Filthy Pictures
By LESLIE ADRIAN
NEWSPAPERS could hardly get dirtier. By the time I have finished my daily chore of news digesting I am fit to be fingerprinted. It all has to do with what the trade calls the half- tones and the public the pictures. And not only the fuzzy photographs arrayed by art editors who know that pretty faces are good impulse-generators, but the massive, black-and- midnight advertisements, sometimes covering with greasy, gummy ink the whole three hundred or so square inches of a page. You have to grasp it to read it, and it's only when you feel that waxy slither at your' finger-tips that you know it's there on the other side of the page. This protest I would not have levelled at The Times, until Tuesday May 3, when they removed their comparatively clean front page and replaced it with the usual kind, half-tones, sticky black ink and all. Until this fateful day it had been possible to carry Tire Times newspaper folded carefully to avoid those acres of ink on the back page and escape comparatively clean. Not any more. Fold it where you will, there's a picture or a filthy great advertisement to cling to your palm. Worse still, they now have this so-called Women's Feature every day, which seems to con- sist mostly of black heavy rules and black heavy pictures. Visually, the paper on which The Times rolls off its eighty-screen blocks (or however many dots to the -square inch they have) is the most effective in current use, being almost dead %%bite and with a highly finished surface. But its absorption factor seems to be lower than that of, say, the Sun, in which the pictures always seem to look under-inked anyway, and a Times special supplement calls for rubber gloves; with ink spread all over the front and back and liberally plastered about inside. It looks 'bright,' it saves all that dreary supplement writing, but, oh brother, is it dirty!
Hardly any newspaper in Britain, except pos- sibly the Financial Times, in which half-tones show badly because of the pink paper, is exempt from this grimy generalisation. And who wants fifty-four squares inches of Prince Charles's pen- pal on the front of the. Daily Express, fifty-five square inches of Henry Cooper's little boy and friend on the front of the Sun and sixty square inches of Cooper himself off the front of the Mirror? Not me, Mr Picture Editor. I could still see them half that size.
Last week the Daily Mail was exemplary. Three pale square inches of Mr Charles Pannell an Friday, no picture at all on Thursday (and she black headline type was set well into the centre) and twelve square inches of the meat man, Mr Algernon Borthwick, on Wednesday. And 'in the back sports page reasonably-sized blocks of personalities and events. Which is all we readers need.
Personally, my preference for clean handle- ability goes to the Daily Telegraph. Admittedly, is a crowded paper, with little room for illus- Itations, and will remain so until they acquire the extra press capacity to expand beyond ;hilly-two pages but bad cess to them if they use their extra acreage to start spreading ink about). The dirtiest pages in the Telegraph are, of course, the women's pages. Somebody must
have said loudly some time that the ladies love pictures, or perhaps find reading tiring. Or maybe its because in the fashion war pictures are the deterrent used by one woman's page on another, and accordingly they have to get bigger and bigger. This theory is borne out by a glance at the posh Sundays. Without exception, their women's pages present the black look. But another reason, I am told, is that the editorial pictures have to hold their own against the advertisements. Another factor in the escalation of the inky wastes.
I wonder how much newspaper producers really think about their readers. The paper that some of them use has what printers call show through so badly that it is impossible to read a single sheet in ordinary daylight because of the slabs of type and pictures glaring through from
the other side. The Morning Star has desperately thin paper. The Sunday Times uses poorer news- print than the Observer. The Times naturally carries off the honours here, especially with its Royal Edition on paper heavy enough to use for lampshades.
But they lost a rosette with this reader when they changed the batting order. Once upon a time you turned to the 'bill page' (not, inci- dentally, named after Sir William Haley) and there were the leaders and letters facing you, with the weather forecast, the contents, the turn- over article, the lot. Now there's that silly diary (as it happens, I find gossip columns a bore), and they have fallen for this silly snob habit of saying who a letter writer is at the top of his letter ('From the Rt Rev Solly Gutbucket, ETC') instead of their infinitely more subtle trick of having a list of letters and writers elsewhere on the page. There is also a bizarre new ruling that outside contributors to the woman's page should be named, which has exposed the regret- table tendency to employ press officers to do the work of journalists.
And the style. How they have sunk into colloquialism and -careless •usage since WJH
initialled the little blue book in 1953. My most
cherished memory of a stylistic lapse was in the very book itself. Under 'misused and over- worked words' The Times had 'adopt,' of which it said, 'Children are adopted, but hats and coats and similar objects should not be.' But the title- page of the book said, 'Style and spelling of words adopted by The Times.'
Commercial broadcasting presents some thorny problems in countries less accustomed to it
than the United States. I heard recently that in Nigeria it has proved to be almost impossible to prevent sly commercial plugs being read into broadcasts in local dialects like Yoruba. While the controllers of the broadcasting stations may know Hausa as w ell as English, the tribal dialects have them beaten. Although the script may be checked before transmission, in practice no one in the studio or control room knows what the speaker has added until the sales of some local sweetmeat or article of clothing show a marked increase within the next twenty-four hours.
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