17  The regular columnist

The only times I’ve regretted a column is when I haven’t written it – because I thought I’d regret it. It’s a highly self-critical, self-analysing process where you spend 90 per cent of the time deciding what to write, justifying writing it, and then the remaining 10 per cent doing it. And for that reason, perhaps, because I know what I’m doing, no, I’ve never been sued. If ever I were, it would be on purpose. (Keith Waterhouse, in a letter to the author)

The one problem I never have is choosing something to write about. I don’t think a general column can be done for long unless you are interested in a wide range of matters. (Bernard Levin, in a letter to the author)

The good reporter and the good feature writer do not encourage us to enquire into things. Even the editorial writer does not often ask us to look on both sides. But the columnist is ever flipping things upside down and wrong side out and inviting us to look and laugh – and think even. (Hallam Walker Davis, The Column)

A columnist has a licence to be rude, funny, satirical, prejudiced, provocative or philosophical: in one word, different, depending on the publication’s formula and the editor’s interpretation of it.

Editors like columns. They provide the security that all regular features provide: at least those spaces will be filled. Regular columns can bring depth and perspective to the consideration of events. They can provoke thought, move to action, inspire, uplift, amuse, to a greater degree than other kinds of feature. Content ranges from ‘lifestyle’ pieces, through humorists, specialists and pundits with a great variety of styles and formats.

What editors value above all in the regular column is an individual voice. They like a columnist who keeps their correspondence page lively. Many columnists now give an email address and benefit from readers’ feedback that provides ideas to follow up.

Let’s have a look at a few different kinds of columns and think about ways of working and ways of finding a slot.

LEARNING FROM THE BEST

The presses are currently groaning under the weight of columnists famed in non-journalistic fields. When those fields provide expert knowledge the specialist columns that result can be admirable. Those of former stars in athletics and various sports come to mind, and if they get a little more help than usual from subs the results are ample justification.

When the fame has been derived from exposure in an entertainment industry the resulting column is often tittle-tattle. Amusing for a while, but such columns lack staying power. So what? Who cares?

A general column has to come from within. It stands or falls by how strongly attracted readers are to your voice, your angle on life, what you have to say that is individual. You need an interest in a wide variety of subjects and the desire and the energy to share that interest. The best columns have an urgent inevitability about them. That doesn’t often come easily: more often it comes after much reading, thinking, and several painful drafts.

Notice that a sentence or two out of the best columns are enough to identify the author. Study the best columnists to develop your techniques until your medium and your message are inseparable: your aim is to be inimitable. It’s not enough to find something to say and then to impose on it clever tricks.

You will find your own ways of learning from the best, but here is a workshop method you may want to try. Cut out columns that impress and paste up sections, or paragraphs, on separate sheets. Write notes on the techniques you identify: for example, what sort of intro, what structure in the body, what sort of ending, use of quotes, anecdotes, etc. Follow-up assignments are given at the end of the chapter.

Have a look at the anthologies, notably The Penguin Book of Columnists (1997), edited by Christopher Silvester, which includes American and Australian columnists as well as British; and Karl E. Meyer’s collection, Pundits, Poets and Wits: An Omnibus of American Newspaper Columns (1990). The former is also overwhelmingly newspaper columns, though the New Statesman and The Spectator are represented. They both cover the ground from the birth of the newspaper column in the middle of the nineteenth century.

As with personal collections of interviews and reviews, columnists’ collections can have the whiff of ephemerality about them, especially when depending on immediate reactions to topical events. The exceptions are those that have resonating qualities of depth and/or humour. Among collections that I think have transferred most successfully to book form are some of The Guardian Bedside Books, Alice Thomas-Ellis’s collection of Spectator pieces, More Home Life (Duckworth), Cassandra at his Finest and Funniest (Daily Mirror/Hamlyn) and Simon Jenkins’s Against the Grain: Writings of a Sceptical Optimist (mostly from The Times), and more recently Francis Wheen’s Hoo-Hahs and Passing Frenzies (Atlantic Books, 2002).

Jenkins more than most has given the pieces in his selection special attention (including greater length) to make them more suitable for the demands of a book.

