FREEDOM’S JUST ANOTHER WORD for NOTHIN’ LEFT to LOSE
Over several months, most of the postings on this blog have also appeared on a website called London Progressive Journal. This is a non-profit site, freely accessible and free of advertising. It also necessarily pays nothing to its contributors. Writers and contributors generally appear on the site by invitation and either write new pieces for it (which I have done once or twice) or recycle material from other outlets (as I have generally done from this blog and as, for instance, George Monbiot does with his Guardian columns).
Recently, I have come into conflict with the duo who edit the site in their spare time. I thought the issues over which we disagreed were important, especially in a context that calls itself progressive, and so I wrote a piece that attempted to address those issues and submitted it on July 22nd. The editors have declined to engage with the matters I raised and have shown no inclination to publish the piece. So I present it below, on the assumption that it bears some interest beyond the narrow confines of LPJ. I have altered nothing from the original submission, save to add references in square brackets:
‘This is a piece about editorial policy on London Progressive Journal. That you are reading it may indicate that the editors have addressed or are willing to address the issues that I raise herein and the implications of those issues. Of course I cannot know in advance if they will have reproduced it exactly as I submitted it. That you, gentle reader, may know the answer to that question, I will post a comment on the matter once the piece is on-site.
How LPJ works is that postings are submitted, read by the editorial staff and transcribed to suit the technical requirements of the site. These requirements can be frustrating; for instance the site’s program cannot read my iMac’s italics and so I have had to devise a strategy for indicating where I mean words to be italicised that does not confuse the editors or cut across other print conventions. It also means that the text does not go blind onto the site. It is read and processed first and therefore there is scope for the introduction of unintended typos and other errors, for subbing and for other editorialising, even for mischief.
Readers without experience of journalism may not be familiar with the phenomenon of subbing. This is usually the work of an in-house assistant called a sub-editor but, in situations where staffing is tight, the task often falls to editors themselves. The sub-editor goes through the texts of articles, correcting unwonted errors by the writer: typos, spelling mistakes, factual inaccuracies, grammatical infelicities and other obvious blemishes. But the sub also has the power, often exercised, to change the text. This may be necessitated because of pressure on space (if, that is, you believe that the accommodation of surrounding advertisements and/or visual material related to the article’s subject matter is a necessity). It may also come about because the sub thinks he can improve the piece by cutting, by re-shaping, even by rewriting, perhaps because he doesn’t comprehend a particular point being made or thinks he can write better than the columnist or reporter. I have done masses of subbing myself but I never felt that it was any part of the job to alter what the writer wanted to say or how she wished to say it.
Intrusive subbing is one of the banes of the print journalist’s life. During my time as television previewer on The Independent some 25 years ago, I had occasion to make an appeal to the paper’s overall editor because the listings editor – a legendarily dreadful man called Elkan Allan (now deceased) – had broken this particular camel’s back by completely rewriting my preview of a documentary about the treatment of Aids. I had two advantages over Allan in the matter: I knew a lot about Aids and he knew nothing, and I had seen the programme and he had not. “To fit the headline” that he had chosen for the piece – a headline so banal and beside-the-point that I have not remembered it – he had changed everything that I had written, in the process ascribing to my by-line the assertion that Aids is a disease (it is a syndrome), that HIV is a virus (HI is a virus, the V stands for virus) and that Factor-8 is a drug (it is blood plasma). This nonsense made me look like an ignorant fool who had paid no attention to the film that I was previewing.
The editor of The Independent remained carefully noncommittal about what he clearly thought was a little local difficulty, but he also evidently discounted the outrageously untrue slurs that Elkan Allan levelled against me and my work in order to justify his egregious subbing. Nonetheless, Allan departed abruptly within the week and I was duly hailed by the other toilers in the listings section as a hero of the people.
But that’s all by the by. Star names in the press – I might suggest as examples John Pilger and George Monbiot – are not, I think, much troubled by subbing being applied to their much-desired work. It’s more obscure scribblers like me who have to fight for every word.
In the eight months or so that my stuff has been appearing on LPJ, I have had little cause to beef about subbing of the intrusive kind. But my two most recent submissions have raised some issues of editorial control that I think need to be addressed. This site is presented as an open forum and therefore it seems to me only proper to discuss these matters openly.
My most recent submission (last week) was entitled ‘A Word In Your Shell-Like’ [July 17th, below]. The version that was posted had three subbing errors that I quickly pointed out to the editors. But there was also something unprecedented added to the piece: a disclaimer at the bottom. It read: “The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and not necessarily those of the LPJ”.
I was completely bemused by this. What had occasioned it? Had I stepped over the line by demurring at Rory Bremner’s hoax? Was it an offence against progressive opinion to suggest that the Freedom of Information Act might make the practical business of government more tricky? Had I strained editorial patience by twitting Kelvin MacKenzie? How was I – or the reader – to tell?
To my email concerning subbing errors, I added this sentence: “As for the disclaimer at the bottom of the piece, I am absolutely hopping mad about it and, feeling as I do at present, am resolved that this will be my last piece for LPJ”.
One of the editors replied thus: “Thank you for your comments. We have made the requested amendments” (actually they have only made one of the three) “but I'm afraid that we won't be budging on the disclaimer below the article.
“We have great respect for your ideas and writing abilities and aim to ensure the LPJ expresses a broad range of opinions from its authors, including those that we, as editors, may personally not agree with.
“I'm afraid that neither of us feels that Assange or Manning is in the wrong and we didn't want to risk our readership feeling that we thought so.
