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Tuesday, September 4, 2007

Bog Standards

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The Times newspaper (August 25) described my weekly web magazine http://www.gentlemenranters.com/ thus:

The Gentlemen Ranters site is a brilliant compendium of reminiscences of the great days of Fleet Street.
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It is perhaps not best form to bite the hand that feeds your website with new readers, but for evidence of the difference between my generation of newspapermen and the current lot, or between ‘the great days of Fleet Street’ and the present day, you need look no further than your TV screen which is regularly showing an advertisement for The Times, even in the former colonies.

If you’re fortunate enough to have missed it, you might like to finish your breakfast before reading on because it focuses on a reader of that newspaper sitting on the lavatory with the sports section in his hands…

When he reaches for the bog roll he finds it empty. No perforated Andrex. So he has a dilemma, cleverly acted out by staring first at the exhausted cardboard tube, and then at his newspaper.
A decision has to be made.

The verdict is obviously that the sports section of The Times is too precious to use for wiping his arse so… he hoiks up his trousers, and departs.

Tasteful advertising? Or crap advertising?

Whatever, this is presumably the accepted view of the newspaper’s readership in the minds of the advertising company that produced the ad, the promotions or publicity department that presented it to the editor, and the editor who (presumably) approved it.

These days, presumably, it is ‘clever’. Yes: Times readers need to crap too, but while the working classes always allegedly used pages of the broadsheet News of the Screws or The Sporting Life, torn into neat squares and hung on a nail behind the door of the outside lavvie, the sports section of The Times is no contest.

Its readers would rather… well, you can work it out for yourselves.

They used to be called the Top People. Now apparently they’re bottom people. Dirty bottoms, at that. Must be information that emerged from one of those focus groups. You’d think they might have wanted to keep that sort of reader information to themselves.

IT’S ALSO interesting how a definition of what’s funny can change overnight – literally.

Simon Hoggart was chairing The News Quiz (BBC Radio 4) before an audience ten years ago when Alan Coren said: ‘I don't know anything about landmines or Princess Di, but I do know you'd be mad to poke either of them.’

Bad taste? According to Hoggart, writing in the Guardian the other day, ‘there was a moment's stunned silence, followed by a huge howl of delighted laughter.’

However, the programme was recorded on a Thursday night. The show went out on Saturday lunchtime, and Coren’s joke – slightly to Hoggart’s surprise, he says – stayed in.
‘That night there was the fatal crash. The producer came specially in to Broadcasting House to lock the master tape in a safe so that it could never, ever, be broadcast again.’
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