GETTING A SLOT

Even if you have a good idea for a column that you think a publication would like you’ll need to produce at least half a dozen examples with indications of how you would continue for many weeks/months after that. Maintaining continuity is particularly important for the more personal kind of column. You may have six brilliant weekly columns in you, but have you any more? As for producing three columns a week for The Times it will help if, like Bernard Levin, you have an office next to the editor’s or if, like Simon Jenkins, you’re an ex-editor.

If you are staff, writer or subeditor, you’ll be living and breathing the world of your publication. Replacing your duties or adding to them by writing a column (assuming there’s room for one or if a current incumbent is poorly) may well be part of your career strategy. If you’re a freelance, before coming up with ideas you must market-study more keenly than you normally do.

Finding the gap

List what you think is missing in the formulas. Would a general column fit in? Can you see scope for a semi-specialist subject that you know something about and would enjoy exploring further? Country matters? Video games?

Approach by giving your background in a brief c.v. that includes any experience that qualifies you to write on the topics or along the lines proposed. Provide several samples plus outlines of several more. You’re not likely to get a regular column immediately but you might be taken on as an occasional feature writer and from there you may be able to cross the bridge.

Local paper columns

Typically, local papers find something local to reflect on, in parish-pump mode:

Lovely cherry blossom trees have been planted round the old folks’ home in memory of a patient … Did you know that Lord Nelson used to watch play at our Cricket Green? And yes, Lady Hamilton used to accompany him.

If you’re a visitor you might have a so-what reaction but such columns can reflect local inhabitants’ deep feelings about where they live: can make it a microcosm.

A sample of wider reach:

Men have role models such as Victor Meldrew. Women, unfortunately, have only mad, pigeon-feeding ladies and mad lady owners of many cats. (Daily Echo, Bournemouth)

I bet that got the letters pages humming. Culture sometimes comes into it, over a pseudonym: Gargoyle (‘The Sage on the Page’) in Kentish Times gets away with a reference to the Frogs in a column under ‘Better latte than never…’:

… Starbucks has opened for business in Paris – the world capital of café culture …

Parisians with a sense of history are (’ow you say?) exceedingly miffed that Starbucks – a relative newcomer to the coffee game – has dared to compete with the likes of cafés where the likes of Ernest Hemingway, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre used to slurp caffeine and think great thoughts and say highly quotable things …

How about a tea culture, with the eccentrics and thinkers that tea attracts?

People like Dave Splarg. Philosophy: Cor, look at the state of that? Catchphrase: Any chance of a cuppa?

ALL KINDS OF DISCOVERIES

The number of columnists are many but the stars are few. If you’re ambitious you’ll derive warning, instruction and encouragement from the words of the esteemed American columnist Max Lerner, quoted by Silvester. Columnists can expect to be criticized for the prejudices in themselves that they expose and attacked for their stance of omniscience:

A general columnist, by his nature, must roam widely and set down his assertions, not just his doubts and torments. Remember that he is not sitting in judgement as an expert who has mastered what there is to know about the subject. He is only a traveller who has made unsuspected discoveries for himself in the realms of gold, and he wants to share them.

Some columnists have to know exactly what their discoveries are before they start writing. Others prefer to start sooner, with a germ of an idea, and discover as they go, freewheeling on their words that come. And there are all the degrees in between the two methods. What are regular, general columns about? In content, structure and style general columns experiment more than other features. We’ll divide the main contents/styles into four, though any one column might exploit several kinds of content and techniques:

•  the world at large

•  lifestyle

•  argument and provocation

•  humour, parody and fantasy.

The world at large

Under this heading we have both the columnists who are closely allied to the publication’s politics and policies, and those given more or less free rein to choose their content and express their own opinion, even when that conflicts with the stance of the publication. Columnists receive these privileges when they’ve established a name. Even then they are advised to have a clear understanding with their editors. Some editors draw a fine line above the amount of controversy they want. Editors and columnists come and go, but the top columnists can be fixtures for many years.

Facts are not lying around in tidy piles ready to be collected, on the Internet or anywhere else. In other words gathering them into meaningful patterns is not as easy as it looks. You need a viewpoint to guide your search, and the integrity to respect and divulge the truth as revealed to you.

