Golden bore

THE PRESS

BILL GRUNDY

Although I had never actually met him, I somehow did not much like Mr John Osborne, the playwright. I have, in the past, -thought up

many possible explanations of why this should be so, ranging from the shape of his face to the size of his fortune. However, now that I am getting on a bit I am beginning to realise that the main cause of my dislike might simply be that he had the nerve to go off and marry Jill Bennett, whom I had secretly fancied for years. Last week, however, I found my heart

warming to him. I found myself wanting to stretch out my hand and ask him to forgive wrongs darker than death or night, wrongs

which in my imagination I had been doing him.

For there, in the Times of 12 May, was a letter which did my heart good. Mr Osborne,

writing from his home in Chelsea Square, asked, in his forthright way: `Sir,—Need this weird and ludicrous event ever take place again? The row, inconvenience and banality of this crass non-starter are too intrusive and even too soon for what was once called the silly season.'

He signed himself 'Yours sincerely,' and I'm

sure he was. For he was talking about the Daily Mail Transatlantic Air Race. And apart from a quibble or two about his writing style, which I thought he might have made a touch more malicious or even more grammatical, I have nothing but praise for Mr Osborne's epistle. I simply couldn't agree with it more.

I know it's all you can expect from the Daily Mail; after all, they've been doing it for

years. As early as 1910 they offered £10,000 for the first man to fly from London to Man- chester—a Frenchman called Louis Paulhan won it. In 1919 Alcock and Brown got another ten thousand quid for flying the Atlantic, as I am sure you could have told me. The drive for all this came, of course, from Lord North- cliffe, always interested in flying, who had chaired a government committee on civil aerial transport years before Alcock and Brown blun- dered into a bog in Connemara in 1919.

But Lord Northcliffe, like Queen Anne of blessed memory, is irrevocably dead. Yet somehow the memory lingers on. What else

can explain the Mail's obsession? For obses- sion it is. What you have been going through

isn't the first time people have suffered this way, you know. You may have forgotten—I haven't—that they did a similar thing in 1959 on the fiftieth anniversary of Louis Bleriot's first-ever crossing of the Channel by air. The man who thought up that particular anniver-

sary stunt—fastest time Paris-London--was Mr Angus Macpherson, the Mail's air correspon- dent. The man who thought up the latest lot is— precisely : Mr Angus Macpherson, the Mail's air correspondent. I am sure that, as a result, the Mail love him. I am also sure that all the prizewinners love him too. But I (and Mr John Osborne) don't. And if I mistake myself not, a lot of other people are a bit bored too.

For after all, who cares? Oh, Monty Modlin cares, as he runs in water-soaked pants to his transport, ob, Ben Garcia cares as he crosses the Atlantic for the tenth time dressed as a packet of cornflakes; oh, Mary Rand cares, as she seizes the chance to don her shorts again. But who else, brother, who else?

As a fairly tired reader of the press as a Whole, I think that the only people who care are the people in charge of circulation at the Daily Mail. For I think it undeniable that stunts like these do put up circulation. For example, the Mail's exclusive story of the astro- nauts (last lot, not this bunch) did boost up the sales. It also shoved up sales of the Mail's sister paper, the Daily Sketch.

The figures are surprising, and go a long way to suggest that Mr Osborne and myself are in a minority of two, a position I do not much

like to think about. For instance, the astro- nauts stuff, which, banal as it was, the Mail and the Sketch had exclusively, had a remarkable effect on the circulations of the two papers. The Sketch put 17,500 on in twenty-four hours. A day later the increase had gone up to 37,500. And they've held it—even allowing for the normal increase in circulation you'd expect at this time of the year. The Mail is even more

astounding. The astronaut guff gave them maybe 60,000 a day extra. They won't say whether they've held it, but they do say that the situation since has been very healthy. But the air race—which after all wasn't exclusive, since every other paper pinched it—that, too, has had a ridiculous effect on circulation. The

Mail say—and who am I to disbelieve them— that they put on 30,000 a day while it was on.

Think of that. Thirty thousand people paid fivepence a day to read in the Mail what they could have read in their usual paper anyway! Psychologically I can't believe it; statistically I must.

Well, all right. The answer to Mr Osborne's question in his letter to the Times—who needs it?—is, clearly, the papers need it. For what we have been witnessing, make no mistake about it, friends, is yet another battle in the Hundred Years War of Circulation. And remember that

the Sunday Times is still sailing single-handed around the world. Remember that the Daily Express has barely got back from Australia on its motor-car rally. Reflect that even the Sun, in its death throes, might come up with

something—after all, it was the Herald that started the whole thing back in the 'thirties. One of these days, my love, you're going to be the fastest to the moon and are going to receive the complete, unexpurgated works of Charles Dickens, bound in luxurious Skivertex, by way of a prize. Lucky you.

But before that particular dawn breaks could I put in a plea? Could we please, in the mean- time, have some real news in the papers? Could we? Please.