JOHN MORTIMER
Trying to puzzle out my future in the world of journalism during the last weeks I have been amazed at the way that those who write about the press have heralded the new printing methods. It's as though they were announcing the outbreak of the Italian Renaissance. The Daily Shah may or may not turn out to be an excellent newspaper, but because it is printed by new machines, and because Mr Shah is thought to have seen off the unions, it is greeted as a source of Great National Pride like the Battle of Goose Green or a rare victory in a Test match. It reminds me of those enthusiasts who told us that cable television would enable us to receive in- stant letters from the bank manager, re- volutionise the entertainment industry and perhaps cure arthritis. Mrs Thatcher her- self was said to be-very keen on it. Well, Mr Harold Wilson also waxed lyrical about the white hot technological revolution until it went lukewarm on him. Not much has been heard of cable television in England over the last couple of years and the excitement about new printing methods will no doubt die away also. It will have greatly increased the profits of wealthy proprietors, caused a lot of people to lose their jobs and inflicted miserable working conditions on many journalists. I don't believe the great buying public gives a toss about how a paper is printed or staffed. All that matters is that it should be informa- tive, brave, well-written and entertain the audience. Such qualities will always be in extremly short supply, and not to be had at the drop of a word processor.
In fact one of the few publications I still open with a feeling of joyful anticipation looks as though it had been cyclostyled on machines otherwise used to produce the parish magazine, and gets on without colour. The news that Richard Ingrams is going to retire from the editorship of Private Eye seems to have surprised every- one. He said his greatest regret was that he had never won a libel action and I feel sorry that I didn't succeed for him in his most promising case, that against Des- mond Wilcox. Richard Ingrams was an admirable witness and the calmest litigant I have ever known. When the opposing QC was on his feet cross-examining Private Eye's witnesses on the subject of Jewish history (a singular but important aspect of the litigation) the editor passed him many notes about the lost tribes of QCs who were dispersed from the deserts of Ireland and gathered to bore everyone to death in the Law Courts. So far as I remember, the QC in question behaved with equal sang- froid and collected the notes to take home and show his children. Now that Mr Winston Churchill no longer wants to make his strange little laundry list of forbidden television subjects part of the law of England we are, I suppose, all at liberty to make up our own. My own list (and the penalty for transgres- sing it is an immediate switch-off with no right of appeal) would include any refer- ence to sport (from Blankety Blank to cricket), party political broadcasts and, above all, operations. The news now con- sists of reports of famine and disaster, details of child murder and then the men in green coats come on to entertain the audience with a kidney transplant or to whip out an occasional heart. In the good old days it was universally recognised that persons who described their surgery were monumental bores second only to those who recounted their dreams at breakfast. Now such people are not only encouraged to talk about their operations, they have them in public. I'm reliably informed by my family that in a recent edition of Hospital Watch an elderly gentleman went so far as to flourish his prostate in the face of a long-suffering public. Thank God I was wholesomely occupied listening to the torture scene in Tosca.
0 ur host had the use of the Royal Box and as we sat under the chandeliers in its little dining-room before The Barber of Seville David Mellor, a Home Office minis- ter, described a gloomy weekend going through statistics and reports of rape and child abuse. Have such crimes increased or are they more frequently reported? In the great, glowing horseshoes of the theatre, I thought of London in the 1850s when Covent Garden was built. Inside it, perhaps, you could hear Rossini's wittiest and most glittering music whilst outside was Mayhew's London, child prostitutes were hawked round the Haymarket and Seven Dials was an impenetrable jungle where rapes and other violent crimes went uncounted and uncared about. So are we truly back to Victorian values? In those days it must have been a London full of terror, and there wasn't even the comfort of being able to blame it all on television, A„ technical terms in the movie busi- ness are rich and strange (`Kill that baby' it an instruction to turn out a small light) but I greatly relish the word I learned most recently. `Atmos to cover the last scene, said the sound man during some filming hi, my house, and we sat silent as on an old Armistice Day while he recorded absolute quiet. As we listened to the room we started to hear the roar of the draughts, the screams of the central heating, the thunder of curtain rings moved by the wind and the creak of the untrodden stair; silence he" came an almost unbearable din. It W85 `Atmos', a title to remember.
Iam interested to discover that the importation of inflatable ladies and 'other erotic articles' into our island has been_e blessed this week by the European Court' It all takes me back to the darker days e' my life at the bar when I drove dolefully up the Ml to argue for the liberation of some of these strange objects which had been impounded by the Customs at a Midlands airport. On a table in front of the Mag0 trates a number of mechanical genitals whirred and flashed disconsolately, and the ladies were entirely deflated. The appeal' ance of a Justice on crutches enabled us to argue, before a sympathetic tribunal, that the mechanical devices were no more alarming than artificial limbs. When it cattle to the inflatable ladies we invoked the Treaty of Rome and our duty to support free trade in the Common Market. 1,° restrain their importation, we suggestea:. could only lead to the appalling prospect of a cottage industry in blow-up women springing up round Solihull. To our intense surprise the magistrates said they found most of the questioned objects `totally acceptable'. Their view has now been supported by the distinguished judges, (Koopmans, Bahlmann, Bosco, O'Higgins and Schockweiler) at Luxembourg. Thus'' in time, the strangest legal fantasies be' come hallowed law.
Previous page
