IN THE National and English Review this month Charles Curran,
in an otherwise penetrating article on the English weekend, repeats the old story that the serious weeklies are 'on the road to oblivion' because of the increasing popularity of what Jimmy Porter called the 'posh Sundays'. In fact the reverse is true: the welcome rise in circulation of the Observer and the Sunday Times has been creating a new class of reader who would not pre- viously have thought of reading, let alone buying, a weekly—but who now, his interest in current political and cultural affairs stimulated by what he reads on Sundays, is beginning to look further afield. A man who has seen an exciting football match tends to read all the commentators' accounts on the next day; and in much the same way a reader who becomes interested in, say, the theatre, or politics, tends to want to know what other interested people think about them. If Mr. Curran takes a look at the weeklies' circulation figures for the first six months of 1959, I think he may find cause to change his mind.
Previous page
