Weighed down by deluge of dreaded Dear Bill letters

DEAR Bill used to be the name of a column in Private Eye that purported to be the private letters of Mrs Thatcher’s husband Dennis. I think I might nick the title and create a new feature to highlight that breathtaking amount of utter codswallop that arrives in my email inbox every day.

Almost every one is a form of the journalist’s bete noir “PR” - or public relations. Journalists have always had a tetchy relationship with the PR industry and in the regional press that’s often exacerbated by the fact that many PRs were often members of our news teams in a previous life.

Once they cross the line to the other side they fall into two camps – those who keep in touch, do lots of work with us, and that I will pick up the phone to (you know who you are) and those we never really hear from again. It is the out-of -town PR industry that drives me nuts. Someone somewhere has enough persuasive powers and enough staff to convince “clients” to pay them to create reams of utter nonsense in a bid to get their brands onto our news pages.

Almost all of them start with the salutation: Dear Bill, and almost all of them hope that I’m having a nice day. This is incredibly nice of them and 20 years ago might have persuaded me to look at the real content of their message before I deleted it. In the last few weeks I seem to have been getting more than ever, suggesting that some PR wonk somewhere has told their teams that newspapers are desperate for something else to write about other that coronavirus. While that might be true, the ‘other’ is never likely to be same of the Dear Bill tosh. In the last few weeks one PR outfit has Dear Bill’d me to ask whether I was Ok and whether I knew what the UK’s biggest sex mishaps were (it’s falling off your partner or a piece of furniture if you were wondering). I was urged to run a feature highlighting how I could identify my interior design style by my zodiac sign, or to throw light on the work of some property experts who had valued celebrity houses (including Del Boy’s flat!). I was also encouraged to wax lyrical about the 15 most popular paint colours on a social media platform. Yes, that’s right, the 15 most popular paint colours.

Getting dozens of Dear Bill notes hoping I’m having a great day from people I’ve never met is mildly irritating, but when they are just the warm up for garbage of that quality they are utterly maddening.

It gets worse when ‘Dear Bill’s are re-sent a few days later with the infuriating addition “Just checking to see if you received...”. Those reminders only serve one purpose – and that’s to remind me to delete the original email immediately. Dear Bills are dropping in at such a rate of knots right now I hardly have time to delete them all, and for the life of me I can’t believe any publication worth its salt is making use of any of that e-junk. I reckon repeatedly asking editors if they are having a lovely day is a risky tactic, as they can be a curmudgeonly bunch and some of the time, not every day is all smiles. Right now editors, like just about every one else in business, are having some pretty tough days. I wrote at the start of lockdown that coming out would be much harder than going in, and getting used to our covid-changed world will take time. I’ve booked a table at the pub this evening so I can go for a pint, and bought some face-masks so I can go to the shops. And if the world didn’t seem strange enough, when I was walking the dogs this morning I passed a large couple sitting in a their rather swanky car eating a jelly. Welcome to the new normal.