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.

Yet more Christmas cheer

Posted by Grey Cardigan on 29 December 2009 at 01:23
Tags: Evening Beast

I’m wary of making this an exclusively Liz-fucking-Jones blog, but you have to admit that these days she’s serving up suitable material on a daily basis.

Her contribution to the Christmas spirit is in today’s Daily Mail, headed “I’ve never liked the homeless - they’re smelly and scary”. Nice one, love.

It’s a lazy ’out of touch hack visits homeless shelter’ piece, but within the usual bollocks there’s a serious warning for a 40-year-old, rotten-toothed tramp called David, who sleeps on a park bench in Queen’s Square in Bristol. As dear Liz says: “At the end of the night, I walk back to my car, to my warm, cosy life, and decide I’m going to go back to that square to find David, and I’m going to try to help him.”

So that’s the next 12 months of confessional column material sorted then. Stand by for ‘I invited a homeless man into my Exmoor home and this is how he repaid me’, coming soon to a newspaper near you.

The magic of Christmas

Posted by Grey Cardigan on 21 December 2009 at 17:40
Tags: Evening Beast

I’m invited to contribute to Jon Slattery’s end-of-year round-up, nominating my best media of 2009.

For Journalist of the Year, I have to plump for Liz-fucking-Jones. She’s painted herself into a corner in a dank, Exmoor hovel; has landed herself with a herd of rescue animals that she can’t possibly abandon; and, as someone smarter than me has said, now looks as if she’s just flown a hang-glider through a flock of crows.

And as if by magic, today’s Daily Mail carries a ‘lonely at Christmas’ piece from the mad woman herself, instantly confirming all of the above. Thanks, Liz.

The Grey Cardigan: December

Posted by Grey Cardigan on 13 December 2009 at 17:19
Tags: Evening Beast

This is an extract from The Grey Cardigan column in December’s Press Gazette. For the full version, see the super, soaraway subs offer.

THE BASTARDS. They’ve only gone and ‘found’ Tommy Cockles.

I’ve been hiding our last remaining staff photographer from the management ever since the ridiculous edict was passed down that we didn’t need to employ snappers any more and that we could make them all redundant and then re-employ them as freelances. It was a disgraceful way to treat loyal employees and the idea that they would continue to work for us with the same passion and professionalism, just because we could starve them into submission, turned my stomach.

So I ‘hid’ Tommy Cockles in the dark recesses of various budgets. He’s been part of the now non-existent training budget, he’s been some very expensive printer cartridges, he’s even been sneaked onto the advertising budget for a few months when no-one was looking. And, when we had a press, I triumphantly managed to masquerade him as ‘rags for the press”.

And in all that time, Tommy has done the business, reliably turning out his eight jobs a day before going home to his mail order Thai bride who poses naked at night for old men with raincoats, squints, and no film in their box Brownies.

Tommy cost me £28k a year, including National Insurance, pension and expenses – which include his notorious ‘reverse mileage’ (“You know when you’re looking for an address and you drive past it and then have to reverse? Well it all uses petrol, doesn’t it?”)

Divide that by 47 weeks, five days, and eight jobs and you come up with the magnificent fee of £14.89 per job. Using a freelance – even one of the poor starving bastards we’ve sacked – costs me between £50 and £75. So where’s the fucking sense in that?

I take my perfectly sensible argument to our oleaginous MD, the Eminence Grease, in an attempt to secure a reprieve. It’s an impossible mission. Head count is what matters, apparently, not common sense. Welcome to the asylum.

So Tommy has to go, just before Christmas, after a 30-year career in which he’s never turned down a weekend shift, never bottled it at a dodgy door-knock, and never failed to come back with the goods, in focus and on time. Having delivered the bad news, I don’t mind admitting that I feel like fucking topping myself.

An urgent job for the new boss?

Posted by Grey Cardigan on 1 December 2009 at 19:39
Tags: Evening Beast

A reader writes: “Sorry to keep banging on, but I have reached Page 16 of the Daily Telegraph and a headline that reads ‘School paedophile checks for festive volunteers.’

“Well, he would, wouldn’t he?”

