It's a gas

October 17, 2015

In the days when I worked Saturdays I would sometimes drive to work. The route took me past the mausoleum of St Pancras, the horrible mess of Kings Cross and the threatening gloom of York Way. Now it's all shiny blocks of flats, smart caffs and young men with dodgy beards. One of the symbols of that dystopian past was the gas works which loomed by the rail way line. Now they are coming back, all gussied up as a frame to an original resi block. Given the tedious nature of most new developments shooting up over London, a real attempt to do something interesting.

Here's a book for anyone who endured - or enjoyed -working in British national newspapers over the past 30-plus years.

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/arnie-wilson/reverse-ferret-a-fleet-st_b_9538290.html

Aah, takes me back … to the days of four-day weeks, long liquid lunches, typewriters, spikes and sub-editors. Before desks became workstations, shorthand gave way to Dictaphones and then iPhones, and when every good reporter had his own Deep Throat inside the police force.

It probably takes a Fleet Street veteran to identify the inspiration for the title of this novel. Like me, anyone who was there in the 1980s might think they can identify some of the real-life journalists thinly-disguised as characters in this gloriously funny and racy romp - even though their names have been stolen or adapted from locations in Manchester - Hazel Grove, Miles Platting, Clough Boggart for a start.

But I was brought to a full stop (or should I say ‘point, new par’?) when I realised I was present at an event which becomes quite central to the plot. It was one of those ‘think tanks’ - or drink tanks - that used to be a popular excuse to combine a weekend in a luxury hotel, often with its own golf course, with a brief spell of brainstorming. I think I may even have had a hand in organising this one, at Hever Castle, one-time home of Anne Boleyn.

It was at that moment I realised that the W.M.Boot credited as the author was not only someone familiar with the inner workings of long-lost Fleet Street AND Evelyn Waugh’s ‘Scoop’ but also someone I had worked alongside. It took me a while but I eventually figured out who he (or she) is, and I am sworn to secrecy. Although anyone familiar with Humbert Wolfe’s view of British journalists will know that it might not take too much persuasion to get me to reveal all.

Regardless of my own involvement in the story, and my acquaintance with the author and his characters, this is a thoroughly enjoyable read and a realistic insight behind the scenes of tabloid newspapers before they were eviscerated by a combination of Leveson and the internet. When journalists were more interested in tippling than tweeting, and for whom sex was more important than selfies.

It was published just over a year ago and I can’t believe it has not been reviewed by Press Gazette or on the media pages of The Guardian. It deserves a wider audience - beyond those who can say ‘I was there.”

*********

This is an hilarious book on the excesses of Fleet Street. I thought the phone hacking scandal was bad enough but this is an often rumbustious dive into murky waters or crime, venality, huge egos and lots of sex. Racism, sexism, alcoholism - it’s all here.

But it is more than just a kiss and tell. It is something of a morality tale in which the hero fulfils his ambition - but at a terrible price. I really enjoyed the uncomfortable mix of satire and seriousness.

******

Jonathan

5.0 out of 5 stars

Putting the Boot into Fleet Street

Enjoyed this review by fellow hack Arnie Wilson, spotted on Huffington Post (see above)

"Reverse Ferret is a book about Fleet Street. And the suspicious, somewhat sexually explicit death – was it murder? – of the editor of the mythical “Sunday Chronicle”.

Not just any book about London’s famous (former) national newspaper HQ but one of the best – racy, intelligent, witty, slick, and so tightly crafted that it almost needs oxygen in order to breathe. What a shame that most readers aged - shall we say under 40 – might understand the naughty bits but won’t really understand the best bits (although these are sometimes one and the same). Nor will they really register the news events or even the TV programmes of the age – the Falklands War, for example. Or Dirty Den. Or even the Page 3 girl “Luscious Lovely Linda Lusardi”.

Fleet Street and its reporters’ modus operandi (long alcoholic lunches, typewriters, and the chance to actually get out of the office and meet real people instead of so often relying these days on sandwiches at your desk, email press releases and interviews) is no more.

Reverse ferret is a phrase “used predominantly within the British media to describe a sudden reversal in an organisation's editorial line on a certain issue - and generally, this will involve no acknowledgement of the previous position”. The term apparently originates from Kelvin MacKenzie's time at The “soaraway” Sun – sometimes known as the “current bun”. And if ever the swashbuckling nature of Fleet Street of the 1980s could ever be captured in a single real-life character it was MacKenzie!

W.M. Boot is not, of course, the author’s real name. (And is not related to William Boot, the fictional journalist in the 1938 Evelyn Waugh comic novel Scoop). But I know who he or she is - a chum who gave me my first ever taste of Fleet Street in the ‘70s. Thanks Boot. I won’t put the boot in my naming you since some of the characters in Reverse Ferret are known to both of us and might be unhappy with their portrayal! Suffice it to say that Boot was an executive on several national newspapers - the Daily and Sunday Mirror, The European, Today, the late lamented Independent and the Times. Among others. And I know of one “other” in particular, but I won’t give the game away.

What does amaze me is the obviously superior classical education that Boot was able to conceal from us when working on some of our saucier stories. Where DID Boot learn that vast academic knowledge? Not in Fleet Street that’s for sure!

Boot certainly bears no resemblance to Miles Platting, a character in the book “whose career as a showbiz writer had spiralled into drunken oblivion after his wife had left him for a young reporter she met at a Chronicle office party.

“He missed deadlines, failed to turn up at interviews, and when he did, invariably had a row with the star. As Tarquin (another character in the book) put it: ‘The Man The Stars Talk To became The Hack The Stars Do Their Best To Run A Mile From’.

One of the funniest characters in Reverse Ferret is a slimy and corrupt policeman, Inspector Dennis Droyle who “had the disconcerting habit of adding an aitch at the most unpredictable moments in what was presumably an attempt to shun the ‘ello ‘ello stereotype of the TV copper, but any attempt at gravity was vitiated by his voice, a high-pitched, adenoidal whine”.

Example: “Hi must say – I rather thought you National newspaper journalists would be living in a more hopulent suite of offices than this.”

But Boot writes: “Hopulent they were not. The features staff were packed together as tightly as a traffic jam on the new M25. There were seven of them in theory, sharing a hugger mugger of desks, bedecked with dirty mugs that nurtured vivid biospecimens , pots of glue and chewed Biros, hemmed in by overflowing waste bins (and), stacks of newspapers”.

Sooner or later, of course, on-screen technology would seep like a virus into all newspaper offices including the “Chronic”. There was a “charge against change” from the staff who “wanted to stay working as they always had, tapping at their typewriters, using paper, ballpoints, scissors and glue. They relished the familiarity of the office, with its smell of damp page proofs, the background clatter of the Linotype machines, the rumble of the presses. If it was good enough for Caxton, it was good enough for them.”

Sadly (perhaps) it was not to be. But with hindsight, Fleet Street was always good fun. Thanks, Boot, for reminding us. And that “heditor” who died? Was it murder? You’ll have to read the book to henlighten yourselves!

– Arnie Wilson

*******

Subs desk

A book that takes you back to the Valpolicella-fuelled newsrooms of the 1980s. Deftly-plotted and highly entertaining with a cast of characters that will be familiar to those who were around at the time.

Who listens?

Who hears?

The Acadian tragedy

260 years on

My old friend Arnie Wilson had this to say in his Huffington Post blog: http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/arnie-wilson/the-scattered-by-richard-holledge_b_7878142.html