Columnists with staying power not only discover such facts but know how to take off from them. Check them as well. In his introduction to Hoo-Hahs and Passing Frenzies, a collection of columns and essays mainly from The Guardian, Francis Wheen says ‘journalism involves telling people things they couldn’t have found out for themselves’.

A few samples of Wheenery:

The prolific Paul Johnson … adds that the Queen Mum ‘benefits from a deep-rooted veneration the British have – it is more manly than deference, akin rather to admiration – for the aristocracy’. Speak for yourself, matey. (The Guardian, 19 July 2000)

When Evelyn Waugh grumpily described children as ‘defective adults’, he was articulating a common national prejudice. We are a nation of child-haters; and, as the size of the prison population demonstrates, we are a nation of punishment freaks. Put the two together and you have a society where physical violence against tiny tots is not only acceptable but also a bounden duty. Hence the undisguised glee of Tory backbenchers when Gillian Shepherd indulged her flogging fantasies on the Today programme this week. (The Guardian, 31 October, 1996)

Other subjects covered by Wheen in the book are the decline of the sitcom, Hollywood’s mauling of film scripts, various kinds of prudery and prurience (usually together), the debunking of sacred cows, whimsical if not weird entries in Who’s Who.

Op Ed pages of newspapers give space to world-at-large columnists. An attack on Tony Blair by Fathers4Justice, using condom bombs filled with purple flour, was followed by a sympathetic treatment of their case in The Observer of 23 May 2004 by David Aaronovitch. As well as pointing out why the law finds custody cases difficult (the unfair treatment of women historically has to be set alongside the changing co-carer view of fatherhood), Aaronovitch can bring humanity into it by getting personal:

So I put myself in the position of another Mr V who is, say, two years into this process: granted access to his children by the courts, thwarted continually by the actions of Mrs V, and almost certainly continually advised that it would be better to give up the fight. Would I not describe myself (and my children) as being victim of a huge injustice? What would I do about it? Slope off sadly and try and forget that I’d ever been a dad? Most do.

Politically speaking

The highly esteemed Hugo Young, political columnist for many years for The Guardian and The Observer, who died on 22 September 2003, published a collection of his political writings under the title Supping with the Devils. His first essay, spelling out the high standards he set himself, is an inspirational message for all journalists. It was reprinted in The Guardian of 24 September, and in the British Journalism Review (Vol. 14, Number 4, 2003) an extract is printed in a tribute by Geoffrey Goodman. Part of that extract reads:

I’ve been less interested in influencing events and the ministers who make them than in enlightening readers who may want to understand what is going on. It is important however for journalists to know their limits. In the end we are not players. We criticize decisions but never make them. If we purport to telling it like it is we can’t avoid talking to politicians. They own the truths we like to think we are reporting. The line they’re spinning is at least half the story and the columnist has the advantage of being able expose the spin and deride it. But he has to talk around to be able to do that. He must sup with the devil constantly … Though writing, I contend, as an outsider he must discover as an insider. But, for me, there’s a limit to the intimacy. I can think of no more than three politicians I’ve regarded as friends. Such fastidiousness is not an advantage for a columnist. It cuts off some of the inside dope. But I think it keeps the water purer.

In Geoffrey Goodman’s words ‘he was fearless as a scourge of cant and hypocrisy’. That makes him a model for all columnists, who can be loath to risk losing favour or friends. When we don’t know who the journalists’ friends are, we’re not quite sure how generous they’re being with the truth, as Matthew Parris reminded us (page 276). Especially when they’re political columnists who may have friends in high places.

Simon Jenkins, columnist for The Times Op Ed pages and for the London Evening Standard, has been a fountainhead of common sense for many years and is a model for both cool reasoning and elegantly incisive style. In The Times of 19 May 2004 he conjures up the image of bin Laden chalking a list of scalps on the wall of a cave on the Afghan–Pakistan border: the victims of 9/11, Saddam Hussein, the Government of Spain and several others.