“Hence, in the spirit of free speech - whilst sticking to our editorial policy and opinions - we felt the need to mention that the opinions in the article are the author’s and not necessarily ours. We have done this with articles from time to time, and even gained praise for doing so from authors who respected our decision to maintain our own views whilst allowing freedom of ideas.
“We hope you will reconsider your decision not to submit any further articles to the LPJ” (I have subbed quite a handful of typos and grammatical and other errors out of this email so that the editor may not be publicly embarrassed).
So that’s it. It’s what I wrote about WikiLeaks that has stuck in the editorial craw. You, gentle reader, will not have my piece to hand, so let me repeat the words with which I introduced the subject of WikiLeaks into the argument: “I may have missed something here but I have always struggled to understand the fine moral distinction between the publication of private conversations intercepted by hacking telephones and the publication of private conversations intercepted by a variety of other breaches of the law”.
I think that is a pretty explicit invitation to apologists for Assange and Manning to engage on the matter, to offer an argument that will enlighten me and soothe away my scepticism. To hand my piece to the readers at arm’s length, the other hand holding the editorial nose is, frankly, an insult both to me and to the reader.
It’s worth reacquainting ourselves with the site’s mission statement. LPJ, we are assured, represents “a non-sectarian left wing perspective” and “aims to provide an intelligent, critical and accessible discourse on the key issues”. It “is not affiliated with any political party or lobby group and therefore has no constraints over what it can publish. As such the range of opinion contained within the pages of the journal is relatively diverse”.
So we can be clear from this that the agenda of LPJ is not – or at any rate not necessarily – Marxist-Leninist, not Trotskyite, not Maoist, not anarcho-syndicalist, not libertarian Socialist, not situationist, not impossibilist, not old-Communist and indeed not (not necessarily) Assangist. Nevertheless, the editors do not “want to risk our readership feeling that (the editors think that) … Assange … is in the wrong”.
There is a rather large presumption here. It is presumed that the LPJ readership as a body subscribes to a consensus that the works of WikiLeaks are beyond question and that I alone am out of step with this happy union. Even were that true, by what editorial sleight of hand does my supposed maverick stance put me outside the tent pissing in rather than inside pissing out? Is there no longer any scope for discussion in self-proclaimed progressive circles? Is the sanctity of Julian Assange a fait accompli?
That the opinions expressed in LPJ do not, as a matter of course, chime consistently and unfailingly with those of the editors ought to go without saying. Progressive opinion, like Harold Wilson’s Labour Party, is “broad church”. There is not and cannot be, on a wide-ranging site like LPJ, an orthodoxy about every topic. Nor is progressive opinion a monolith that admits of no discussion or dissent. By all means let the site as a whole carry a disclaimer about all the material carried on it not necessarily reflecting the particular opinions of the editors. But to single out one posting and announce effectively that LPJ thinks it’s rubbish is not to be countenanced. Let one of the editors – or some other contributor, or Julian Assange himself (he is patently kicking his heels at present) – make the case for WikiLeaks in a complementary article. That is the mature and confident editorial response. To disassociate the site from one piece without any word of explanation is, at the very least, a discourtesy to everyone.
But this is the second successive posting of mine that has fallen foul of an editorial decision that greatly troubles me. The earlier piece was called ‘Bad Sight Of The Week’ [June 26th, below]. In it I deployed the word “cunt”. I did not do it gratuitously. I was quoting somebody else who used the word as a generic term for women. As it happens, perhaps as a semi-conscious test, I did use the emphatic “fucking” gratuitously in the piece and that was left alone.
The on-site version showed the quoted word as “c***”. I queried this. I was informed that one of the editors “hates the word”. I did not argue the toss further but it seemed to me to be no argument. There are plenty of words that I dislike for myriad reasons, but we are mature people, and language, in all its variety and multifariousness, is the tool that we use as writers and readers.
For an editor to blank a word because it is “hated” is a subjective and, I rather think, emotional use of editorial power. And – to give a dog a name – it is nothing short of censorship. I imagine that quite of lot of contributors to LPJ would not want to risk our readers feeling that we all thought censorship is acceptable.
These are fit matters for discussion, for god’s sake, not for indisputable editorial fiat. (By the by, I never capitalise the first letter of the term “god” because there is no god and so something that does not exist cannot possess a proper name. In LPJ, the “g” is routinely capitalised without discussion).
It is in the nature of the case that these words will be read by the editors before they are laid before the readers. So I say this to the editors – and I want the readers to know that it was said: do not refuse this contribution. There is no credible ground on which it may be refused. Let there be debate. Engage it yourselves but do it on the site, not out of the view of the readership. Remember that the piece that occasioned this debate was itself about freedom of the press. Do not fall into the trap of replicating the unyielding control over free expression in an open forum that has passed for editing in the capitalist press. It will be a struggle for you to reconcile a stance of intervening editorially in a free discussion with your fear that you may be thought opposed to Assange’s own purported quest to liberate information and open debate.
And I invite readers and other contributors to engage with these matters. Keeping channels open for uncensored debate is the most important function that LPJ can perform’.
P.S.: I no longer submit pieces to London Progressive Journal.
Showing posts with label previews. Show all posts
Showing posts with label previews. Show all posts
Sunday, August 05, 2012
Friday, June 10, 2011
ROLLING with the PUNCHES II
A large part of my journalism career was spent writing about television. As someone who grew up with the medium’s golden age, I eagerly cast myself in the 1970s as its print champion. It seemed to me that television was not yet written about well enough: where were the weighty books and where was the newspaper criticism that did it justice? In fact there was already a pretty strong tradition of thoughtful arts section writing about television, but I couldn’t know then that such thoughtfulness would die out rather than deepen.
