Grey Cardigan: Test your subbing skills

Posted by Grey Cardigan on 2 March 2010 at 17:18
Tags: Evening Beast

I’m always quick to kick the BBC for lazy subbing, so it’s only fair to hold our inky hands up when one of our own gets it horribly wrong. This, my friends, is the bag of shite that appeared on the Daily Mirror website this morning. See how many errors you can spot.

Kristian Digby: 10 things you need to know about the former TV presenter
By Chris Wilson, Mirror.co.uk 2/03/2010

Digby was born on in Devon in 1997 to a family of property developers

He studied Film at the University of Westminster and in 1997 he won a Junior BAFTA for his film Words of Deception

He was best known for presenting BBC property sow To But or Not To Buy. He was one of the original pr4senters, alongside Dominic Littlewood, when the daytime show launched in 2003

Other property shows he fronted included Buy It, Sell It, Bank It, Open House and To Build or Not To Build, which followed Digby as he built he own property in east London

He also had a stint presenting BBC Choice programme hat Gay Show in 2001

As well as presenting, Digby also directed a handful of programmes, including Home Front, She’s Gotta Have It, Girls On Top and The Ozone.

Following his death the BBC issued the following statement about him: “Kristian was a much-loved and talented presenter for BBC Daytime. He brought a real sense of energy and warmth to all the shows he presented for us and will be sorely missed. Our thoughts are with his family at this very difficult time.”

In 2006 he posed nude for charity in gay lifestyle magazine AXM

Didgy appeared on a celebrity edition of BBC2 quiz Eggheads and on celebrity Masterchef

Answers below, please.

Grey Cardigan: The bullying editors

Posted by Grey Cardigan on 24 February 2010 at 22:00
Tags: Evening Beast

The latest Gordon Brown story gives the national columnists the chance to recall tales of brutal newsroom behaviour (although hardly shocking from my experience), notably from Rowan Pelling in the Daily Telegraph and Allison Pearson in the Daily Mail.

Funnily enough, the doomed T2 supplement in The Times comes up with the best link, almost certainly accidentally, by featuring the infamous Alec Baldwin speech from the Glengarry Glen Ross in its classic film slot.

For afficianados of cool, calm, newsroom-style invective, try this YouTube link. (NSFW if you’ve got your speakers on.) And coffee is for closers.

A related link is probably nearer the truth for many of us who started out in the late Seventies. Meet Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, who could still teach a few of the ranting legends a thing or two.

Grey Cardigan: I’ll have a vowel please, Cheryl

Posted by Grey Cardigan on 24 February 2010 at 21:18
Tags: Evening Beast

A pitiful slip in standards at the Daily Telegraph, where not only is it bad enough that they even bother to document the tawdry, tabloid Ashley and Cheryl split-up, but they then adorn this pile of steaming dog shit with a pathetic literal.

“Cheryl stopped wearing her wedding ring and later told Jonathan Ross: “I was tempted to put it back on – in his head.

“But she forgave her husband, blaming his “young mentality” and in return, Cole pledged to abandon his partying lifestyle and renew his wedding vowels.”

Worse than that, it’s still on the website many, many hours after publication.

Doesn’t anyone care any more?

Grey Cardigan: Extract from February’s column

Posted by Grey Cardigan on 10 February 2010 at 15:51
Tags: Evening Beast

SO I’M in the Shivering Whippet for a couple of liveners with one of my predecessors as Editor of the Evening Beast – the last proper boss we had, if truth be told.

I’m moaning at him about a budget meeting I’ve just sat through: the sheer penny-pinching misery of management and the inevitable death by a thousand cuts.

Then there was the 20-minute debate after our managing director, the Eminence Grease, suggested that we should charge some kind of levy on the sandwich van that comes every morning. This is run by one of our former printers who sank his redundancy money into the tiny business. He provides a much-needed service since they shut our canteen down. (I can remember when I used to have a full English brought to my desk after the first edition had gone.) His food is good and well-priced. He’s got four kids … and we’re talking about snatching some of his meagre profits to help our bottom line? The world’s gone mad.

“You know, Grey,” my ex-boss says, “I remember meetings back in the early nineties when we didn’t know what to do with all the money we were making. We had to find cunning ways of hiding it from the shareholders. We were hitting margins of over 30 per cent and were turning advertising away despite constant rate increases.

