The carnival is over I

T’S hard to imagine today’s generation of earnest journalism lecturers recommending the Daily Mail’s John McEntee’s book “I’m Not One to Gossip, But”. He cheerfully admits to creating a fake contributor in order to defraud The Times, while even the Pope was not immune from his deviousness.

In an impressive display of bravura, he claimed to be disabled so as to win a private audience with the pontiff.

And he tells how the late gossip columnist Nigel Dempster, at one time one of the best-known journalists in this country, once ran over a child while driving home drunk. Such behaviour and characters like McEntee were at one time unremarkable in Fleet Street and further afield. For example, the legendary Oxford don, John Sparrow, the famously drunken Warden of the undergraduate-free All Souls College, Oxford, for 25 years until 1977 used to casually ask police when he was caught drink-driving: “Have I killed any babies?” Some of my national journalist friends were treated almost like mini-celebrities in the 1960s and 70s. One of them, Colin Gower from Salendine Nook, who died recently was typical of the breed.

Some of my national journalist friends were treated almost like mini-celebrities in the 1960s and 70s

A great raconteur, I can recall him more than 25 years ago greeting people in Doncaster town centre thus: “Gower’s the name, fun is the game.”

Another, Peter Whittell, a reporter on the Daily Express for 25 years, would describe 12 pints of beer as “mouthwash”.

I used to love hearing all the stories, but it seems very much a bygone era today.

As McEntee tells the in-house journalism website Press Gazette: “Fleet Street was overmanned, overpaid and over-drunk, but the fact was it was fun.”

How many journalism lecturers today would mention the word ‘fun’ to students or dare to quote the late Nick Tomalin’s celebrated summary of the ‘only’ qualities required for success in journalism: ‘ratlike cunning, a plausible manner, and a little literary ability’?