The press
Always bores on Sunday
Paul Johnson
Which is the bigger threat to Fleet Street: its propensity to bleed itself to death by suicidal strikes, or its increasingly marked lack of new ideas? The ideas shortage is itself the result of the trade union straitjacket, too much job security, not enough movement between papers, and the frustrating inability of editors either to punish lack of talent by the sack, or to reward it by whopping individual rises. Salary differentials are now much too nar- row. There is a deadening absence of incen- tive. The Street of Adventure is fast becom- ing the Street of Mediocrity.
The sales figures for the second half of 1982, for instance, strike me as indicative of the current poverty of invention. The new Mail on Sunday is judged to have done very well since its relaunch, raising itself from a Monthly average of 738,887 in July to an average of 1,443,408 in November, the first full month after it introduced a colour-mag and comics. Its December figure was a handsome 1,400,000 and its six-month average therefore worked out at more than a million. But few, if any, of these were new readers. They simply came from other Papers. All the other seven Sundays lost sales to the Mail on Sunday, the losses for the Sunday Mirror, People, Sunday Ex- press and Sunday Telegraph being par- ticularly severe. Total sales for the Sundays were about 17,813,000 in the second half of 1981, before the Mail on Sunday existed, against 17,780,000 for the second half of last year. Lord Rothermere appears to have lavished about £20 million so far on the project, and other papers have also spent heavily in fending off the new com- petition. In short, the industry as a whole has invested something not far short of £30
million during the past year in the Sunday market and the net result is an overall loss of more than 30,000 copies.
But can you blame the readers? What the Sundays were offering this week was enough to drive one to Dimanehe-Matin. The Sunday Mirror had some routine in- timate chat about an over-publicised actress (`It's been a bitch of a week for Joan Col- lins'). The Sunday Express was churning out the dog-eared prose of James Herriot ('My heart thudded as I came across the cause of the calf s trouble'). The Sunday People was on about last year's story of the grief-stricken Rainiers and how the Prince has 'bravely thrown himself into his work'. Sad, to be sure, but we don't actually want to know that 'his routine normally begins at 9am or 9.30am and winds up at anything from 6pm to 8pm'. Even more in a groove, the News of the World was analysing the af- fairs of Diana and Charles ('It is rapidly becoming the world's most difficult mar- riage'). It claimed Diana was so unhappy she had become 'a shop-aholic' and 'spends a mind-boggling £1,000-a-week or so' in 'her favourite shops'. But to boggle my mind I'd need to be given an itemised list of how much she had spent, on what, in which shops — and that the paper does not supp- ly, presumably because it would take a lot of hard leg-work. As for the Mail on Sun- day, it was not in a position to bore us since the unions had put the thumbscrews on.
Among the heavies, the Sunday Telegraph had some interesting stuff about corruption in Soviet Russia by the former KGB major, Vladimir Kuzichkin, but it lacked impact because it was fuzzy about details, figures, dates: everything was
the middle of 1981', 'one winter's day', 'in
the mid-1970s', 'a few years ago', 'in recent years'. Lady Falkender's reminiscences in the Observer had a date all right because it was all about 16 March 1976, the day Harold Wilson resigned. But that was all. Readers who ploughed through her flat procession of clichés ('Back in Number Ten, the atmosphere was strange, almost unreal ... What remarks we did make were confined to the "What an extraordinary day!" variety') ended up none the wiser about why the little man quit. We are threatened with two more action-packed episodes.
The Sunday Times came up the best of a poor lot with its extracts from the diaries of Parviz Radji, the handsome young man- about-town who was the Shah's last am- bassador in London. Like other journalists, I enjoyed Parviz's attempts to brighten what was, even before terrorists gutted it, the gloomiest embassy in London, with caviare, fizz and smarties. His diaries are surprisingly sharp. Lady Falkender emerges from his jottings in livelier shape than from her own, denouncing Callaghan as 'a bent copper' (`whatever that means', wondered Parviz), Princess Margaret dismisses Mrs Gandhi — `Dick-tay-ta' — and Mrs That- cher puts the conversational stopper on Denis: 'But darling, the Ambassador already knows that.'
At a deeper level, however, Parviz gives a sharp and, I believe, completely accurate picture of the debilitating deference and destructive fear with which even the highest Iranian functionaries dealt with the Shah, and which was one of the gravest weaknesses of the regime. It was risky to tell him any of the truth, let alone the whole truth and nothing but the truth. The diaries also illustrate both the power and im- potence of the Western press. The Shah's regime, which was pretty civilised by Mid- dle Eastern standards, was the target of vicious and quite unbalanced Western media abuse. From what Parviz writes, one grasps the extent to which this campaign not only mesmerised Iranian diplomats but undermined the self-confience and judg- ment of the Shah himself — it is amazing to find that he worried about Private Eye and so helped to destroy the regime. But to those who knew Persia it was perfectly ob- vious that any regime which succeeded the Shah's would be infinitely worse. A few of us tried to get across this point at the time, but our voices were scarcely heard above the thunderous inanities of the overwhelm- ingly left-liberal media establishment.
Now, of course, it is too late. Western journalists, who had the capacity to damage the Shah precisely because he was a civilised man open to their criticisms, have absolute- ly no influence on his barbarous successors whom they helped to put into power. In the same issue, the Sunday Times, one of the Shah's chief critics, reports impotently that in Iran women who commit adultery are now stoned to death. Of course they are: and it was the Western media which, in their folly, cast the first stone.
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