Apart from a year on the trade magazine Broadcast, I never got to write regular reviews of television or any other art form. Reviewing jobs are very tricky to come by. Basically, you need to be standing by the arts editor’s desk beaming benignly when the baton is passed on. Such opportunities are almost always bestowed before anyone outside the paper knows there is one. Suddenly, a critic’s column ends with a sign-off and a commendation to follow the critic’s anointed successor. When an unplanned vacancy occurs, there is a mad scramble. The long-time theatre critic of The Daily Mail, Jack Tinker, died suddenly. I zipped down to Northcliffe House and delivered a letter to Paul Dacre, the veteran editor, applying for the job. He wrote me an unexpectedly charming, personal and modest reply, apologetic that he couldn’t give me an immediate answer. But I didn’t get the gig.
Most of my journalism about television was previewing and reporting. Previewing never had the status of reviewing, though Time Out magazine, whose third television editor I was, and Elkan Allan at The Sunday Times considerably raised the game for the penetration of previewing into programme-makers’ consciousnesses. And such was the pertinence of the news-gossip-and-preview format that Pattie Williams and I worked up in the Time Out television section that we became remarkably influential. One BBC producer told me that each week on publication day Television Centre fell silent while everyone absorbed our latest fusillades. When The Guardian ran a piece on Bruce Forsyth with the headline “The Most Important Man in British Television”, someone at Time Out cut the headline out and stuck it over my pigeonhole.
The point was that Pattie and I were serious about television. We thought that it should be covered with the same expertise, discrimination and passion as any other art form. We developed an auteur theory of programme-makers and we wrote about the mechanics of montage, camerawork, genre and transmission modes, in order to encourage our readers to understand better why some programmes worked more effectively than others and why programme-makers made the decisions that they did.
After less than eighteen months, I got headhunted by The Observer which was expanding its coverage of television. I wrote a more extensive selection of weekly previews than the paper had ever carried before, along with a comment column. Colour pieces were supplied on a fortnightly turnaround by Russell Harty and Melvyn Bragg, and there was also a review column. This was the only element that I had a problem with. The review was by Clive James. I considered James to be the destroyer of proper criticism of the medium; and James was – important distinction – a reviewer, not a critic.
Clive James, a serious critic
The Observer had a fine tradition of television critics: TC Worsley, Maurice Richardson, George Melly. Each of these was serious about television. James wasn’t. He was serious about wanting to get onto television, which he duly did. But his writing about television was, in fact, a blog avant la lettre in which he mused about the world. Thus he merely used television as a sounding board against which to bounce his worldview. Tragically, many people were seduced by this, even otherwise sensible people who worked in television. It was claimed by some at the paper that James accounted for a quarter of the paper’s sales all by himself. I ground my teeth.
Inevitably, James’ notion of how to write about television became the template for others to follow: AA Gill, Stephen Pile, Charlie Brooker. The critics who, in my time, assessed the medium on its own terms rather than as a thing over there to be mocked – Peter Black, Peter Fiddick, Séan Day-Lewis, Jimmy Thomas, Shaun Usher, Dennis Potter, Jennifer Selway, Chris Dunkley, even (in her own sweet way) Nancy Banks-Smith – have no successors.
Grace Dent, with whom I had a Twitter spat described in the previous posting, writes about television in the Guide section of the Saturday edition of The Guardian. I read her for the first and last time last weekend. She wrote about a programme called Four Rooms, employing the kind of look-at-me-ma allusions and comparisons that were staple Clive James. The programme being about antiques, she began with a clod-hopping assault on Antiques Roadshow (so timely 32 years into its run), including an elaborate conceit about it being on at tea-time that was somewhat scuppered by the fact that transmission was moved out of the tea-time slot some three years ago.
She described one of Four Rooms presenters as “foisting dice in some hapless victim’s face”, clearly unaware of the meaning of “to foist” – maybe she was thinking of “hoist”. Her characteristic showy riffs are extended way past their effect and only scratch, never bite. In sum, she’s a lightweight. She has no seriousness of purpose. She cares diddly-squat about television for its own sake and is, like her predecessor in the slot Charlie Brooker, merely looking for an all-purpose on-screen career delivering banter. I expect she’ll get it too. If you want to read her column, it may be found at
http://bit.ly/lMBiTw
Grace Dent: last appearance (I promise)
Cheap show-offs like Dent are terribly sensitive about any remarks made about them, however determinedly they maintain a scornful attitude to all of television’s output. Indeed, reviewers generally dish it out readily but take it badly. Dusty Hughes was theatre editor when I was on Time Out, went on to run the Bush Theatre and then became a playwright. I reviewed a play of his at the National Theatre. Its director, Richard Eyre, actually went to the trouble of dropping me a line to thank me for my remarks. Dusty, by contrast, rang my home and demanded of my partner to be allowed to speak to me (I was out) because he wanted to call me a cunt. Same review. But Richard Eyre hadn’t been a reviewer.
Whenever the “victim” of a bad review hits back, however briefly, the critic always wants the last word. The latest example is the theatre critic on The Daily Telegraph, Charles Spencer, another ineffable lightweight. Spencer’s only moment of limelight beyond the tiny proportion of Telegraph types who read about the arts came when he described Nicole Kidman’s brief nudity on the London stage as “pure theatrical Viagra”. Though the phrase was widely quoted – by far the most by Spencer himself who evidently felt he was Oscar Wilde reincarnated – it survives no examination as a meaningful metaphor, even if you wanted to go down that road.