The wall also celebrates the demise of the Middle East ‘road map’ and the restoration of the Afghan warlords and the opium trade, easing the return of the Taleban. It celebrates the disarray of European diplomacy and a diplomatic war between France and America. It celebrates the American team not daring to wave its flag at the forthcoming Olympics. All this was beyond fantasy two years ago. Bin Laden can now confidently anticipate anti-Western fanatics taking power in Iraq and the corrupt House of Saud losing its valued American sponsors.

Not only has the Government of Spain fallen, those of Japan, Italy and Poland have been rocked. But even bin Laden could not have hoped to turn the bonny smile on Tony Blair’s face into an ashen mask and have his Cabinet scheming to get rid of him. He could not have imagined Donald Rumsfeld swinging in the congressional wind on charges of torture, and George Bush facing plummeting opinion polls. And all because the World Trade Centre was made of tin.

Jenkins’s discoveries are of the facts, of how to select them, make pictures with them, give them meaning and draw lessons from them.

Personally speaking

You may, in contrast, prefer to have a general column whose discoveries are largely personal: of yourself and your relationship to the world. You can put yourself in the middle of it all. But are you interesting enough, and are you passionate or funny enough about what you’ve got to say?

Too many ‘I’s’ are irritating, especially when the culprits have run out of anything worth saying about current events and mores. Whimsical chatter about domestic upheavals can be groan-making. The gossip columns of the popular papers are parodied by Private Eye (see below).

If you insist on being whimsical you may find a market in your local paper or an undemanding magazine. But surely a magazine aimed at the retired is also aimed at retirement if it gives room to such pieces as the one that began:

I am no Adrian Mole, but he, with another 50 years behind him might well turn out to be just like me. Now 64½ I still search my face for pimples past and principles present (or is it the other way round?). And, having taken early retirement and being on a small pension, I also have difficulties with my pocket money.

You can get away with a lot of ‘I’s’ if you’re angry and forceful enough. Cassandra (Sir William Connor) was the star columnist of the Daily Mirror for many years. He wasn’t really talking about himself: he was voicing the frustrations of ordinary people with bureaucratic inefficiency, the waste of taxpayers’ money, and the other ills that we’re all heir to:

An extraordinarily large part of my life is spent holding a black plastic object that stretches from my mouth to my ear.

I talk, shout and whisper down it for hundreds of hours a year.

Much of the time when I do this I am in a small red room that is usually filthy, always uncomfortable and frequently ill-lit.

This constricted house of pain is called a telephone kiosk.

The Spectator has some highly readable columnists. You don’t always believe (or even sympathize with) what they’re saying but they can write with inimitable style, the essential quality for longevity. Let’s have a look at the issue of 29 May 2004. Paul Johnson, historian as well as journalist, although proud of his connections as already mentioned, often seems in his columns (‘And Another Thing’) to be in a world, even a planet, of his own. In this issue he gives a potted history, spiced by personal history, of red hair (at 70-odd he happily tells us that though grey on top, he’s still red ‘downstairs’). Arriving at his public school he was insulted by a group of boys:

Their spokesman said, ‘Johnson, you are a new squit and a nasty-looking ginger fellow, and we don’t like your manners. Can you give me one good reason why you should not be beaten up?’ I said, ‘Yes, I can. But I will have to whisper it.’ Suspicious but also intrigued, he leant over. So I dealt him what I had been taught to call an uppercut …

I wonder about that. I never believed in those uppercuts in Hollywood films. Now at least they rub the fist that was used, with a grimace of pain. Johnson has met everybody worthy of note, it seems, and is often able to put them on the right track. In the same piece he says that once:

after listening to that tortured writer James Baldwin the b lack American author who wrote memorably about racial prejudice]complaining at length about his sufferings and slights, I told him, ‘Listen, if you’re born in England, as I was, red-haired, left-handed and a Roman Catholic, there’s nothing you don’t know about discrimination.’

You must admit, you’ve got to read that sort of thing when you come across it.

At the back end of this issue of The Spectator there are columns that trade well under their straplines. High Life (Taki) is high society in its most un-PC form. You weren’t safe from punks even on Concorde.

