Unerring bad taste Anne Chisholm
SCANDAL by Amanda Platell Piatkus, £5.99, pp. 297
It might perhaps be assumed that some- one with a track record like Amanda Platen's, an Australian who has edited the Sunday Mirror and the Sunday Express, served as managing director of the Inde- pendent and whose current job is Head of News and Media for the Conservative party, could not be a fool. However, on the evidence of this novel, a luridly presented airport paperback purporting to be 'a sexy, scandalous and utterly authentic expose of the world of journalism', foolish she must be. Unless, like her heroine, she has a handsome winemaker lurking in the West- ern Australian bush ready to provide an escape to a simpler life, she is likely to find this dismal little book, vulgar and ill- written even by the low standards of the genre, to have been an unfortunate career move. Whatever else she earns from it, she will not earn respect.
The story, such as it is, revolves around the rivalry between two women editors and the accompanying boardroom battles for control of the Tribune Group. Georgina, with whom the author presumably identi- fies, edits the Sunday Tribune; she is slim, composed, and elegant and wears dark business suits and red lipstick. Sharon, who edits the Daily, is shorter and fatter with an 'all year round sunbed tan', and wears tan- gerine lipstick and bras two sizes too small. Her gigantic cleavage is presumably a sign that she is based on the similarly endowed Eve Pollard. She keeps a bottle of vodka in her desk, shrieks obscenities at her staff and is obsessed with getting rid of Georgina. Their boss, Douglas, is chief executive of the Group, which he runs, as Platen puts it with unerring bad taste, 'with all the efficiency of a concentration camp'. He intends to make the Tribune a seven- day tabloid operation, so one of the editors will have to go. Meanwhile his trusted man- aging director is scheming to shaft him and take over his job. Bugging, blackmail and backstabbing ensue.
Needless to say, the purpose of this book is not to provide insights into the way news- papers are edited or run but to set up fre- quent bouts of sex. Georgina is fashionably bisexual, but fears that if her current lover is known to be a woman, her job will become impossible. Sharon is carrying on with the treacherous MD. Douglas is hav- ing an affair with another employee, while his bulimic model wife strives to become pregnant. The group marketing manager, a foul-mouthed homosexual known as the Ferret for unprintable reasons, betrays everyone in turn until he is knifed in a pub- lic lavatory with a £20-note wrapped around his organ, propositioning another man. Every sexual encounter is crudely explicit. Many designer labels and smart restaurants get a mention.
Only when Georgina and Sharon use modern newspaper technology to do each other down does Platen give any indication of inside expertise. Sharon uses a teenage nerd to hack into her rival's computer files and steal her scoops; before long Georgina succeeds in planting a bogus story about the foreign secretary's love child, with satis- factory results. Once or twice, when describing a tabloid news conference, Platell shows a trace of wit; a potential story on the ozone layer is soon converted into one on the '000-zone', to be accompa- nied by 'a map showing where people have the best sex in the world'. But if the book ever aspired to be satire, it fails. Nor does it have the bite of an openly vindictive roman a clef, even though one or two of the characters may resemble Canary Wharf or Blacicfriars originals. The poor old Conser- vative party, hardly in need of further embarrassment at the moment, must hope that this tawdry book sinks without trace.
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