In the present nonsense, Spencer had given his usual snotty review to the latest production of Deborah Warner, whose work he doesn’t have the capacity to understand. Warner, perhaps a touch ad hominem, accounted Spencer “a toad” (the resemblance is not wholly far-fetched). The amphibian, while declaring that “I’d hoped to take her anger on the chin like a man and keep quiet”, naturally could not forbear to write a whole column of reply, justifying it by essaying that “this spat does raise interesting questions”. Sadly he never wrote about any of those. I did laugh, though, when he described Warner’s work as “self-advertising”. Pure theatrical myopia, anyone?
Charles Spencer, the theatre critic, not the former brother-in-law of the Prince of Wales
Read it if you must at http://tgr.ph/iuip5T
Also last Saturday, Clive James returned to reviewing television. He had been secured by The Daily Telegraph under the banner or “world’s greatest television critic”, though of course this was probably demanded as part of the deal by his agent. James has in all probability returned to reviewing because he is ill with leukaemia and it’s a job he can do as and when his health allows (unlike his television interviewing). James’ return has been hailed by his friends on Twitter. I can’t raise much anger about it now, partly because he’s dying, mostly because the battle to establish a useful body of television criticism is long lost.
James’ first column is here:
http://bit.ly/lKuIu1
It’s vintage in the sense that everything I hated about his stuff is intact. He always wrote like a man who could listen to the sound of his own voice all day and he still does. The chief topic of his column is the drama serial The Shadow Line about which he actually says almost nothing. There is an absurdly elaborated detour on the movie tropes of John Woo in order to make a tiny point about a directorial tic of the television serial’s writer-director Hugo Blick. And of course James comes back to a non-televisual experience of his own at the end. Yes, his metasubject is the same as ever: it’s Clive James.
A large part of my journalism career was spent writing about television. As someone who grew up with the medium’s golden age, I eagerly cast myself in the 1970s as its print champion. It seemed to me that television was not yet written about well enough: where were the weighty books and where was the newspaper criticism that did it justice? In fact there was already a pretty strong tradition of thoughtful arts section writing about television, but I couldn’t know then that such thoughtfulness would die out rather than deepen.
Apart from a year on the trade magazine Broadcast, I never got to write regular reviews of television or any other art form. Reviewing jobs are very tricky to come by. Basically, you need to be standing by the arts editor’s desk beaming benignly when the baton is passed on. Such opportunities are almost always bestowed before anyone outside the paper knows there is one. Suddenly, a critic’s column ends with a sign-off and a commendation to follow the critic’s anointed successor. When an unplanned vacancy occurs, there is a mad scramble. The long-time theatre critic of The Daily Mail, Jack Tinker, died suddenly. I zipped down to Northcliffe House and delivered a letter to Paul Dacre, the veteran editor, applying for the job. He wrote me an unexpectedly charming, personal and modest reply, apologetic that he couldn’t give me an immediate answer. But I didn’t get the gig.
Most of my journalism about television was previewing and reporting. Previewing never had the status of reviewing, though Time Out magazine, whose third television editor I was, and Elkan Allan at The Sunday Times considerably raised the game for the penetration of previewing into programme-makers’ consciousnesses. And such was the pertinence of the news-gossip-and-preview format that Pattie Williams and I worked up in the Time Out television section that we became remarkably influential. One BBC producer told me that each week on publication day Television Centre fell silent while everyone absorbed our latest fusillades. When The Guardian ran a piece on Bruce Forsyth with the headline “The Most Important Man in British Television”, someone at Time Out cut the headline out and stuck it over my pigeonhole.
The point was that Pattie and I were serious about television. We thought that it should be covered with the same expertise, discrimination and passion as any other art form. We developed an auteur theory of programme-makers and we wrote about the mechanics of montage, camerawork, genre and transmission modes, in order to encourage our readers to understand better why some programmes worked more effectively than others and why programme-makers made the decisions that they did.
After less than eighteen months, I got headhunted by The Observer which was expanding its coverage of television. I wrote a more extensive selection of weekly previews than the paper had ever carried before, along with a comment column. Colour pieces were supplied on a fortnightly turnaround by Russell Harty and Melvyn Bragg, and there was also a review column. This was the only element that I had a problem with. The review was by Clive James. I considered James to be the destroyer of proper criticism of the medium; and James was – important distinction – a reviewer, not a critic.
The Observer had a fine tradition of television critics: TC Worsley, Maurice Richardson, George Melly. Each of these was serious about television. James wasn’t. He was serious about wanting to get onto television, which he duly did. But his writing about television was, in fact, a blog avant la lettre in which he mused about the world. Thus he merely used television as a sounding board against which to bounce his worldview. Tragically, many people were seduced by this, even otherwise sensible people who worked in television. It was claimed by some at the paper that James accounted for a quarter of the paper’s sales all by himself. I ground my teeth.
Inevitably, James’ notion of how to write about television became the template for others to follow: AA Gill, Stephen Pile, Charlie Brooker. The critics who, in my time, assessed the medium on its own terms rather than as a thing over there to be mocked – Peter Black, Peter Fiddick, Séan Day-Lewis, Jimmy Thomas, Shaun Usher, Dennis Potter, Jennifer Selway, Chris Dunkley, even (in her own sweet way) Nancy Banks-Smith – have no successors.