Good point, well made. Then there was Page 12 of yesterday’s paper, littered with quotation marks and the with unnecessarily stupid downpage heading of ‘Flies more likely to wake men than babies’.

What thought process went into that masterpiece when the alternative ‘Flies more likely than babies to wake men’ would have been more accurate and a better shape as well? May the revise sub hang his head in shame.

And don’t even get me started on the error-riddled weekend sections. Let’s see how the former Daily Mail hard case Tony Gallagher sorts this mess out. If he needs a sub or two, my many angry correspondents will be happy to help.

The Mad Woman of Exmoor strikes again

Posted by Grey Cardigan on 29 November 2009 at 14:31
Tags: Evening Beast

Poor Liz-fucking-Jones. In today’s Mail on Sunday the Mad Woman of Exmoor bleats about the pressures of fame. The hatchet-faced hypocrite whines that writers ”make rude, personal comments that have nothing to do with your work”, citing a Daily Telegraph report that she went home from her job as a magazine editor to shield her cats’ eyes from a total eclipse of the sun.

In fact, as Liz explains: “I had given them their food at this crucial time so that they would be staring at their bowls rather than directly at the sun.”

So surely that would be shielding their eyes from the sun, then Liz?

Barking, completely barking…

Time to eat humble pie

Posted by Grey Cardigan on 29 November 2009 at 14:16
Tags: Evening Beast

I’ve never rated the Daily Telegraph’s Jasper Gerard as a restaurant critic. While better than the flanelled fool who preceded him, he’s not just convincing; his overwhelming self-absorption cancels out any impression that he’s passing on useful information to the common man.

In yesterday’s Weekend section, he proved the point once and for all. In the supposed interest of his readers, he escorted the Michelin-starred Heston Blumenthal to Michelin-starred Marcus Wareing’s restaurant at the Berkeley Hotel. Once there, Heston dispensed with the menu, telling the waiter: “Please just bring whatever Marcus wants to cook us”.

Hot carrot soup in shot glasses; pan-fried foie gras with peach, honey, amaretti, black olive and peach jelly; scallops and cod confit with cauliflower, smoked corals, macadamia nuts and shallot dressing … all sorts of culinary wonders followed. The bill was £318.37 for the two of them. For lunch.

It’s hard to think of a more pointless exercise. One world-famous chef cooking personally for another world famous chef at extraordinary cost … it’s no wonder the food was described by the dribbling Gerard as “a feast I can gain great pleasure just dreaming about”.

But how on earth does that inform the average reader? As a restaurant review, it’s more akin to an unseemly display of gastronomic willy-waving. And a complete and utter waste of space and money.

So when did we abandon reporting restrictions?

Posted by Grey Cardigan on 17 November 2009 at 19:32
Tags: Evening Beast

I know that the red-tops play fancy-free with Contempt of Court, but The Sun’s coverage today of the Delroy Grant case doesn’t so much as drive a coach and horses through the 1981 Act but makes a complete fucking mockery of it.

Am I just out of touch? Do the reporting restrictions that were hammered into us by news editors past matter any more? Your views would be appreciated.

Skullduggerry in the shires

Posted by Grey Cardigan on 14 November 2009 at 00:33
Tags: Evening Beast

I DON’T think any of us have ever been happy about the way our craft is portrayed on television. Soap scriptwriters in particular seem to be astonishingly naïve or just plain lazy.

The Weatherfield Gazette regularly sends doorstep merchants out onto the cobbles of Manchester whose blatant thuggery would have them up before the PCC and sacked by the News of the World before you could say Ken Barlow. And now that plague of casual stereotyping has spread to the rural idyll of Ambridge, home of The Archers.

We’ve had words with Borchester Life and its thrusting young editor Glen Whitehouse before. (Who can forget the David Brent-like re-branding of this venerable magazine as B Life?) But recent events would have Archant bosses, acknowledged masters of the genre, choking on their slow-roasted shank of lamb with raspberry jus.

Here’s the back story: Lee Mason, Felpersham City’s star player, holds his 21^st birthday party at Grey Gables, to the delight of Caroline who invites a photographer from Borchester Life to record the grand occasion. But during the course of the piss-up, Lee punches Ian the gay chef in a quite shocking homophobic attack. (I blame Jan Moir.)

