The press
Sunday mag wasteland
Paul Johnson
Is there anything more depressing than looking through a bunch of six Sunday newspaper colour magazines? Yes, there is: looking through two weeks supply at once. The sad thing is that the people who pro- duce these publications are obviously sweating hard to make our drab and chilly January lives a little brighter. Their favourite word is 'dream'. 'Dream Holidays', enthused the Telegraph Sunday Magazine last week, 'places you have long- ed to visit, journeys you have longed to take.' Have you been longing to savour the pampered pleasures of the idle rich?' it ask- ed, 'do you fancy living in a £1 million villa on some exclusive acres in the sun?' The colour mags raise these questions every year about this time, and answer them in tradi- tional fashion, by sending well-heeled jour- nalists who have been everywhere and are bored by everything to supply some copy to go between the travel-agency ads.
Last week's Observer mag had exactly the same idea: 'Dream Hotels: Eric Newby, Gavin Young, Maureen Cleave and others fulfil their fantasies' while 'Sally Brampton Picks Dreamy Clothes for Cairo'. 'This Way for Suit Dreams', it punned inside; `for this bumper travel issue we invited a team of writers to stay at the kind of hotels which, normally, they would only gaze at from afar.' So far as the Cipriani Hotel in Venice was concerned, Observer readers had to gaze at it from afar too, since it fail- ed to provide a photo of the hotel. There was one of St Mark's Square and another of a canal, with a lame caption: 'From the luxury of the Cipriani ... it is only a short way to the typical Venetian backwater.' True, in a two-inch-by-four general shot of Venice the hotel could be minutely seen, but this was printed the wrong way round.
The other mags were not much better. 'January is the time to fantasise about sum- mer holidays,' announced the Sunday Ex- press Magazine, and sent its writers on cruise ships. Both the Sunday Times Magazine and Sunday, which goes with the News of the World, carried identical 40-page 'Holiday Plus' supplements, which each separately claimed to have published 'in association with Pickford's Travel'. This was the same old thing too: 'Holiday Plus invited some well-known personalities — ranging from writer Leslie Thomas to strongman Geoff Capes, from actress Liza Goddard to photographer Patrick Lichfield — to reveal their personal escape routes from the resort areas they know best.' You, the Mail on Sunday mag, had 80 pages of travel ads-and-editorial: 'Island escapes... in the world's most beautiful holiday playgrounds the beaches really are white and fringed by palm trees, the seas tur- quoise and the sunsets always as ravishing as this.'
The Observer was at it again this week: 'Dream Drives ... This week our writers test their fantasies on the roads of Europe, East and West ...' I had a careful look at this issue of the Observer mag, and what did I find? Katharine Whitehorn fantasising with a £66,000 Lagonda, a travel article on Bavaria, another one on Portugal, a third on Tuscany, one on East Germany, one on new household lines, two on cookery, one on interior decoration, one on camping and another on new swimsuits. With the excep- tion of a double spread on Chris Bon- ington, another in the paper's excellent 'A Room of My Own' series, all the articles in this issue were advertisement-related. Now what do I mean by this? I don't mean that advertisers paid the Observer to put these articles in, or were shown them in advance, or had anything to do with their composi- tion. What I mean is that the subject matter of these articles had been selected with advertising in mind, and that the basic editorial objective of giving readers what they want or what they ought to want had been usurped by the aim of providing what advertisers want.
The Observer seems to be the worst of- fender in this respect — for the last two weeks it has carried virtually nothing except this type of article. The Sunday Times, by comparison, is much better. As a photo- magazine, of course, it is not a patch on what it used to be, and a lot of the articles it carries today are distinctly lacklustre. I don't, for instance, want to read Melvyn Bragg giving a plug to Fay Weldon, his fellow-toiler in the Public Sector Culture vineyard. Nor do I relish a ridiculously eulogistic profile of Fidel Castro, which leaves out all the really nasty — and in- teresting — aspects of his life. But 1 did en- joy an eight-page article in this week's issue on Aphrodisias in Western Turkey, a relatively unknown Roman site which is now being systematically uncovered. The photographs were magnificent and here, it seems to me, is the right way for a colour magazine to approach the problem of travel articles. Indeed, in the long run this type of quality feature is more likely to attract advertising than the stereotyped material I have been describing.
Some colour magazines are obviously worse than others. The Sunday Express Magazine, after a good start, has become disappointing. I found nothing worth
reading in its last two issues; and I noticed that this week three out of five of its main articles were TV-inspired, the easy way out for colour mags and absolutely fatal to good copy. The prime offender is Sunday, which is really nothing more than a TV magazine. This week, for instance, it had features on Benny Hill, on American foot- ball timed for this weekend's TV showing, and on two blond fuzzywuzzies involved in a TV rock-show. There was not much else apart from travel stuff and dieting, another colour mag standby not unconnected with the Box.
The best, or at any rate the most original, of these mags is You, which may help to explain why the Mail on Sunday, not in any other respect a scene-stealer, is still doing well. You has as much rubbish as any of the others but at least it has one first-class feature which only a photo-magazine can provide. This is 'Headliners', which con- sists of unfortunate snaps of the kind of `celebrities' who spend their evenings at film premieres or nightclubs. These people are famous for being famous and deserve everything they get. The captions are very funny and whoever writes them (no one is credited) has the kind of talent which the desolate landscape of the colour mags so badly needs. I have just looked through about 700 pages of these publications, representing over the past fortnight a total number of 8,000 million pages delivered to the customers, and it makes you want to weep for the fallen trees.
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