Grace Dent, with whom I had a Twitter spat described in the previous posting, writes about television in the Guide section of the Saturday edition of The Guardian. I read her for the first and last time last weekend. She wrote about a programme called Four Rooms, employing the kind of look-at-me-ma allusions and comparisons that were staple Clive James. The programme being about antiques, she began with a clod-hopping assault on Antiques Roadshow (so timely 32 years into its run), including an elaborate conceit about it being on at tea-time that was somewhat scuppered by the fact that transmission was moved out of the tea-time slot some three years ago.
She described one of Four Rooms presenters as “foisting dice in some hapless victim’s face”, clearly unaware of the meaning of “to foist” – maybe she was thinking of “hoist”. Her characteristic showy riffs are extended way past their effect and only scratch, never bite. In sum, she’s a lightweight. She has no seriousness of purpose. She cares diddly-squat about television for its own sake and is, like her predecessor in the slot Charlie Brooker, merely looking for an all-purpose on-screen career delivering banter. I expect she’ll get it too. If you want to read her column, it may be found at
http://bit.ly/lMBiTw
Cheap show-offs like Dent are terribly sensitive about any remarks made about them, however determinedly they maintain a scornful attitude to all of television’s output. Indeed, reviewers generally dish it out readily but take it badly. Dusty Hughes was theatre editor when I was on Time Out, went on to run the Bush Theatre and then became a playwright. I reviewed a play of his at the National Theatre. Its director, Richard Eyre, actually went to the trouble of dropping me a line to thank me for my remarks. Dusty, by contrast, rang my home and demanded of my partner to be allowed to speak to me (I was out) because he wanted to call me a cunt. Same review. But Richard Eyre hadn’t been a reviewer.
Whenever the “victim” of a bad review hits back, however briefly, the critic always wants the last word. The latest example is the theatre critic on The Daily Telegraph, Charles Spencer, another ineffable lightweight. Spencer’s only moment of limelight beyond the tiny proportion of Telegraph types who read about the arts came when he described Nicole Kidman’s brief nudity on the London stage as “pure theatrical Viagra”. Though the phrase was widely quoted – by far the most by Spencer himself who evidently felt he was Oscar Wilde reincarnated – it survives no examination as a meaningful metaphor, even if you wanted to go down that road.
In the present nonsense, Spencer had given his usual snotty review to the latest production of Deborah Warner, whose work he doesn’t have the capacity to understand. Warner, perhaps a touch ad hominem, accounted Spencer “a toad” (the resemblance is not wholly far-fetched). The amphibian, while declaring that “I’d hoped to take her anger on the chin like a man and keep quiet”, naturally could not forbear to write a whole column of reply, justifying it by essaying that “this spat does raise interesting questions”. Sadly he never wrote about any of those. I did laugh, though, when he described Warner’s work as “self-advertising”. Pure theatrical myopia, anyone?
Read it if you must at http://tgr.ph/iuip5T
Also last Saturday, Clive James returned to reviewing television. He had been secured by The Daily Telegraph under the banner or “world’s greatest television critic”, though of course this was probably demanded as part of the deal by his agent. James has in all probability returned to reviewing because he is ill with leukaemia and it’s a job he can do as and when his health allows (unlike his television interviewing). James’ return has been hailed by his friends on Twitter. I can’t raise much anger about it now, partly because he’s dying, mostly because the battle to establish a useful body of television criticism is long lost.
James’ first column is here:
http://bit.ly/lKuIu1
It’s vintage in the sense that everything I hated about his stuff is intact. He always wrote like a man who could listen to the sound of his own voice all day and he still does. The chief topic of his column is the drama serial The Shadow Line about which he actually says almost nothing. There is an absurdly elaborated detour on the movie tropes of John Woo in order to make a tiny point about a directorial tic of the television serial’s writer-director Hugo Blick. And of course James comes back to a non-televisual experience of his own at the end. Yes, his metasubject is the same as ever: it’s Clive James.
Saturday, May 29, 2010
CRITICAL CONDITIONS
Back in the day (as the fashionable phrase has it), I really craved a berth as a full-time critic on a national newspaper. During more than thirty years of journalism, I wrote quite a lot of reviews across what I reckoned were my three areas of expertise: theatre, film and television (I wrote about the odd book too). Most of these pieces appeared in magazines but now and again there’d be a one-off in a newspaper or a stint of holiday-relieving. As a proper first-stringer, I pictured myself diligently criss-crossing the country (indeed, the world), covering theatre in a scrupulously anti-London-centric manner; or rounding up wide swathes of televisual genres in regular packages, as I did when passing a happy year as reviewer for the trade mag Broadcast three decades ago; or constructing a new auteur theory of film out of the post-post-movie-brat generation of Hollywood directors and indeed of indie production companies, but always leading my movie columns on the state of the perpetually dying British industry and the ever changing picture in non-English language cinema.
I fancied myself pretty damned good at reviewing. At least, I had a clear and determined view of what was the critic’s function and of what constituted bad reviewing (of which there was always plenty and now there is little else). “Ok, clever-clogs”, I hear you cry, “so how come you didn’t get a proper reviewing gig?” There’s really not much mystery to it. You won’t be surprised to learn that reviewing jobs don’t get advertised (“Opera critic required by national Sunday newspaper: must be able to read a score and know some good jokes” – I don’t think so).
Nancy with the laughing face
The first most of us learn of a critical changing of the guard is the column that ends thus: “Well, that’s my final piece for this newspaper. I’ve enjoyed every minute of the last 28 years. Next week, Stuart Maconie will be reviewing dance in this slot. I wish him well”. And you think “Oh bugger, I’ve been waiting 28 years for that useless old bitch to move on and suddenly it’s all done and dusted and I never even got my cv in the post”.