On one trip back from the States he had to witness the sort of ‘proletarian brutalism’ that ‘has made the English loathed the world over’:

I told one of the slobs to keep his voice down as I was trying to read, and he looked at me in that cowardly way punks have – half-smile in case I’m someone well connected, and half defiant because I am, after all, a pensioner – but nothing came of it. I know that BA is in trouble but punks should be told to behave or else before they get on. When I asked the stewardess exactly how much ‘these gentlemen’ had contributed to fly Mach 1, she smiled ruefully and said nothing. Enough said. I sat with the beautiful Princess Ferial of Jordan, talked about the Middle East, and in no time we had landed.

Taki knows he has to perform – you never know what the next sentence will bring – and the timing is impeccable. An unmitigated snob but you have to laugh.

A Low Life column (Jeremy Clarke) has nightmares brought on by withdrawal from antidepressant drugs and experiments with homeopathic tablets and vitamin and mineral pills. Singular Life, in the shape of Petronella Wyatt, deplores girls being drawn to ‘pretty boys’ like Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio and Johnny Depp, and rejecting the classic Hollywood types – Clark Gable, Cary Grant and Spencer Tracy. Other kinds of life are given space from time to time: this week Wild Life (Aidan Hartley) charts the shameful record of the British Government in Rwanda and the bleak prospects for Blair’s Commission for Africa.

Lifestyle

The term came in for some well-earned ridicule when it was coined, along the lines of: why don’t you try getting a life instead? The term now tends to be used as a convenient catch-all to cover anything that doesn’t need a great deal of thought or depth, which reflects consumers’ increased spending power and which will bring in the adverts. Thus both newspapers and magazines have rubrics such as Life or Living or Style. Typically they cover some of the areas listed under The Observer Magazine’s Life section, which has the headings Relationships, Fashion, Interiors, Gardens, Food and Drink, Living, Health, and What Happened Next?

Since such subject matter is perennial, the newer rubrics may seem hardly necessary, even if you admit some convenience. In a way it’s a sad reflection of our over-busy, fragmented lives that we need features telling us how to live. ‘Slow down!’ is a cry getting louder at present, so paradoxically enough that theme also gets into the lifestyle columns.

Most of those sections are specialisms and a few will receive some attention in Chapter 19. Many of the general columns are aspirational: often pegged to celebs’ lifestyles, they encourage living vicariously. There are hypocrisies to be aware of in all kinds of publications that are hot on lifestyles. An American magazine editor for 20 years, Myrna Blyth has published a book, Spin Sisters, which shows remorse for the way she went along with the vested interest magazines have in making women feel stressed. They are then more likely to buy the aromatherapy oils and yoga videos in their adverts.

There’s conspicuous hypocrisy in the popular nationals: for example, when puritanism looms large on one page and prurience on the next. The sexualization of teenage magazines for girls and of the girls themselves is currently causing controversy. The sexualization of the young men’s (lads’) magazines reached a boring point and they have had to look for more satisfying or less in-your-face diversions. In other words, some thoughtfulness.

Some of the specialisms, of course, notably Health, are covered by interviewing experts and by using case studies. Relationships is often dealt with by psychologists or psychiatrists, but just as often in personal, somewhat frothy columns. On the Living page of Ireland’s Sunday Independent, under the strapline Working It Out and the standfirst ‘Take a good look at what defines you, and you’ll find plenty of room to change …’, an essay-style column begins:

Take a good look at yourself. What do you see? There are some things that you just are and there isn’t a whole lot you can do about it. You are as tall as you are. You are the race that you are. If you are 35, and even though you might tell the occasional fib about it, you are 35. But what kind of 35 you are is up to you. You can veer towards the 30 or the 40 with equal ease.

The conclusion is that we can change more about ourselves if we put our minds to it. There’s a worthwhile seam in there, about understanding what it is that influences our decisions. But it doesn’t avoid preachiness. Sometimes when you’re being personal it can even be a good idea to bring a few more ‘I’s’ into it (and a few more doubts).

