DEATH OF A WEEKLY
The press: Paul Johnson thinks it foolish to be despondent about the Listener's end
THE year that has passed was in many ways a time of sadness, epitomised by the fall of a great national leader, dragged down by the faint-hearted, the small- minded, professional liars and a camarilla of Welsh guttersnipes. There were some sombre losses in the media too. The Sunday Correspondent went down after a heroic struggle (the Independent papers survived, after a quick-fix injection of Spanish and Italian cash). Then there was the tragic execution of the Listener, which is worth examining. No doubt in the final phase the decision, first by ITV, then by the BBC, to cease subsidising the maga- zine, to the tune of £1 million a year, was inevitable. ITV itself is reeling from the fierce contraction of the television adver- tising market, and the BBC, with every kind of financial problem of its own, could not be expected to carry alone the burden of sustaining what had, I fear, become a pretty unappetising invalid. The question is: how did a once-great review come to this pass?
There is no single explanation but perhaps the central one is a change in BBC Radio policy. In its days of Reithian self-confidence and for long after, the BBC was distinguished for many things but not least for its magnificent talks. They were given not only by the famous, such as Bertrand Russell and J. B. Priestley, but by little-known though nonetheless gifted broadcasters like Peter Duval-Smith, who had the finest male wireless voice I have ever heard. The editor of the Listener thus had the chance to make a weekly selection of some of the best essays and articles then available. To give a talk on the BBC carried immense prestige, and for it to appear in the Listener, usually illustrated with point and skill, still more. The print- ing of a talk of mine in the magazine, on the joys of collecting paintings, was one of the highlights of my career. The talks formed the essence of the paper, but their effectiveness was enhanced by a first-class books section, edited by people of the quality of Janet Adam Smith, excellent coverage of the arts, and by exemplary design, layouts and typography. The paper was also noted, in its heyday, for its fairmindedness, lack of malice, impeccable taste and for its mandarin standards, up- held by such regular contributors as Philip Hope-Wallace.
The false values introduced in the 1960s and popularised on BBC television struck a blow at the paper's serene self-confidence, but still more serious was the decision to replace much of the output of radio talks by documentaries, in imitation of televi- sion. This policy was based upon the assumption — quite false in my view that modern listeners are too frivolous to listen to a serious talk by a single voice, however gifted, but have to be kept awake by a gallimaufry of chatterers. Such prog- rammes, however effective they might occasionally be on the air, were poor material for the Listener and rarely read well on the page. It is true that some talks were (and still are) broadcast, and were eagerly seized upon by quality-starved editors. But a scaling down of the import- ance of talks in the BBC hierarchy of values led to a growing unwillingness of first-class writers to give them (they had never been well paid). Then too, the Reith Lectures, which ought to have provided the paper with a stimulating shot-in-the- arm every year, proved more of a sopor- ific. There were one or two successes. But too many of the lecturers were phonies, second-raters or just plain bores.
All in all, then, the central point of the paper's existence was whittled away and became merely peripheral. A succession of editors, and the senior BBC bureaucrats set in authority over them, were never able to agree on what the purpose of the paper now was. It might have become the world's leading serious weekly on broadcasting in all its aspects, as I once urged in this column. Or it might have tried to recapture its mandarin spirit by commissioning the kind of material the BBC no longer wished to broadcast. As it was, it fell between every possible stool, lost its character and image — its soul, in fact — and with it, at ever-accelerating tempo, its readers. The result was the usual coda to a once fine publication: constant change of editor, change of policies, recriminations, acrimo- nious committee meetings at high levels, and then the arrival of the bureaucratic undertakers.
The close of the Listener has led some commentators to predict the end of the weekly as a form of journalism. Don't believe it. I have been hearing these cries of gloom ever since the early 1950s. It is true there have been many casualties over the decades: the Athenaeum, the Week- End Review, the old Nation, Time and Tide, John O' London's Weekly, New Soci- ety and others. The New Statesman, which absorbed no less than four of these casual- ties, is a shadow of its former self, and some claim it too now has the pallor of death upon it. On the other hand there have been new arrivals (not necessarily weeklies) in this field: listings magazines like Time Out, booksy papers like the London Review of Books and the Literary Review, even political organs like Marxism Today. The Economist flourishes as never before, the Times Literary Supplement is still widely read and loved (as are its sister-supplements), and the oldest and most typical of all the weeklies, The Spectator — which in its second incarnation goes back to July 1828 — has been en- joying, for the past decade or more, an extraordinary resurgence of popularity and influence. Thanks to Mrs Thatcher, Eddie Shah and the Wapping Revolution, we now have a uniquely wide choice of healthy national newspapers. But long experience shows that sophisticated readers are not content with their newspapers, however good they are. They want something in addition, towards the end of the week: a paper which provides detachment, reflec- tion, a voice above the clamorous news- values of the nationals, a touch of spice and irreverence, above all, a strong, personal character. There will always be a place for weeklies which provide these things: and on that note of optimism, I face 1991 with relish.
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