In the old days, arts editors deliberated long and hard over which particular learned authority might be persuaded to stoop to contributing notices on a regular basis. That began to change in the 1960s: new critics tended to be appointed from among those artsy types who happened to be hovering near the arts editor’s desk looking winsome at the moment when the incumbent suddenly dropped dead, had a last and decisive hissy fit or got a more lucrative offer from The International Herald Tribune. Some time in the late ‘80s, that shifted again. Newspapers no longer wanted people who could write out of passion, discrimination, erudition and long absorption in the particular art to be reviewed. Instead they wanted some jackass who knew diddly-shit but who could be relied on to be funny. This is precisely how someone as empty-headed as Toby Young gets to be a theatre critic. The rumbles you hear are Ken Tynan and Harold Hobson stomping out of their graves before the houselights come up.
One reason why I fancied myself a worthwhile critic was precisely because I was interested in film and television and theatre. After all, if you were Richard Eyre or David Hare, Ralph or Ian or Miranda or Joely Richardson, you worked all these beats. Isn’t it appropriate for the critic of one to be versed in all? They’re not, though. Very few movie reviewers ever set foot in a theatre, almost no theatre critics get to watch mainstream evening television and television reviewers … well, they know nothing about anything.
It happens all the time that even the liveliest critics in one of those spheres reveal woeful ignorance of the allied arts. I remember the peerless Nancy Banks-Smith in the 1970s reviewing a Play for Today whose cast was led by Robert Lang and that led to her perplexed cry: “Where has this wonderful actor been all my life?” Well, Nancy, the answer is that he was leading Olivier’s National Theatre company at the Old Vic. If you’d been to almost any production there in the previous dozen years, you would have known that.
Billington, the fat owl of the stalls
Though he’s hardly what you’d call an inspired theatre critic, The Guardian’s veteran Michael Billington consistently writes with shrewd judgment and immense knowledge (I do wish he wouldn’t always expect plays to make “points”, though) and much of that authority derives from his history of reviewing film and television as well as theatre. He also – and this helps immensely – has occasionally taken a turn as a director.
During my time as a journalist, I alternated with jobs in television and I continued to submit projects (though rarely with any result) to theatres and movie production companies. I like to think that my reviewing was informed by a feel for how work was made and by a certain amount of objective (and I hope interesting) assessment of technique. If a play or musical or movie or programme works, there are usually discernible reasons why that should be the case; and often enough there are explicable flaws that militate against its success. A critic ought to be specialist enough to tease out these factors, or so it seems to me.
If there is one critic who changed all that, I submit that it was Clive James. James, who happens to be about five weeks older than Michael Billington, had a ten-year platform as designated television reviewer on The Observer. For a while, in the middle of that time, I shared a page with him as the paper’s television previewer. Demand for this latter function had grown in the national press, partly in response to the success of the television previewing on Time Out, from the executing of which I was duly recruited.
The view I had developed was that reviews of all the other arts except for live concerts were read like television previews: in other words, you read the critique and got to see the show afterwards, as you did with a movie, book, ballet, exhibition and so on. So it was legitimate to write fully and critically about a programme yet to be transmitted because in practise the advantage you enjoyed over your readers was not significantly more than that of critics of the other arts. Evidently the arts editors were beginning to accept this philosophy.
The young(ish) Renaissance Man, James
I have no idea what James thought of my previewing: we had very little contact during my time at The Observer. Perhaps he sensed my hostility. At any rate, I thought he carried no torch for the medium whatsoever. He just used television as a vehicle via which to write about the world and/or whatever he wished. He had no feel for what programme-makers were trying to do. While I am sure he subscribed to the auteur theory of the movies – as we all did in those days – he was blithely uninterested in any notion of a hierarchy or a hall of fame of television programme-makers.
There was one episode – immensely enjoyable for me at least – when James loftily attacked the documentarist Angela Pope because, out of his ignorance of technique, he assumed that she could not have gathered the footage that appeared in her film without some degree of manipulation. She sued him. I recall him rampaging around the newspaper’s open-plan office, fulminating against this “cunt”; not that this was anything new, because I had already learned that James’s generic term for women was “cunts”. The paper duly withdrew his observation and apologized. I was a bit disappointed. I had been hoping that he would go to jail.
What I always suspected duly came to pass. James really wanted to be on television himself. I imagine his broadcasting career has been less glittering than he would have wanted or imagined. He’s probably pleased with it but it’s objectively the case that almost nothing memorable came out of it, especially the feeble LWT documentaries that he fronted.
But James’s column was very popular, even in some parts of the business. He made readers laugh. They thought the world of him at the paper. I even heard one of the executives claim that James accounted for a quarter of the paper’s sales. As one who felt that his own mission was to champion television, to make it “better” by chiding programme-makers when they weren’t stepping up to the mark and to make it more “readable” to viewers by writing about its tropes and techniques, I thought James was vulgar, down-market and self-regarding. But look around the critical landscape today and all you see are those who want to emulate James: writers like AA Gill, Charlie Brooker and Charles “theatrical viagra” Spencer.
Milton Agonistes
Plying my own trade in the ‘70s, I bore a suspicion that some of my seniors took a rather dim view of their readers. I remember covering an opening at the Greenwich Theatre, at the interval of which most of my fellow critics lolled in the stalls chewing the fat. Unremarked, I remained among them and listened in, hoping to learn something. Most vociferous on this occasion was Milton Shulman. This Canadian Jewish ex-pat was, for donkey’s years, chief theatre reviewer for The London Evening Standard, always wielding a straight bat on behalf of the unchanging values. No new play, unless it be written by William Douglas-Home, escaped the lash of Milton’s scorn. Your work had to be at least fifty years old before he would consider it worthy of revival.