A column in Marks Spencer Ma gazine is full of doubts, which makes us all feel better about ourselves, especially if we’re a female writer with three children, but it is rather short on drama. It is headed ‘A New Me? Yes Please’ and subheaded ‘Ever-hopeful of a fitter, healthier and stress-free lifestyle, Fiona Gibson finds that reality has other ideas’. She tells us how she has switched from late nights with her ‘goals’ notebook to stopping work earlier and having a hot bath.

How a particular decision (or rather lack of decision at a particular moment) changed an outlook on life is the subject of Tom Templeton’s (invisible) interview with Frank McGarry, the What Happened Next column in The Observer Magazine of 23 May 2004. It’s an interesting story about 15 years of the interviewee’s life and the short-story structure providing suspense gets us emotionally as well as mentally involved. It works like this:

Standfirst: ‘Date: 8 January 1989. Place: M1, Kegworth, Leicestershire. Facts: Frank McGarry was the last survivor to be pulled from the wreckage of a Boeing 737 flight from London to Belfast that crash-landed on the M1. He is now sales director of a fund-management firm in London and has just had a boy with his wife, Paula.’

The intro:

My memory of the events from the hours around the crash and the weeks after I’m sure is in there, I just don’t go looking for it. When I talk about the crash, I have a kind of after-dinner speech – ‘Somebody else sat in my seat and they died, two people in front of me died, three people behind me died.’ I’m emotionally detached from the crash when I talk about it.

The body, paragraph by paragraph:

1  In hospital with serious injuries.

2  Was 23, a university graduate, and had been about to join the army.

3  It took over a year to recover but two months after the crash he set up a consultancy business with a friend and got engaged. Became a workaholic.

4  Advice from a doctor dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder: get in control. Finally managed to, meeting a great support, Paula, an old school mate. Now have a baby boy.

5  Four years at various IT consultancies, part of the team that set up Cofunds, the UK’s leading fund supermarket. Now Cofunds’ sales director.

6  What happened before that crash. The pilot said there was ‘trouble with the right engine’. McGarry knew it was the left engine because he saw the sparks and could have forced his way through and told the captain he’d made a mistake. Because he didn’t ‘47 people died’.

The conclusion:

And now, I do the same thing to everybody else. When something is not right, I just stand up and say, ‘Where’s that going? That’s just wrong.’ I speak my mind a lot more and know I can change things, if I really want to.

It’s not great writing, but you know it’s the truth and he doesn’t use the word ‘lifestyle’ once.

Argument and provocation

Readers are prepared to meet, in general columns, arguments that are less balanced than a straightforward feature would allow. The ‘purely political’ Op Ed columns, such as the Simon Jenkins example above, have to be firmly based, and seen to be firmly based, on facts. What’s certain is that in regular columns that are given leeway there must be evident respect for the facts.

But how much time have you got? How many more facts do you want? It’s never possible to gather all the facts. So the line is not easy to draw between the columns that depend almost entirely on logical persuasion and those that bring more emotion to bear, that are more concerned to make you think or shake up your prejudices than to persuade. Many factual and emotional argument columns supply the publication’s or the author’s email address to encourage participation by readers, who may provide more facts, opposing arguments, different experiences, fruitful ideas, all of which help to keep the column going.

The iconoclasts

Because many columnists blandly ramble about nothing very much, a columnist who stops you in your tracks is highly valued. Julie Burchill, who has written for The Face, New Society and The Mail on Sunday, and is at the time of writing in The Guardian, is a sociopath. Well, that’s how she has described herself in an interview: however you interpret her (not easy to do), it works. The collections of columns (see Bibliography) maintain their edge too. Here she is in The Mail on Sunday:

Was I the only person to drop my genuine Our Lady of Lourdes cigarette lighter in awe when the Papal Tiger gave that amazing lecture to Hollywood on the danger of creating images that ‘weak, defenceless, old and unattractive’ people could never live up to? Apart from the fact that it’s very rude to talk this way about Terry Wogan, it was terminally rich coming from a man who leads a church full of priests – celibate of course – who know enough to advise their flocks on every problem of family life and whose ideal woman is a mother who is also a virgin. The truth is that the idea of being born in original sin has mixed up and maimed more people than a million soap operas ever could.

