Media Matters
Stephen Glover
Where are the journalists of yesteryear? I mean the young men and women who learned their trade in the 1960s and 1970s, when Fleet Street was full of vast, clanking machines that would have been easily recognisable to someone who had strayed out of the late Victorian age.
A few are dead, of course, either as a result of ill luck or too much drink. Others were diverted into PR. Some have retired. But an extraordinary number of them are still plugging away.
Despite this being an age supposedly fashioned for the young, there are many journalists of advanced years still writing, some of them better than ever. On the whole, it is advisable to keep your marbles, and to stay sober while working. But as long as those qualifications are met, this really is a golden age for oldie hacks.
The distinguished photojournalist Don Mccullin is still snapping away at the age of 83, with a new retrospective show at Tate Britain. The brilliant cartoonist Stan Mcmurtry has just retired from the Daily Mail at 82 – much to the paper’s chagrin. Age has not dimmed the vitality of Hunter Davies, authority on the Beatles and much else, who at 83 is publishing his 100th book on March 21. That other Promethean scribe Ray Connolly is a youthful 78. The former Guardian reporter Duncan Campbell, a mere 74, is publishing a new book later this year.
Looking at our national newspapers, it is fascinating how many columnists are happily pontificating at an age at which, in a previous generation, they would have been put out to grass. The Times’s Max Hastings chunters away aged 73, and I hesitate to mention those youngsters on the same paper, Melanie Phillips (67) and David Aaronovitch (64). At the Guardian, Simon Jenkins is still putting the world straight at 75, while Polly Toynbee remains on full throttle at 72, and Ian Jack is a thoughtful presence at 74.
Over at the Sun, the legendary 76-year-old Trevor Kavanagh shows no signs of flagging. The Daily Telegraph may not be the gerontocracy it once was, but it still has a clutch of columnists in their sixties (Charles Moore, Ambrose Evans-pritchard), while on the Sunday
Telegraph Christopher Booker is as forensic as ever at 81, and the great gifts of Janet Daley, 74, show no signs of abating. I won’t enumerate the many brilliant older writers who grace the pages of The Oldie, other than to say, if you seek their monument, look around.
Even editors seem to be getting older. When I entered Fleet Street in 1978, some of them were quite aged (the Daily
Telegraph’s Bill Deedes was 65 and had another seven years to run). Then, in the 1990s, there was a crop of thrusting young editors (Paul Dacre, Alan Rusbridger, Charles Moore and Dominic Lawson). My impression is that their successors are more ancient. John Witherow, editor of the Times, is 67, while his counterpart at the Financial
Times, Lionel Barber, is 64. Geordie Greig recently took up the reins at the
Daily Mail at the age of 58. Nor should we forget the capo dei capi, Rupert Murdoch, still the most powerful figure in British newspapers, who is 88 on 11th March.
The lesson – and it applies to writers more than editors, who tend to be culled before the age of 70 – is that, if you can keep going, there will be work for you long after judges, ambassadors and businessmen have put up their feet or migrated to the golf course. The older journalist, so long as he or she is not consumed by nostalgic thoughts, can draw creatively on a huge bank of experience built up over a lifetime. Bill Deedes did not really hit his stride as a reporter until he was about 80.
No doubt it helps that readers of newspapers – at any rate of the printed version – are getting older too, with the average age on some titles being well over 60. But actually I’m sure younger readers appreciate good oldie hacks. Avoid alcoholism and dementia, and the future is bright.
When did it become impermissible to use the word ‘tigress’ to describe a female tiger? I ask because two tigresses have recently been mauled to death. Melati, a Sumatran tigress, was killed by a tiger at London Zoo. And then Shouri, an Amur tigress, was despatched by a tiger and tigress at a Wiltshire safari park.
I read about both sad incidents in several newspapers, and could only find one instance when the banned word ‘tigress’ was used. Even Right-wing newspapers, which claim to abhor political correctness, described Melati or Shouri as a ‘female tiger’ or ‘tiger’. The only exception I came across was the Daily Telegraph, which bravely described Shouri as the ‘tigress’ she was.
It’s long been de rigueur to avoid the word ‘actress’. Now ‘tigress’ has gone the same way. An important distinction is lost, for no sane reason I can think of.