On this occasion, everything Milton had to say was witty, wise and to the point. His fellows – Billington, Benedict Nightingale, John Elsom, Robert Cushman – had nothing remotely as perceptive to say. I looked forward eagerly to Milton’s notice the next day. And not a whit of this gossamer gold appeared in the paper. It was his habitual, curmudgeonly drone.
The Guardian is presently running its third annual competition for “young critics” and as the top age limit is 18 I guess I’ll have to rule myself out. In a feature earlier this week, various established critics reminisced about getting started and about the critics who inspired them, an unsurprisingly dispiriting exercise. One reviewer thus hailed as a heroine was notorious in her day for having her copy made coherent by her journalist boyfriend. Tragically, the couple suddenly broke up. “How will she cope?” we wondered, to which the noted wit John Lyttle replied: “She’ll soon be back in the social swim, looking for Mr Rewrite”.
Peter Bradshaw, far from my favourite movie reviewer, complained in his piece that his parents took The Daily Telegraph in the 1970s and “I would no more want to read their reviews than to read the lines of stock market prices in The Financial Times”. Certainly no one at that time would have made a decision about what to see in the theatre based on the opinions of “Colonel” John Barber, but The Telegraph did then have one of the most incisive and diligent television critics in the business in the form of Séan Day-Lewis.
Bradshaw offers as his critical hero – yes, you guessed – Clive James. “James more or less invented the critic-columnist trope of riffing, digressing, zooming off at a tangent” reckons Bradshaw, which pretty much encapsulates everything I deplore in reviewing.
********************************************************
Perhaps you clocked the hint of enquiry I offered about the sexuality of David Laws in the posting ‘Cabinet in the Sky’ on May 12th. If you want to keep abreast, just keep watching this space …
Back in the day (as the fashionable phrase has it), I really craved a berth as a full-time critic on a national newspaper. During more than thirty years of journalism, I wrote quite a lot of reviews across what I reckoned were my three areas of expertise: theatre, film and television (I wrote about the odd book too). Most of these pieces appeared in magazines but now and again there’d be a one-off in a newspaper or a stint of holiday-relieving. As a proper first-stringer, I pictured myself diligently criss-crossing the country (indeed, the world), covering theatre in a scrupulously anti-London-centric manner; or rounding up wide swathes of televisual genres in regular packages, as I did when passing a happy year as reviewer for the trade mag Broadcast three decades ago; or constructing a new auteur theory of film out of the post-post-movie-brat generation of Hollywood directors and indeed of indie production companies, but always leading my movie columns on the state of the perpetually dying British industry and the ever changing picture in non-English language cinema.
I fancied myself pretty damned good at reviewing. At least, I had a clear and determined view of what was the critic’s function and of what constituted bad reviewing (of which there was always plenty and now there is little else). “Ok, clever-clogs”, I hear you cry, “so how come you didn’t get a proper reviewing gig?” There’s really not much mystery to it. You won’t be surprised to learn that reviewing jobs don’t get advertised (“Opera critic required by national Sunday newspaper: must be able to read a score and know some good jokes” – I don’t think so).
Nancy with the laughing face
The first most of us learn of a critical changing of the guard is the column that ends thus: “Well, that’s my final piece for this newspaper. I’ve enjoyed every minute of the last 28 years. Next week, Stuart Maconie will be reviewing dance in this slot. I wish him well”. And you think “Oh bugger, I’ve been waiting 28 years for that useless old bitch to move on and suddenly it’s all done and dusted and I never even got my cv in the post”.
In the old days, arts editors deliberated long and hard over which particular learned authority might be persuaded to stoop to contributing notices on a regular basis. That began to change in the 1960s: new critics tended to be appointed from among those artsy types who happened to be hovering near the arts editor’s desk looking winsome at the moment when the incumbent suddenly dropped dead, had a last and decisive hissy fit or got a more lucrative offer from The International Herald Tribune. Some time in the late ‘80s, that shifted again. Newspapers no longer wanted people who could write out of passion, discrimination, erudition and long absorption in the particular art to be reviewed. Instead they wanted some jackass who knew diddly-shit but who could be relied on to be funny. This is precisely how someone as empty-headed as Toby Young gets to be a theatre critic. The rumbles you hear are Ken Tynan and Harold Hobson stomping out of their graves before the houselights come up.
One reason why I fancied myself a worthwhile critic was precisely because I was interested in film and television and theatre. After all, if you were Richard Eyre or David Hare, Ralph or Ian or Miranda or Joely Richardson, you worked all these beats. Isn’t it appropriate for the critic of one to be versed in all? They’re not, though. Very few movie reviewers ever set foot in a theatre, almost no theatre critics get to watch mainstream evening television and television reviewers … well, they know nothing about anything.
It happens all the time that even the liveliest critics in one of those spheres reveal woeful ignorance of the allied arts. I remember the peerless Nancy Banks-Smith in the 1970s reviewing a Play for Today whose cast was led by Robert Lang and that led to her perplexed cry: “Where has this wonderful actor been all my life?” Well, Nancy, the answer is that he was leading Olivier’s National Theatre company at the Old Vic. If you’d been to almost any production there in the previous dozen years, you would have known that.
Billington, the fat owl of the stalls
Though he’s hardly what you’d call an inspired theatre critic, The Guardian’s veteran Michael Billington consistently writes with shrewd judgment and immense knowledge (I do wish he wouldn’t always expect plays to make “points”, though) and much of that authority derives from his history of reviewing film and television as well as theatre. He also – and this helps immensely – has occasionally taken a turn as a director.