Not only are half the tarts in London convent-educated, but a large number of the drunks, dossers and assorted human flotsam lying around the streets speak with an Irish accent.

Like Taki she knows how to be noticed.

Humour, parody and fantasy

We have seen humour at work in several of the columns discussed above, some successful and some not. For a column whose main purpose is humour you need a good idea and you need to take off. Too much research or analysis is liable to weigh heavily. Subs are warned not to interfere: the moving of a comma can destroy a carefully planned bit of irony. Extracts that give a fair idea of the whole are for the same reason difficult to find, except for the more outlandish styles – parody and fantasy. To appreciate their satirical effect fully you will need more exposure, but there follow a few tastes.

The prolific Craig Brown does parody in several places. His Daily Telegraph column of 11 March 2004, ‘Continuing Way of the World’s exclusive serialization of the Unpublished John Gielgud letters’ included: ‘To Dr Ian Paisley, 5 May 1972’:

I simply cannot be bothered with intrigues, lies and recriminations. When I bumped into you – a perfect stranger! – in Piccadill y and told you how much I admired your white ankle socks, adding as an aside that you also had the most beautiful hands, I had no idea your mind was already occupied. How was I to realize that you were leading a demonstration of 10,000 Ulstermen, bless them, against this, that and the other? One cannot be expected to notice simply everything.

You bellowed at me to get out of the way, yet I was only being sweet. I sense you are a bit of a bossy-boots, darling Ian. If you cannot take compliments, then I shall no longer bother to offer them, and then you won’t like it, will you? And you so marvellously tall and broad-shouldered, and with such a twinkle in your eye. Oh, but there I go again!

Among the greatest of columnists have been those who have taken off into fantasy while working within journalism and its purposes and keeping to its restrictions of length and deadline.

J. B. Morton wrote his Beachcomber columns for the Daily Express for over 40 years from 1924. The best were collected in The Best of Beachcomber, from which the following extracts were taken. The law in operation provided some of the funniest moments. The first day of the case of Miss Ruby Staggage v. Broxholme Hydraulic Laundries and Others caused Mr Justice Cocklecarrot much trouble, with laborious talk of multiple cozenage, ultra vires, sine die, ‘tutamen being implicit, with or without barratry, responderia and plonth’, and so on.

On the second day:

Cocklecarrot asked Mr Honey-Gander, counsel for the defendants, what the twelve red-bearded dwarfs could possibly have to do with Broxholm Hydraulic Laundries, and how they came into the case. Mr Honey-Gander made the sensational reply, ‘M’lud, I understand that these gentlemen have a controlling interest in these laundries. In fact, they are Broxholm Hydraulic Laundries.’

Cocklecarrot: Then why do they call themselves ‘Others’?

Mr Honey-Gander: I believe, m’lud, that there are others connected with the laundries.

Cocklecarrot: Red-bearded dwarfs, too, I will wager.

Mr Honey-Gander: So I understand, m’lud.

Cocklecarrot: How many?

Mr Honey-Gander: Forty-one, m’lud.

Cocklecarrot: Merciful heavens! Call Mrs Staggage.

Mr Honey-Gander: Your name is Elvira Staggage?

Miss Staggage: No, sir. It is Amy Clowte.

Mr Honey-Gander: I see. You own a rocking-horse factory?

Miss Staggage: No, sir. I act for the real owners.

Mr Honey-Gander: And who are they?

Miss Staggage: A number of red-bearded dwarfs, sir. I see them over there. (From J. B. Morton, The Best of Beachcomber)

The case is complicated by the fact that the dwarfs are both hydraulic launderers and rocking-horse manufacturers, and so are both plaintiffs and defendants.

