THE PRESS
Cannon's shot
BILL GRUNDY
Since this week a well-known Cannon has at last gone off with a bang, this could be as good a time as any to see what effect it's had on the target.
Mr Geoffrey Cannon, you will remember, is the new editor of the Radio Times, or the RT as we are trendily required to call it these days for reasons which entirely escape me. Mr Cannon often writes on pop for the Guardian in language so spectacularly incomprehensible that the correspondence columns of the paper are sometimes full of calls for translations. Mr Cannon also wrote in New Society, but I regret to say I never read him. Mr Cannon revamped the pages of the Listener, with the result that when you read interview transcripts in that magazine these days, you have to keep going back to the beginning to work out who's speaking, because the lay-out doesn't seem to allow for mundane things like speaker identification. Nearly three years ago Mr. Cannon had a hand in re- designing the SPECTATOR.
Mr Cannon has also worked for the International Publishing Corporation, exam- ining existing magazines and drawing up plans for new ones, an activity which seemed to result in almost nothing. Mr Cannon worked for a time on Granada Tv's documentary series World in Action, with what effect I am unable to say. Mr Cannon in other words, has done a lot of things, and though he doesn't seem to have achieved very much, it has resulted in his becoming well-known, well-known enough to be made editor of a magazine which once had a circulation of about eight million and is now down to somewhere about half of that Mr Cannon had the luck to be made, first of all, editor-elect, which gave him plenty of opportunity to make sure the world knew what was going to happen to the Radio Times, I mean the RT, long before he assumed full control. Mr Cannon did.-not let the opportunity slip. Indeed, in those months of eager expectancy so much was said and sung about the shape of things, to .come, and most of it, I suspect, by the editor-elect himself, that I began to under- stand afresh what Shakespeare meant when. with remarkable foresight, he talked about `Seeking the bubble reputation/Even in the Cannon's Mouth'.
But all the time the date has been drawing nearer when Mr Cannon would have to back his words with deeds and show us the masterpiece falling new-born from the press. Well, now he's done it. Shown us, I mean. But whether it's a masterpiece or a mess, and whether it fell new-born or dead-born from the press, is a matter of opinion. My own first impression is that it is rather ugly and appears to be printed on sensitised lavatory paper.
It starts, uncompromisingly enough (actually it's uncompromisingly too much) with three pages summarising the entire programme output of the BBC, radio and television, for the week, and it does it in type so tiny that even with my close-work reading-glasses on I began to think I'd gone blind.
But then come the feature articles. These again are badly printed, in my copy at least, with so much ink around, that a lot of pictures are invisible and many of the words are muddied out of existence. But the quality of the articles is far superior to those of Pir's rival, the TV Times, which, with one or two honourable exceptions, seem to be written by cretins for morons.
After the feature articles come the detailed daily programme lay-outs, television on four pages, followed by radio on two. Comparing them with the old Radio Times, they are a vast improvement. After a little while, even the most stupid of us stand a chance of being able to find what's on before the damn thing finishes.
There's no cookery, motoring, gardening. or crossword. Cannon himself says this is because he wants the magazine to be all about radio and television. Anyone who has ever got lost in the jungle of recipes, horo- scopes, offers of flower bulbs, and pictures of Aimi Macdonald (I don't think she's lovely at all) which are part of TV Times, can only heave a sigh of relief at what Mr Cannon has produced. He told me some months ago, when I asked him what the new Radio Times was going to be like, that it would be 'nothing like the TV Times'. In so far as that's certainly true, Mr Cannon appears to be on target. There's a lot more to do yet. but I'm beginning to get a distinct feeling (to my surprise, I must admit), that Mr Cannon might be the man to do it.
Talking of Mr Cannon, connoisseurs of his prose style must on no account miss his Guardian account of the Bob Dylan concert on the Isle of Wight. In this, under the appropriately reverent heading 'The gospel according to Dylan', Cannon took off with some of the purplest writing even he has yet- placed before his public. I quote from
his conclusion—or, rather, grand finale: 'He was touching on a body of work—his own—so complex and so dense and so well known that his easy style seemed that of a consummate scholar. And I kept on thinking—what scholar? What text? The Talmud. And Dylan's style is now Hasidic . He bobbed and weaved and swayed, smiling, in possession of an incalculable amount of potent knowledge, which was believed . . . Now, he's wise; and he's also Bob Zimmerman. He has come to his people. And his people is us.'
It was a bit of a disappointment, after that. to read in the very next day's Times that, safely back in America, Dylan had said that he had no wish to perform in England again, that he regarded his concert for 'his people' here as a mere warm-up for a forthcoming American tour and (unkindest of all) that in Mr Dylan's view 'they make too much of singers over there'. You can say that again, Zimmerman.
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