SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK

CHRISTOPHER BOOKER

Once upon a time there was a widely revered newspaper called the Times. Its articles were

anonymous, its headlines sober ('Sir A, Home To Remain At The Helm), its sub-I editing celebrated for its rigour. It was nevertheless extremely dull, widely revered largely because so few people read it, and it had to be changed.

The first major change, it will be recalled, was putting news on the front page on 3 May 1966. It was perhaps ominous that the story chosen for its first front-page headline was 'London To Be New H.Q. For Nato'— but even so, the issues of that time today look forty rather than four years old. For the next landmark was the takeover by Lord Thomson and Mr William Rees-Mogg in 1967.

We at once had a notorious bout of trendi- ness: editorials eulogised Mick Jagger and pleaded for the liberation of pot; on the Court Page, pictures of the Duchess of Kent admiring her new baby Lady Helen Wind- sor, gave way to pictures of Mr Ringo Starr admiring his new baby Zak; literate stand- ards were thrown overboard (I particularly recall a news story describing ammonites as 'giant snails, several million years old'), and the sub-editing collapsed to the point where it seemed the Grauniad might soon be rivalled by the Tisme.

Tabloid Times

After this initial seizure the 'new-look' Times did eventually settle down, and des- pite 'Picnicking on Vesuvius', a diary laden with unbelievable trivia about the media, the ineffable Saturday Review of the Arts, and sundry other irritations, became at least more lively, and on balance better than be- fore. Then a few months ago, some well- informed person told me to 'watch the Times around August: it is going to become even more pop.'

Whether this is so or not, I wonder how many people would have been able to guess the source of last week's headline 'MARY 30 ROMANCE REVEALED'. An unretouched picture of nudists at Orpington, another of a film starlet admiring her baby (the largest item on the page), a main feature entitled Will The Real Tony Jacklin Please Stand Up'—there has certainly been even more than usual in recent days which would not look out of place in the most liberal tabloid.

Spot the error

The illiteracies are still hilarious—I won- der what my grandfather, who for years used to have a daily competition with a fel- low Eton master to see who could spot an error in the Times before they went into chapel (`You saw the bottom of the third column on p. 8, I suppose?'), would have made of last week's description of London as 'Cobbett's Great War'. The Saturday Review is more appalling than ever; the opening of a book review last Saturday read: 'All my life I thought of Max Beer- bohm as some camp Edwardian oaf who drew cartoons and wrote bits for the weekly papers . , I very nearly threw the book out because it is most tediously introduced by Lord David Cecil who, in an exam paper prose, writes about writing like it was furniture's I suspect the moment has arrived when, if the Times is to be regarded as really worth saving, less attention should be paid to trivial economics, and a last real effort made to turn it back into a serious newspaper,

Close season

As is usual with such affairs, it is hard to know quite who comes most absurdly out of the current fracas over the exhibition of modern 'sculpture' in Salisbury Cathedral close—which includes 'a white symbolic plastic male doll making love to a white fe- male plastic cushion', and various bits of stray ironmongery which look as if they have come straight from a boilermaker's scrap- yard.

On the one hand is the enraged stage colonel, who delights the trendies by behav- ing exactly as they would wish, with cries of 'monstrosities', 'heathen', 'sacrilege'. On the other are the equally stage reactions of the Dean and cathedral authorities, pathetically eager to be thought `with-it', and of the organiser of the exhibition, a young lecturer at Salisbury College of Art, who modestly declares that 'informed people feel it is ex- citing and relevant'. Having seen the exhibi- tion myself when it was equally incongru- ously scattered about the close at Winchester last month, my basic sympathies are with the colonel. But to be fair to the organiser, I must confess that he put the traditionalists' case better than anyone, when he admitted that the row blew up because 'The Close is actually very sacred to the people in this area ... they feel that the function of art should be to inspire and uplift.' The implicit corollary that he disagreed was most revealing.

Unhappy Niarchos

Everybody knows that very rich men lead miserable lives, but I somehow suspect that few people really believe it. I once, for some reason, spent some time in Paris with Mr Niarchos. It was about the most joyless twenty-four hours of my life. We dined at Maxim's, sat gloomily for two hours in the latest discotheque; the following day lunch was taken at his mansion, a cross between a film set of what a rich man's house should look like and a museum; little gilt chairs: thirty year old claret and forty year old port; room after room, each with its Renoir or Degas or van Gogh; everything in its place, and all as dead as the tomb. Through- out these proceedings Mr Niarchos wore an air of abstracted melancholy, only heigh- tened by his unseeing, automatic smile (1 once saw exactly the same expression on the face of Mr Charles Clore). The overwhelm- ing impression was of a man completely trapped by the fantasy world he had created for himself, and too intelligent not to know it. The latest episode in the Niarchos story seems only too unhappily in keeping.

Bigga Ben

One tourist to another (overheard in Toth ill Street, Westminster): 'hi a minute we see Big Ben. You heard-a Big Ben? She the most famous watch in the world'. What I can't puzzle out: why were they speaking in English?