During my time as a journalist, I alternated with jobs in television and I continued to submit projects (though rarely with any result) to theatres and movie production companies. I like to think that my reviewing was informed by a feel for how work was made and by a certain amount of objective (and I hope interesting) assessment of technique. If a play or musical or movie or programme works, there are usually discernible reasons why that should be the case; and often enough there are explicable flaws that militate against its success. A critic ought to be specialist enough to tease out these factors, or so it seems to me.
If there is one critic who changed all that, I submit that it was Clive James. James, who happens to be about five weeks older than Michael Billington, had a ten-year platform as designated television reviewer on The Observer. For a while, in the middle of that time, I shared a page with him as the paper’s television previewer. Demand for this latter function had grown in the national press, partly in response to the success of the television previewing on Time Out, from the executing of which I was duly recruited.
The view I had developed was that reviews of all the other arts except for live concerts were read like television previews: in other words, you read the critique and got to see the show afterwards, as you did with a movie, book, ballet, exhibition and so on. So it was legitimate to write fully and critically about a programme yet to be transmitted because in practise the advantage you enjoyed over your readers was not significantly more than that of critics of the other arts. Evidently the arts editors were beginning to accept this philosophy.
The young(ish) Renaissance Man, James
I have no idea what James thought of my previewing: we had very little contact during my time at The Observer. Perhaps he sensed my hostility. At any rate, I thought he carried no torch for the medium whatsoever. He just used television as a vehicle via which to write about the world and/or whatever he wished. He had no feel for what programme-makers were trying to do. While I am sure he subscribed to the auteur theory of the movies – as we all did in those days – he was blithely uninterested in any notion of a hierarchy or a hall of fame of television programme-makers.
There was one episode – immensely enjoyable for me at least – when James loftily attacked the documentarist Angela Pope because, out of his ignorance of technique, he assumed that she could not have gathered the footage that appeared in her film without some degree of manipulation. She sued him. I recall him rampaging around the newspaper’s open-plan office, fulminating against this “cunt”; not that this was anything new, because I had already learned that James’s generic term for women was “cunts”. The paper duly withdrew his observation and apologized. I was a bit disappointed. I had been hoping that he would go to jail.
What I always suspected duly came to pass. James really wanted to be on television himself. I imagine his broadcasting career has been less glittering than he would have wanted or imagined. He’s probably pleased with it but it’s objectively the case that almost nothing memorable came out of it, especially the feeble LWT documentaries that he fronted.
But James’s column was very popular, even in some parts of the business. He made readers laugh. They thought the world of him at the paper. I even heard one of the executives claim that James accounted for a quarter of the paper’s sales. As one who felt that his own mission was to champion television, to make it “better” by chiding programme-makers when they weren’t stepping up to the mark and to make it more “readable” to viewers by writing about its tropes and techniques, I thought James was vulgar, down-market and self-regarding. But look around the critical landscape today and all you see are those who want to emulate James: writers like AA Gill, Charlie Brooker and Charles “theatrical viagra” Spencer.
Milton Agonistes
Plying my own trade in the ‘70s, I bore a suspicion that some of my seniors took a rather dim view of their readers. I remember covering an opening at the Greenwich Theatre, at the interval of which most of my fellow critics lolled in the stalls chewing the fat. Unremarked, I remained among them and listened in, hoping to learn something. Most vociferous on this occasion was Milton Shulman. This Canadian Jewish ex-pat was, for donkey’s years, chief theatre reviewer for The London Evening Standard, always wielding a straight bat on behalf of the unchanging values. No new play, unless it be written by William Douglas-Home, escaped the lash of Milton’s scorn. Your work had to be at least fifty years old before he would consider it worthy of revival.
On this occasion, everything Milton had to say was witty, wise and to the point. His fellows – Billington, Benedict Nightingale, John Elsom, Robert Cushman – had nothing remotely as perceptive to say. I looked forward eagerly to Milton’s notice the next day. And not a whit of this gossamer gold appeared in the paper. It was his habitual, curmudgeonly drone.
The Guardian is presently running its third annual competition for “young critics” and as the top age limit is 18 I guess I’ll have to rule myself out. In a feature earlier this week, various established critics reminisced about getting started and about the critics who inspired them, an unsurprisingly dispiriting exercise. One reviewer thus hailed as a heroine was notorious in her day for having her copy made coherent by her journalist boyfriend. Tragically, the couple suddenly broke up. “How will she cope?” we wondered, to which the noted wit John Lyttle replied: “She’ll soon be back in the social swim, looking for Mr Rewrite”.
Peter Bradshaw, far from my favourite movie reviewer, complained in his piece that his parents took The Daily Telegraph in the 1970s and “I would no more want to read their reviews than to read the lines of stock market prices in The Financial Times”. Certainly no one at that time would have made a decision about what to see in the theatre based on the opinions of “Colonel” John Barber, but The Telegraph did then have one of the most incisive and diligent television critics in the business in the form of Séan Day-Lewis.
Bradshaw offers as his critical hero – yes, you guessed – Clive James. “James more or less invented the critic-columnist trope of riffing, digressing, zooming off at a tangent” reckons Bradshaw, which pretty much encapsulates everything I deplore in reviewing.
********************************************************
Perhaps you clocked the hint of enquiry I offered about the sexuality of David Laws in the posting ‘Cabinet in the Sky’ on May 12th. If you want to keep abreast, just keep watching this space …
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