A Spectator's Notebook
It always Dors on Sunday
ONE does not wish to be censor- ious, but occasionally one feels compelled to. What has been going on, these last few weeks, in the News of the World and the Sunday Pictorial, has set new records for British Sunday journalism which will, I feel, . endure. It began on January 17, in the News of the World. This remarkable news- paper had some three years ago a circulation of about 8f million—easily the biggest ever achieved by any newspaper anywhere in the world. There was no secret of the way in which this gigantic total was built up; it was by feeding, week by week, the British public's apparently insatiable desire to read reports of cases of sexual crime, and civil cases with a sexual theme, heard in the courts. The tastes of the proprietor and editors have been extremely catholic; no section of the aberrant community has been overlooked or underplayed. Here a rape, there a buggery, and everywhere copious details—keyholes, instru- ments and all—of the wide range of sexual devia- tion prhclised in Britain. A credulous reader of the News of the World might have gained, over the years, an impression that half the population of the country spent its time interfering with infant members of its own or the opposite sex, while the other half occupied itself with seducing its neighbours' spouses, and by the use of rather recherche methods at that. Remonstrances have always been met with the excuse that these reports, being reports of actual cases, were only the stuff of life itself, and in reporting them the newspaper was doing no more than showing one half how the other, and queerer, half lives.
But rather more than two years ago something began to go wrong. It may be—I wish I could believe it more deeply than I do—that the British people were growing out of the need for this kind of thing, and that the torrent flowing across the Sunday breakfast-table (many families bought two copies of the paper, lest anyone should be delayed in acquiring the vicarious thrills it provided) was becoming as boring to the many as it had always been to the few. Or possibly the opposite had happened; that the palate of the readers' sexual imagination had grown insensitive after so long on the same diet, and craved descriptions of more remarkable activities on the part of their fellow- citizens than their fellow-citizens were able to provide. Anyway, whatever the reason, the circu- lation began to fall with great speed; and last year it was down to less than 61 niillion—a proportion- ately greater decrease than any other newspaper since the war has suffered in a comparable time. It still left the circulation well above that of any other newspaper in the world. But the fall was catastrophic, and steps had clearly to be taken. The People was catching up.
The steps included the hiring of Mr. Randolph Churchill to write a weekly political column, the departure of the editor, Mr. Reginald Cudlipp, and—on January 17 this year—an announcement that the News of the World had obtained the serial rights of a book `by' Miss Diana Dors. The price paid for it (unstated) was well over £30,000 —which puts Miss Dors in the Montgomery class, if not the Eden—and the paper was clearly of the opinion that it was cheap at the price. (So it was, as a matter of fact.) A poster campaign (Tye been a naughty girl') followed the announcement on January 17 that the serialisation would begin the following week. There was no mention of who had done the actual writing, but this seemed hardly necessary in view of Miss Dors's promise to tell all, not to mention the accompanying pic- ture of Miss Dors, with a look—eyes half-closed, lower lip thrust out—that would be of great interest to anthropologists at least.
'I have a criminal record,' she writes. 'I've been had up for housebreaking. I have modelled in scanties and less. I have loved men I would rather now forget.'
You can read about the secret love life of her first husband; of the mirror in the ceiling; of the startling guest room.
It's a fabulous rip-roaring life that she
tells. . .
'I hide nothing in my story,' she says. 'I write it because I am currently a wife and about to become a mother. . .
The last sentence may appear a non sequitur, but the News of the World seemed confident that its readers' would not notice.
At this point the Sunday Pictorial got into the act. The Pictorial had been outbid by the News of the World for the rights of Miss Dors's story, but instead of following regular Fleet Street prac- tice in such circumstances and attacking its pub- lication, the Pictorial management clearly thought more vigorous counter-action was required. It therefore rummaged round and brought to light a couple called Patrick Holt and Sandra Dome, from the fringes of show business, The following Sunday the News of the World's readers were regaled with stuff like 'As I thump the typewriter keys' and tales of the twelve-year-old Miss Dors being fingered by schoolboys in the local cinema and her total ignorance of the voyeur parties her husband used to throw round a one-way ceiling mirror while sexual play of various kinds was going on in the room below.
In the Sunday Pictorial, however, Patrick Holt and Sandra Dome were telling the story of `The Shocking Mr. Dors'—Dennis Hamilton, Miss Dors's late husband. The article was very much the same as the rival one—mainly detailed descrip- tions of Hamilton's voyeurism and other sexual eccentricities—with the difference that this time it was Mr. Holt and Miss Dorne who took no part in these orgies but happened to hear about them later. The only other noticeable difference was that the Pictorial's story was 'as told to Bernard McElwaine.'
Thereafter, the cascade was stepped up, week by week, in both papers, until it has now reached a level which even by British newspaper standards —as far as pornography is concerned the most remarkable in the world—is almost past believing. The Pictorial, it may be noted, changed the attri- bution of their story in the second instalment to `Edited by Bernard McElwaine,' and in the third Holt and Dorne had dropped out completely—it was 'By Bernard McElwaine,' with promise for the following week of an instalment by Tommy Yeardye, one of Miss Dors's former camp- followers. We may also note that Miss Dors took time out from the typewriter-thumping to have a baby in the middle of her story. Other incidental felicities produced by the affair have included an attack on both serials (though he did not name the newspapers) by Lord Boothby in the Sunday Dispatch, which led to his being reproved in the Evening Standard (more than a week later, and, after he had attacked the Sunday Express) for forgetting that the Sunday Dispatch used to be one of the most pornographic papers of all; and the silence.(comniented on by Lord Boothby) of Mr. Randolph Churchill, formerly a useful ally in the anti-pornography battle, but now the political columnist of the News of the World.
All that remains, of course, is to see what effect it all has on the circulations of the two newspapers concerned. My guess would be that the decline in the readership of the News of the World has gone too far to be halted, even by these methods (though there may be a temporary increase for a few weeks), and that it will eventually wither away, to the infinite relief of those of us who were beginning to find the stench quite unbearable. The Pictorial (whose editor also left recently—he went to the Daily Sketch, and one wonders where on earth there is for him to go next) appears to be having second thoughts—there was not a word on the front page last Sunday introducing the delights inside—and may find that it, too, has done itself no good. In fact, I suspect that both papers may well have lost more readers than they gained over it, and since—as Mr. Churchill, to do him credit, pointed out—the only way to upset millionaire pornographers like Mr. Cecil Harmsworth King (of the Pictorial) and Sir William Emsley Carr (of the News of the World) is by lessening their in- come, one hopes so.
BERNARD LEVIN
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