“The daft thing is, we all knew that it was going to end. We knew that the internet would eventually take away our ad revenue; that classified would go first, followed by property and sits vac. And yet we did nothing about it. We didn’t plan for the future or invest in innovative content and means of delivery. We just carried on snuffling up the profits like pigs around a trough.”

He paused and put his hand on my knee.

“Grey, I’m truly sorry.”

Well after that, I really needed something to cheer me up. The opportunity for a small, but satisfying victory came the next morning.

The Eminence Grease, as you might guess, is one of those oleaginous creeps who smarms around semi-important visitors like a human oil slick. He clasps their hands in his as if it was love at first sight and uses their first name in every other sentence. He keeps a database of wives’ and children’s names and it would surprise me if he didn’t personally deliver a bunch of flowers on their birthday. He also makes a point of going out to the front office to welcome then, rather than sending out his secretary.

Today, the Bishop of Beastville was due for morning coffee, so I staged a secret raid on the storeroom used by our Azerbaijani cleaners, waited until the Eminence Grease went out to meet him and then sneaked quickly into the MD’s office.

It gives me some satisfaction to know that when the Bish sat down, he would have been greeted by a well-thumbed and strategically opened copy of Razzle on the coffee table.

This is merely part of the February column. For the full version, subscribe to Press Gazette. You can contact me, should you be minded, at thegreycardigan@gmail.com

Grey Cardigan: Welcome to the Planet Guardian

Posted by Grey Cardigan on 5 February 2010 at 00:25
Tags: Evening Beast

Younger readers won’t know what a sabbatical is. Derived from Greek or Hebrew, it is defined as “a rest from work, or a hiatus, often lasting from two months to a year”.

It used be be commonplace on some newspapers. My father, a hard-working hack, was granted a two-week sabbatical once he’d completed 20 years on his Fleet Street title. He used it to go into hospital and die of cancer on the operating table in his mid-fifties.

So excuse my bitterness when I read the following on the mediaguardian site tonight: “Guardian News & Media editorial staff today voted to oppose proposed changes to pay and conditions, including the axing of sabbaticals…

“NUJ members at the meeting were told that [the] company wants to end journalist sabbaticals – a four-week paid break for every four years of service.”

Let’s say it again: “A four-week paid break for every four years of service.” And that’s on top of a generous holiday entitlement.

I’m often criticised for having a prejudiced attitude to the pampered pissants who enjoy the profit-free protection of the Scott Trust. I think you can now see why.

So print is dead? Not in Derry Street

Posted by Grey Cardigan on 30 January 2010 at 14:39
Tags: Evening Beast

I’m taken aback by the report in The Guardian that the Daily Mail is to spend £10 million on an advertising campaign aimed at 35-year-old women. Ten million pounds? That’s more than the profits of some regional newspaper groups. Ten million pounds on a single promotion? I sometimes can’t find the money to get some bloody posters printed.

But then, it’s a different world in Derry Street and if any newspaper is going to buck the ‘print is dead’ trend, then it will be the Mail.

Only today we have a re-designed, re-vamped Weekend magazine in the newspaper. It was already the best TV guide amongst the nationals with six pages allocated to each day of the week. Now it’s cleaner, clearer, smarter, easier to use … a splendid job. Why people still buy Radio Times when quality like this is on offer is beyond me.

And the best thing about it? The fact that the ubiquitous Piers Morgan, who still owes me two grand, doesn’t feature anywhere.

So where are Auntie’s subs?

Posted by Grey Cardigan on 27 January 2010 at 19:20
Tags: Evening Beast

You might think that the lead item on the BBC evening news would be lovingly crafted, carefully checked, and be a tour de force of television reporting.

Not so. Tonight’s report on the Chilcot Inquiry had a whizzo graphic showing the calendar of Lord Goldsmith’s shifting opinion on the legality of the war in Iraq. Two small problems: November was spelt wrong, as was February.

I’m sorry, but this is just pathetic. Doesn’t anyone have any subs anymore?