Concerned about negative publicity, Caroline phones thrusting young editor Glen Whitehouse and asks him not to run the pictures. Glen suggests that he might be persuaded to do this, but only if she takes out a double-page ad in the next issue. Reluctantly, Caroline agrees. At the same time, Glen is promising Linda Snell that he’ll ditch the pictures if she’ll come up with a ‘gossip from the powder room’ column, dishing the dirt on celebrity guests.

Blackmail? Extortion? Or just a bit of entrepreneurial nous during these difficult days? You decide, but you have to say that our Glen is a bit of a lad.

OF COURSE, such shenanigans would never happen in real life, would they?

Next stop Newsquest, where poor editors are being swamped by a tidal wave of fuckwittery beyond even the most imaginative TV screenwriter.

As well as another tiresome round of bench-marking, these poor souls continue to suffer the lunatic attentions of a certain Philip Chisholm, who seems to have been given the run of the place in an attempt to drum up a few bob from photo sales.

Not content with urging ever more Bonny Baby competitions on the editorial unfortunates, Mr Chisholm has now hit upon another spiffing wheeze to “harvest revenue by using existing human resources”.

“Why not,” he asks, “Get Paid to Write the News?”

Brace yourselves, because this isn’t going to be pleasant (and the punctuation, grammar and spelling are all Mr Chisholm’s).

“The concept is straightforward; send out email flyers to all local business telling them that you are a media centre capable of writing their PR stories and photographing any required pictures. The success is born out of the revenues £150 per job up to three hours, thereafter £45 per hour plus travel and subsistence. Naturally you then use these stories within your own Newspapers. You are also now in a position to sell these stories on to other publications. The synergy fits hand in glove with your media business in creating revenue from excising resources.”

Hmm, “excising resources”? But wait, there’s more.

“This also allows you to create local heroes from your regions businesses; such opportunities then open the way to new ad revenues or sponsorship deals, with products like the ‘Editors Portrait of the week’. Such weekly profiles could be of any local business and be sponsored by such as an insurance company etc. Therefore, words and pictures sell regional newspapers coupled to the photojournalist’s craftsmanship in being able to provide these skills on demand … After all why send a photographer/journalist to the opening of a new office, business presentation or conference when you can get paid to attend?”

Yes, why indeed? Why bother at all with such things as editorial integrity? Let’s face it – there are so few fucking readers out there that surely they won’t notice if we suddenly abandon objective journalism and turn our few remaining staff into PR tarts?

Mr Chisholm, I salute you. Even in these tempestuous times, I never expected to come across a money-spinning idea quite so crass and quite so completely at odds with the basic values of journalism. You clearly have a very special talent. And, I bet, a very shiny fucking suit.

This is an extract from the full Grey Cardigan column, published in the November print version of Press Gazette. You can buy a subscription by clicking on the link on the home page. Please do.

Debt, Liz? You haven’t a clue.

Posted by Grey Cardigan on 8 November 2009 at 15:57
Tags: Evening Beast

I have a theory that it was the rise of Tanya Gold that finally pushed Liz-fucking-Jones over the edge. Let’s face it, the Queen of the Cringing Confessional wouldn’t have relished seeing the Guardian’s big-footed fatty attracting more outraged readers to her comments field than the original Deranged of Derry Street.

Hence the increasingly lunatic, shotgun-dodging witterings, culminating in yesterday’s Daily Mail spread in which the poor woman complained about being £150,000 in debt due to ridiculous extravagance caused by insecurity and poor self-image.

Good God, the vacuous cow even admits to turning down a ‘two-for-one’ on her £8.95 tube of toothpaste (yes, £8.95) because she couldn’t be bothered to walk back down the aisle to collect the freebie.

But let’s have a bit of context here. As far as I can ascertain, Ms Jones is paid a salary not unadjacent to £450,000 a year. (And given her prodigious output, I wouldn’t argue that she didn’t deserve it.)

However, is there any hack out there who isn’t in debt to the tune of a third of their annual salary? I very much doubt it. And that’s without investing in a holistic sheep shearer or some organic pasta from Carluccios’s with which to feed the ‘rescue’ chickens.