Change in the air
THE PRESS BILL GRUNDY
It's not often that texts for sermon and epilogue come so handily together, but page 6 of Mon- day's Guardian provided both; one must obviously grab what the gods of Gray's Inn Road give so generously. First, a letter from L. J. Davey, of Leamington Spa. Its stark sim- plicity affected me deeply : `Sir,—If you publish another article on pop music by Geoffrey Can- non, please could we have a translation?— Yours faithfully.'
If you read the Guardian you will know what Mr Davey means, for Geoffrey Cannon writes features on pop for that journal, once so august, now so springily youthful. I've found difficulty in understanding Mr Cannon's writ- ings myself, and so have others, quite apart from Mr Davey. 'He speaks English,' a col- league said to me. 'Well, the words are English but I can't make head or tail of what he says. Perhaps he gets them in the wrong order.' Whether he does or not is beside the point. What is to the point is that the mandarins of the BBC are going to get a shock, and the Radio Times is going to get a shake-up, because Mr Cannon has just been made editor-designate of that magazine. He joins them in March and expects to take over some time in June or July. He is likely to have a considerable impact on it. He is only twenty-eight, and has bad a career that might have been designed specially
for the job. At university he edited his own
paper, in 1962 he was one of the founders of New Society, and in 1965 he joined Clive Irving, that many-parted man, who was respon- sible for the magazine section of the Inter- national Publishing Corporation. He spent some time brushing the cobwebs off that stuffy pub- lication, the Statist. He worked on the design of the SPECTATOR and the Listener, and spent six months doing a reformulation of the Radio Times, unaware that he was about to be asked to edit it. He works in television and as I am sure he knows about steam radio, too, he looks to be the right man for the right job.
He finds words come easily to him, he says. They do, if a very long telephone conversation is anything to go by. He sees Radio Times as a journal of information, which is something; is determined that it shall have the very latest news of its own riveting branch of the enter- tainment industry; gets very McLuhanny about television actually being the world for a lot of people and is absolutely convinced that what- ever changes he makes, the one thing he won't try to do is copy the TV Times. I can see why.
You know the TV Times, don't you? The only television journal in the world where you can't find the programmes for the recipes. By page twenty-six of this week's edition I knew a great deal about chapatis, popadum, pork vindaloo, chicken and prawn pullao, Madras beef curry, and many other mysteries of the mystic East. I knew a great deal about the latest fashions and what it would cost me to take up show-jumping. But I knew very little, if any- thing, about the week's programmes, which is presumably what I buy the damn thing for.
Bad as it is, it used to 1..e much worse. When, on 19 September, the new, exciting TV Times burst on a waiting world, the howl that went up from people in the television business was pitiful to hear. Credits were captious in the extreme; the wardrobe mistress might get a mention, the producer and director might not. Billings bore so little relation to programme content that the producer of What the Papers Say is alleged to have told the editor that if the second week's billing of Papers was as mis- leading as the first, then the TV Times would be his programme's number one target the fol- lowing week. Would-be viewers, and therefore would-be buyers, baffled by the way the pro- gramme details were hidden, and the fact that when found they were quite often wrong, tended to leave the magazine decorating their news- agent's counter. The programme companies, who own shares in it, had a council of war, words were exchanged (words with which the Independent Television Authority itself can be assumed to have agreed) and since then the magazine has improved a bit.
Whether its financial fortunes have is another matter. Circulation figures are due at the week- end; they are expected to show something about 3.5 million, which is slightly up on the old, cheaper-to-produce version, but much less than editor Peter Jackson was forecasting with such confidence in the dear dead days before the fall. Rumour has it that its profitability rating has fallen from £0.5 million to about £0.0 million, which won't gladden the hearts of one or two' people I know. A senior executive of the maga- zine said that he did have some figures but he'd rather not see them reported, thank you very much. He did, however, add: 'It's too early to say if it's going to be a bonanza. Give us a year at least.' Which suggests that things are not altogether lovely in that particular gar- den either.
So there we are. Not much to laugh at, except the thought that Geoffrey Cannon is going to do his damnedest to make sure that the Radio Times doesn't resemble the TV Times at all. For which relief, much thanks.
That was the sermon; now for the epilogue, taken from page six of the Guardian, in an epistle from Francis Boyd, sentence two : 'It is assumed by politicians at Westminster that Labour has already passed the halfway mark between the election of 1966 and the next general election:It's nice to know. from the Guardian's senior political correspondent, that our beloved Prime Minister has definitely de- cided not to extend the life of this Parliament beyond its statutory five years. Thanks, Francis.
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