Samples of the famed column of Brian Nolan, a fore-runner of Private Eye, are collected in The Best of Myles, Pan Books, 1977. Here is a section under the (strictly Gaelic) heading ‘Sir Myles na Glopalean’. Note the similarity of this to ‘Pseuds’ Corner’ in that magazine:

Myles himself, the brilliant young journalist, will be out of town for 14 days. No letters will be forwarded. An indefatigable first-nighter, he is keenly interested in the theatre and has written several plays. Life he regards as a dialectic that evolves from aesthetic and extra-human impulses, many of them indubitably Marxian in manifestation. The greatest moment in his life (which occurred in 1924) was when he made the discovery that life is in reality an art form. Each person, he believes, is engaged on a life-long opus of grandiose expressionism, modulating and mutating the Ego according to subconscious aesthetic patterns. The world, in fact, is a vast art gallery, wherein even the curators themselves are exhibitors and exhibitionists. The horse, however, is the supreme artistic symbol…

The Editor: We can’t have much more of this, space must be found for my stuff.

Myself: All right, never hesitate to say so. I can turn off the tap at will.

Private Eye of 27 May 2004 has Craig Brown parodying Sir Peregrine Worsthorne’s recently published In Defence of Aristocracy. Sir Peregrine is qualified to deal with this subject because:

… I was myself born into the very bosom of the aristocracy. As is well-known in aristocratic circles, my great-grandmother’s second husband had a third cousin who was an Anstruther of Godalming. The Anstruthers stand as the veriest beacons of the hereditary principle, having given over their lives to looking after the people of Godalming, supplying them with nutritious scraps in cold spells and taking them to court only when the subsequent bills have remained unpaid. (Reproduced by kind permission of Private Eye/Pressdram. Copyright Pressdram Limited 2004)

Boris Johnson, Shadow Minister for the Arts, editor of The Spectator, and excellent columnist for The Daily Telegraph (winning him Columnist of the Year in 2004), is lampooned by Private Eye in the same issue in one of the many anonymous pieces (nobody and nothing are sacred in that organ). Under the heading ‘Boris Johnson on his doubts surrounding the conduct of the Iraqi war’ we have:

Golly! Cripes! What’s going on? When I signed up to support the war lark, no one said it was going to turn nasty!

Makes you feel a bit of a chump! I mean, didn’t we go over there to liberate Johnny Iraqi? You know – crowds cheering, flags waving, happy smiling kiddies chewing gum, that sort of thing?

Nobody mentioned torture. Chaps getting their private parts kicked in. That’s a bit strong, isn’t it? We didn’t even do that sort of thing at Eton. Well, we did actually, but that’s not the point.

The point is that old Boris has been sold a pup by our Yankee cousins, and I’m feeling a bit of a prat. Blimey! (Reproduced b y kind permission of Private Eye/Pressdram. Copyright Pressdram Limited 2004)

MANY WORKING METHODS

Some columnists don’t believe in much preparation and like to work an hour or two before the deadline, especially if they’ve already spent a good part of a lifetime as a newspaper reporter. They may find it difficult to work in a quiet study and will prefer to produce their columns in the middle of a busy office. They keep up with what’s in the papers and on their column day will grab some news item that intrigues them, sit in front of the computer and type the thing straight off. Well, they might need to do several drafts of the intro until they get that right, and then the rest will follow. That’s how they used to write their reports.

Others carry cards or a notebook everywhere and as ideas occur they are noted. When decision time comes they look the ideas over and make a decision. They have probably read the papers and a news item that day may associate with one of the ideas. Generally it’s not finding the idea that’s hard, it is having too many (see Keith Waterhouse at the start of this chapter). What seems like a great idea somehow doesn’t have legs; it’s probably funny enough already. What looks much less promising can suddenly spark the imagination: you see something funny in what is actually ordinary or boring and it’s the observation you put into it and the way you tell it that makes it funny. So acknowledges Miles Kingston (The Independent and The Oldie magazine).

A more leisurely approach that probably works best for the columnist who produces weekly or monthly an elegant essay is to build up files of cuttings on subjects of interest (as has been recommended elsewhere for the feature writer). To these might be added correspondence if that’s coming from readers. When the idea is selected there’s a ransacking of the files and a consulting of reference books and perhaps some online surfing, and plenty of note-taking. There may then be several drafts.

Whichever preliminaries are preferred, and however good the columnist is at outlining or ordering the material, the trick for humour is to take wing, to be able to think laterally, to take off with word associations and to enliven facts by linking them to their own experience. Surprise is the essential, and too much dependence on research can inhibit the gift.