Decent Exposure
THE PRESS
By DAVID FROST But can you' make a judgment like that? Or does the statement contradict itself? Is the raking-up of the scandal the pictures instantly recalled such a journalistic falling from grace that it automatically rules out the use of a word like `taste'? As a judgment, is it as unsatisfac- tory as the recent tribute from a devotee on radio in New York that 'Adolf Hitler handled the Jewish question with as much humanity as could be expected of someone like him'?
I think not. I think rather that the People does have a minor achievement on its hands, that it was quite simply pleasant to see the poor, lost victim of 1963 emerging in a funnier tale in 1966, accompanied by an attractive photo- graph and, thankfully, no flashbacks. After all, the pressure to use ten-inch headlines announc- ing that 'THE GIRL WHO ROCKED A NATION ROCKS A CRADLE' must have been pretty powerful. No, in its technique the People, under its new editor, does seem to be making considerable strides.
Except in one direction. It is with great sadness I have to report that the traditional People Sports Expose/Confession seems to be dis-
appearing fast, along with other hallowed tradi- tional aspects of British life like miming to records on television and Her Majesty's Oppo- sition. It is literally months since the last inter- national footballer revealed that he took little-known Indian drugs during half-time in the Cup Final at Wembley and was actually in a coma when he shook hands with Sir Stanley Rous. We have almost forgotten the bliSs of reading that 'The Ice Hockey World As We Know It' is 'Sodom and Gomorrah on Skates'; that before going out to score 217 the England opening pair drank methylated spirits in the Long Room at Lord's; and that it was the interminable orgies in the women's chalets that caused our Day of Shame in Helsinki or Oslo or wherever the last international athletics meet- ing and Aid to World Peace was held.
Certainly the People has not deserted us sports- lovers altogether. But these days it is all so well- intentioned. It even had a piece last Sunday headed 41 ACCUSE ALF RAMSEY: which in the old days would have accused the England team manager at the very least of a love-nest in Cricklewood. What is the accusation now? That Mr Ramsey 'does not understand, any more than Walter Winterbottom did in Chile, the terrible job facing a centre-forward in continental foot- ball.' Let's face it—things have come to a pretty pass when the most salacious-sounding item in the People Exposé is the name of the ex-England team manager.
What, moreover, about those great revelations by Mike Gabbert last year about bribery in soccer? Not a word about any other vice. Net one word. I am not surprised at this week's an- nouncement that Mr Gabbert is off to join the News of the World. He will get much more scope there.
Alas, the era of the exposé has gone for ever. Why, I don't know. Perhaps all these days of spiralling wages and huge signing-on fees and footballers opening boutiques and cricketers wanting £500 to play in a Test match have de- stroyed that indefinable aura of idealism that used to surround our sportsmen. It's not half as much fun reading exposes about people when you know already that they are rogues just like the rest of us. That is really the trouble. Our expose writers can't shock us about sportsmen, and there is really no one else they can use either. Not even in Parliament. Pyjama Parties behind the Woolsack and Sex Orgies during Question Time cut no ice at all. They are 'old hat' already and politicians, if anything, are even more in disrepute than sportsmen. There is no- where else to go. Short of someone catching Billy Graham's 2,000-voice choir in that love-nest in Cricklewood along with All Ramsey there are no more vices left to expose. Only the revela- tion that Two-Way Family Favourites is in fact all done in London, and there is no one out there in BAOR at all, could really shock us now.
The new exposé will have to go in another direction. Luckily, the first of these fell into my hands this week. It began: 'I went into the England dressing room at half-time and sure enough it was just as I predicted. All eleven men were gathered in the middle of the room swigging water just as if it was whisky. It was then I learned that on the night before this, the World Cup Final, the entire England team went to bed at 10.30. . . .' Separately, too. But that's only the beginning. I hereby offer it exclusively to the editor of the People for £10,000.
Or perhaps by taking someone who has been involved in a political scandal and showing her as a homely, young mother the People feels it has got there first.
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