just mentioned did not suffer from the delusion that journalism is interesting in itself, or that the public was fascinated by journalistic feuding carried on ad nauseam. One exchange of broadsides, fine, but the childish serial sniping of some modern writers is just a bore.
To conclude, I confess to a slight worry about press freedom. When I was a young reporter you could report anything in a court of law except the evidence in divorce cases (you had to rely on the judge’s summing up), and the names of juveniles; I’m pretty sure you couldn’t give the name of the accuser in a rape case either; anyway, you didn’t. But today there seem to be all kinds of censorship: we hear of “reporting restrictions”, and that names have been suppressed for “legal reasons”; in local government the closed meeting which prevents the electors knowing what the elected are doing, is commonplace. These are bad things in themselves, and a sign of times when it is possible for a Home Secretary (admittedly an unusually clownish one) to propose interference with the jury system, and it is suggested that in certain cases an accused shall have no right to confront his accuser.
It is also possible that some government will be so misguided as to try to bring in a “privacy” law. Now, in spite of politicians’ babble about the “last chance saloon” there is no way in which this can be imposed in a free society, except in marginal prohibitions on photographic intrusion in certain circumstances. But there it must end. Press freedom was dearly bought in Britain, and any government short-sighted enough to let their civil servants tamper with it (assuming they had the intelligence to frame legislation through which any competent barrister couldn’t drive a horse and cart) would just find themselves defied. You can’t impose bad law on the Sun and the News of the World unless you assume totalitarian powers. And we are still some distance from that.