The Press
Keeping the readers satisfied
Paul Johnson
We all know about the Page Three girl in the Sun, but what about Page Three in the Daily Telegraph? One reason why the Telegraph keeps above or around the 1,400,000-a-day mark, twice the combined circulation of The Times and the Guardian, is that it simply gives more news than anyone else, and that includes detailed reporting of the better-class court cases. Page Three provides a daily selection, with special attention paid to juicy defamation ("Vice Libel Shattered my Career" claims Dorothy Squires') and that inexhaustible new source of human eccentricity, the Industrial Tribunal.
Last week the genteel person's Page Three was in cracking form. On Tuesday, under the headline 'Three Dancing Pensioners in Jealous Tango' we were told about a 71-year-old Army captain who, when his regular dancing partner at the Solent Court Hotel in Ryde dropped him for a 73-year-old retired policeman, became 'consumed with jealousy', punctured the radiator of his rival's car, cut the brake-hose and poured water in the petrol tank. Other items included 'Osteopath Gets Five Years for Rape' and a story about Alpha Androstenol, a synthetic version of 'a chemical found in underarm perspiration' This, it is claimed, transmits 'attractant signals to any male within sensory range' and is to be marketed as a woman's aphrodisiac. The Telegraph headlined it: 'Love's Old Sweet Pong'.
On Wednesday Miss Squires was telling the judge that when she read the report in the News of the World she was 'physically sick', invitations to dinner-parties stopped, her concerts were 'disastrous', pornographic letters arrived and 'tomato ketchup was daubed on the doors of her home'. Alongside, under the head 'Marchioness Denies Land Deal Secret', Lady Dufferin was before an Industrial Tribunal facing her former butler, Chopping, who alleged wrongful dismissal, and answering questions about a 'McAlpine plan' ('he was allowed to graze his sheep and things but he had to keep the land in good nick'). From America, Page Three readers were told that pigs forced to go for daily jogging produced better 'carcase parameters', ate less feed and 'grew shapelier legs'. On Thursday we had 'Lady Diana's Secret Love: ,Bubble-Gum', 'Saudi Prince "Drank Bottle of Whiskey before Death" and the adventures of Captain Mark Phillips on the midnight British Rail Sealink Ferry: at one stage the bar steward called out to Captain Phillips: 'What would your mother-in-law say if she knew about this?' We also heard about a 'drag man' who went into a boutique to buy dresses, robbed the owner and forced her to strip, telling police later: 'My missus went away five days ago and I wanted to cheer myself up'. On Friday there was a 'former Fifties playboy' Who sold fraudulent bubble-gum machines, a rattlesnake victim who stayed alive two weeks (the Croydon Coroner concluded: 'It seem pretty dangerous to go gardening in Arizona'), and a wife who poured two thirds of a bottle of Murphy's Tumbelweed over her husband's curry supper.
To round off the week Saturday's Page Three gave us a woman member of Mensa protesting she was a victum of sex discrimination ('Brainy career woman upset men in office'), a company director claiming to be a victim of the Equal Opportunities Commission Of somebody came up to me in the street and said "Give me your watch or I'll take you before the Employment Appeals Tribunal", I would give them it and* run a mile), a woman who kept a 'trusting man friend' drugged for two months while she 'plundered his house and his savings', and a nurse who robbed old women by drugging their tea, being herself the victim of 'a Glasgow moneylender who turned out to be a real West Coast Shylock' Of course the Telegraph is not the only quality newspaper which uses sex and crime for the well-bred titillation of sales (or should we called it 'reader interest'?) For some time now, and with increasing success, the Guardian has used its women's page for a racy coverage of sex-and-politics issues which is said to be the envy of Rupert Murdoch himself, 'Can't We Even Eat Without Sex-Stereotyping?' asked its main headline last Thursday, and answered 'Apparently Not'. Jill Tweedie was objecting to Weetabix advertising itself as 'Strong Arm Stuff' and asserting that 'research' on mothers feeding children 'shows a distinct tendency to discourage girls from the idea that they have the same absolute right to food as boys'. Down-column there was a complementary letter about more 'research', revealing that girls 'from babyhood' were taught `to be dependent (emotionally and financially ), to underachieve and to underestimate themselves' — a grumble signed by 'Anna Adcock and seven other members of the University of Bath'. Angry ladies, indeed, spilled over the main letters page, complaining that an article on Billie-Jean King 'reinforced some of the media's most prevalent myths about lesbian/bisexual women and their relationships', and concluding 'No wonder no one at Surbiton seemed to know whether female homosexuals were predatoryor not'. God bless my soul! It doesn't seem all that long ago since I hesitated long and hard before publishing in the New Statesman a solemn article which first broached the subject of lesbianism in a general publication, and being congratulated by Leonard Woolf (then a director of the paper) for being 'daring'.
Oddly enough the best woman-interest story of the week did not appear either in the Guardian's woman's page or the Telegraph's Page Three but in the randy old Sun itself. Under the headline Ate the Girl Who Wouldn't Be My Mistress', it reported the case of the Japanese student in Paris who murdered and ate 'the nicer parts' of a reluctant Dutch girl. But the Sun only had space to give what might be called the bare flesh-and-bones of the story, and it was left to an up-market publication, the Observer, to fill in the details about the man known to the French press as 'the Cannibal of the Bois de Bologne', such as that he took 30 colour pictures of the carving-up process, kept bits of the girl in his fridge `to eat later', and was 'an admirer of English literature', his favourite play being Macbeth. 'What', the paper asked, 'is the motivation of a modern cannibal?' Not so very different, I should think, from the motivation of a modern newspaper.
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