Framley Examiner brings out new issue

Posted by Grey Cardigan on 15 January 2010 at 12:48
Tags: Evening Beast

It is with great delight that I bring you news that the Framley Examiner has uploaded some new pages.

And if you’re struggling with staff shortages, rampant literals and work experience kids pretending to be trained reporters, boy, will they make you wince.

A Craven decision?

Posted by Grey Cardigan on 31 December 2009 at 12:54
Tags: Evening Beast

ON my travels the other week, I picked up a copy of what was once my favourite weekly newspaper, the Craven Herald. This used to be a magnificent throwback; a big anachronistic broadsheet with only classified ads on its front page.

Coach trips, jumble sales, pub music nights, farm auctions – it was a tremendous insight into a community, and must have brought in a nice few bob as well. The rot first set in a couple of years ago when a small 6×4 panel appeared touting which news stories were inside. Who cared, when local life was so lovingly detailed via paid-for centimetres?

And now it’s all over. The Craven Herald has gone tabloid and has banished the small ads from its front page. It now looks like any other Newsquest weekly, its USP sacrificed to the god of group efficiency.

That’s not to say that it isn’t still a great newspaper. It’s packed with courts, council and planning stories, community news and readers’ letters; it’s full of local stories about local people with some excellent columnists as well. My beef is that it’s lost the very thing that made it distinctive and special, and sadly that may cost it in the difficult years ahead.

Grey Cardigan: January column

Posted by Grey Cardigan on 29 December 2009 at 01:29
Tags: Evening Beast

This is an extract from the Grey Cardigan’s January column. For the full version, find the subs offer elsewhere on this site.

WHAT is it with the Scotch? Give them an invitation to the Christmas do and at the drop of a Tam O’Shanter they’re in the full kilt ensemble, complete with a dinky little dagger down their sock.

To be fair, it’s not all of them. Mungo, our peripatetic Glaswegian sub who keeps a house brick in his desk drawer “just in case”, wouldn’t dream of doing the Full Jock. It’s more often the so-called Shortbread Scots of second or third generation, most of whom have never been further north than Sheffield, who embrace this tartan twattery with zeal.

Which brings us to Gavin, a 23-year-old Evening Beast trainee, whose father is a London lawyer and whose mother comes from a moneyed family of former cattle rustlers. Gavin seems to have got it into his head that he’s Scottish, except when England play rugby or football, when he mysteriously reverts to being the ex-Durham University stoodent that we all know he is.

(I didn’t take him on; he was appointed by my predecessor, Crystal Tits, who had a penchant for well-spoken middle class kids. I’d much rather throw our rare vacancies at the local former grammar school to see what talent we could pick up from there.)

So in a magnificent gesture of goodwill, we were each granted £6 by management towards our Christmas do. In previous years, editorial used to have its own piss-up, but depleted numbers mean that it’s more sensible for us all to pitch in together. So here we are, gathered at a soulless city centre hotel, where we’re served cardboard turkey, yesterday’s warmed-up sprouts, and gravy of a puzzling origin. And then the disco begins.

Did I mention that it was fancy dress? I had argued long and hard against the notion in the management meeting, but was outvoted by the excitable girl who was ad manager for the week and a circulation director who is notorious for dressing up as a woman at any given opportunity. At home, most evenings, by all accounts.

Our dear managing director, the Eminence Grease, was throwing shapes on the dance floor, surrounded by deluded yet adoring classified comfort women. He seemed to have come dressed as Gomez Adams, but it was hard to tell the difference from his everyday demeanour.

And then Gavin, the Shock Jock, performed his party piece, as they all inevitably do once they’ve got a skirt on. He whirled into the musical melee, lifted his kilt at an unimpressed secretary and projectile vomited across the crowd. And that’s when the fight started.

Surprisingly, it was Mungo who sorted it out in the end, mainly by decking dear Gavin before he could do any more damage. As he explained to me afterwards, it was a matter of national pride, and “that wee English eejit had it coming”.

The Eminence Grease was last sighted departing in a taxi with two tele-ad girls, both of whom were promoted on their return to work after the Christmas break, and I decanted a comatose Gavin into my own cab and sent him home. Which meant that I had to walk three miles across town to the office to sleep. Dressed as Fred fucking Flintstone. Yabba Dabba Doo.