BLAND LEADING THE BLAND
The press: Paul Johnson
looks at the pros and cons of the new Sunday
PRODUCING an entirely new paper from scratch, with two main sections totalling 64 pages, plus a 72-page colour mag, is such a vertiginous undertaking that I'm inclined to quote Dr Johnson on women preaching: 'Sir, it is like a dog walking on its hinder legs: the thing is not done well, the wonder is that it be done it all.' In fact the Sunday Correspondent's first issue is done well: excellent printing, clean, distinctive typography and layouts, well-chosen photos, no obvious cockups. This is a dog with agile hinder legs, even elegant ones. Unlike the first issue of Today, it does not look in the least provincial, and nothing could be further from the disastrous debut of the News on Sunday. In sophistication it compares with the launch of the Indepen- dent, the bench-mark for these things, and it is evident that Andreas Whittam-Smith's careful planning has been well studied.
Moreover, the Correspondent starts with an unexpected plus: a first-rate colour magazine. To be sure, my copy looked at the edges as though it had been struggling with a malevolent piece of machinery, but the cover was striking and the contents lived up to it. The mag's image is, super- ficially, that of the Independent's Saturday supplement, but is less twee and does not make the pretentious mistake of thinking that black-and-white photos are somehow better than colour. The main story on the Mafia's approach to 1992 was suitably alarming and there were workmanlike features on the hyping of Kenneth Bra- nagh, and the American cult writer Raymond Carver. The 'questionnaire' seems to me a sharp idea, in a crowded field, for a final page, and the issue contained one of the most remarkable photos of Mrs Thatcher I have ever seen, snapped Madonna-like, amid a bunch of Tory peasants at the Conservative Confer- ence ball — it might have been painted by Ribera or even Zurburan.
However, once I began to probe beneath the satisfactory surface of the main paper, weaknesses appeared in plenty. The case against the paper, put to me by its rivals, is that its costings are too low and in particu- lar that its journalistic resources may be inadequate. For a paper which calls itself
the Correspondent, it did not have enough on the spot. Last Saturday was a poor day for news: even so, the new paper seemed short of this essential article and its intellectual-snob decision to bury the big society wedding, which produced excellent photos for its competitors, in one page three paragraph, looked foolish. My fi- gures for the number of news stories (excluding business and sport but including items in news round-ups) in the four Sunday qualities this week are as follows:' Sunday Telegraph 60, Sunday Times 52, Observer 64, Correspondent 45. I am not saying all these stories are true, of course. A front-page exclusive about Mrs T and Japanese war-graves in the Observer was dismissed by No. 10 as 'a load of balls' and a tall tale in the Telegraph about Nixon planning an attack on Iran seven years after he ceased to be President was de- scribed by his aide as 'laughable and preposterous'. On the other hand, there was some real meat too, including a big Sunday Times story about corruption in local government. The Correspondent had nothing of this kind to offer. Its front page, with only two stories, neither with much impact, looked static and un-busy. At a distance of a few feet I found it easy to confuse the front pages of the news and the review sections — a similarity which must be corrected. The Correspondent did in
fact have an excellent news story of its own, the revelation that Michael Meacher plans to have a future Labour government instruct judges on how to try cases involv- ing unions. The disastrous implications of this plan for Neil Kinnock's chances were and are striking and I would certainly have made it the front-page splash: instead it was put on page five. (However, Labour has since denied the story.)
The reason, I suspect, why the Meacher story did not lead the paper was the desire not to kick off with an anti-Labour sensa- tion. The new paper is rightly anxious to emphasise its independence from prop- rietorial control and party bias. That is its trump card, at any rate until the Sunday Independent comes along. But the fact remains that the only hole in the Sunday quality market, if indeed there is one, is around the centre-left of the spectrum, where the Observer, lumbered with the Rowland presence, is felt to have lost its way and where the News on Sunday failed. So the paper, whatever it says, is aiming in the first place at non-Tory-voting readers and that imposes its own restraints.
My most serious criticism, in fact, is that the paper reflects too many of the axioma- tic views and values of the left-liberal media consensus, not least in its coverage of the arts and books. I say this not so much because I reject many of them myself as because they are so well represented already, not only in the Guardian, Obser- ver and the television duopoly but in parts of supposedly conservative papers like the Telegraph and Times. To be new and fresh you have somehow to get outside the current cultural concentration camp, and this the Correspondent has not succeeded in doing. I was disappointed, for instance, that its opening leading article chose to condemn Mrs Thatcher's killing of the sex-Aids survey. The topic was a week out of date anyway, and to plug the 'more- research-is-needed' line, a bedrock belief of unthinking sub-intellectuals, struck me as feeble. Surely there are more lively, red-blooded issues the paper cares about?
The editor, Peter Cole, in his Page Two introduction to the paper, drew attention to what he considered instances of good writing in the first issue, a dangerous tactic likely to produce, as Louis XIV put it, a lot of resentment and some ingratitude. As it happened, Cole did not mention the piece which particularly took my fancy, a lam- basting of women fashion editors by a disgruntled male model. This had a bit of bite, whereas the paper's regular space for bile called 'Hit List' — not a bad idea in itself— was just abusive. In brief, then, we have in the Correspondent the makings of a valuable addition to our quality titles. But it should strive to be less bland, more rugged, less anxious to please, more willing to wound. It might with profit follow Ken Tynan's notorious advice to himself, which he pinned to his desk: 'Rouse tempers, goad and lacerate, raise whirlwinds.'
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