Stephen Glover’s Fleet Street novel Splash! <\/em>is a burlesque treat<\/p>\n Laura Freeman<\/a><\/p>\n 27 June, 2017<\/p>\n The question I was always asked in the four years I worked at the Daily Mail <\/em>was: \u201cIs the swearing really as bad as they say?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cOh no. Nothing like,\u201d I\u2019d reply. \u201cIt\u2019s much, much worse.\u201d <\/p>\n So when Trevor Yapp, deputy-editor of the mid-market tabloid the Daily Bugle<\/em>, in Stephen Glover\u2019s Splash!: A Novel<\/em> calls graduate-trainee Benedict Brewster a \u201ccertifed clot\u201d, I found myself thinking, \u201cclot\u201d isn\u2019t quite the word he\u2019d have used.<\/p>\n Glover, a columnist at the Daily Mail<\/em>, co-founder of the Independent<\/em>, and editor of The Penguin Book of Journalism<\/em>, is a newsman to his bones. The Daily Bugle<\/em> is a novel \u2014 and it is very much emphasised by the title that this is a novel and any similarity to editors, reporters and star columnists is entirely coincidental \u2014 about a once-great newspaper threatened by Twitter, smartphones and 24-hour rolling television news. Threatened, most of all, by its own succubus creation: Bugle Online with its instant-click, instant-hit stories of shark attacks, sneezing squirrels and half-naked \u201clovelies\u201d taking a shower.<\/p>\n The longstanding Bugle<\/em> editor Eric Doodle is making plans for his knighthood and retirement to a grouse moor with a pack of gundogs. He\u2019s a stickler for ties in the office and an avid circler of houses in a glossy property weekly called Rural Retreats<\/em>. The proprietor, Sir Edwin Entwistle, is keen to pack Doodle off to his Georgian rectory and install the barracking Yapp, Bugle Online\u2019s man-of-the-future, at his desk. With Yapp in place, Entwistle can offload the failing Bugle<\/em> and its page leads about the perils of drinking too much bottled water onto the nearest handy Chinese or Russian billionaire. Tables have already been booked at the Fig Leaf \u2014 London\u2019s most fashionable restaurant \u2014 with Mr Po and Mr Vrodsky. Again, any similarity to Country Life<\/em>, the Ivy, or newspaper-owning Russian oligarchs is entirely coincidental. (Though no proprietor\u2019s wife could object to being described as \u201ca corker\u201d, and so beautiful as to \u201cmake your eyes prick with tears\u201d.)<\/p>\n While the editor is driven to Downing Street for t\u00eate-\u00e0-t\u00eates with the Prime Minister \u2014 \u201cWe\u2019ve an election coming up, and we will need to count on the Bugle<\/em>\u2019s support\u201d \u2014 the paper\u2019s chief reporter Sam Blunt \u2014 manner blunt, pencil sharpened \u2014 is sinking pints in the Half Moon and reliving the great days of the foreign dispatch, the commandeered helicopter, the race against deadline and pursuing militia. All Sam does now is rewrite agency copy and stories that come in on the news wires. He has been asked to babysit Ben Brewster, a young Old Etonian with a First in Anthropology from Oxford who is not so much wet behind the ears as leagues out of his depth. Ben botches his first story for the paper and is banished to the basement to be a \u201cgalley slave\u201d for Bugle Online, uploading stories about amusing chimpanzees. In the Half Moon, Sam, who is fired and rehired at editorial whim, and Ben hatch an investigation into dodgy donors, ministers campaigning to strangle the free press, and government links to the gold mines of Kangala, a despotic African state. They hope for the \u201csplash\u201d \u2014 the front-page story \u2014 that will save Sam\u2019s career and make Ben\u2019s.<\/p>\n The model is Evelyn Waugh\u2019s Scoop<\/em> with its glorious, excruciating, savage and affectionate portrait of journalism at its best and worst. (I\u2019m longing, incidentally, for a retiring sub-editor, unsung hero of the newsroom, to write a humdinger of a novel about late nights on the backbench and call it Sub<\/em>.) Ben Brewster doesn\u2019t quite tug the heart as Waugh\u2019s hopeless William Boot, nature-notes columnist turned war correspondent, does, but I did sympathise with his first-week copy manglings. Asked to write a \u201ccolour\u201d piece about the visit to London of His Incomparable Excellency Moses Ovambo, President of Kangala, Ben files a piece about red hats, apricot suits, and the green-and-ochre banners of the Movement to Free Kangala from Oppression. A \u201ccolour\u201d piece means lively, personality-led, vox-popped. Not rainbow prose.<\/p>\n As a very junior commissioning editor I was asked to \u201cfollow up the splash with a page-eight ghosted leader on edition\u201d I said \u201cof course\u201d without knowing what was meant by \u201csplash\u201d, \u201cghost\u201d, \u201cleader\u201d or \u201con edition\u201d. I was all the more thrown when page eight turned out to belong to another section. (The old page-eight comment piece had been on page 14 for a decade but names stick, even if layout doesn\u2019t.) If not quite another Scoop<\/em>, Splash!<\/em> has the pace and wit of Tom Sharpe at his Porterhouse<\/em> best and the mournfulness of Michael Frayn\u2019s Towards the End of the Morning<\/em>. When a dejected Eric Doodle says, \u201cOnline is the future, after all,\u201d you feel his attachment to paper and ink. Here is a man who loves the press, the story, the splash, the bylines and straps, the column inches and centre spreads, the headlines blown into 72-POINT FONT.<\/p>\n If the novel has a fault it is that for much of the story the mood in the newsroom is downcast, defeated, somnolent. I remember the odd afternoon like that, but so much more often an electrifying feeling of a paper to fill before the first edition went off-stone. Of breaking news and Olympic medals and royal weddings and shock resignations and the sudden deaths of great men and women when we had no obituary on the stocks. The novel\u2019s climax, the sending of Sam and Ben\u2019s joint-byline splash to the printers, captures the thrill of the newsroom. \u201cSend it,\u201d says Doodle and a shiver went up my spine. For a minute I missed it. But not the late-night cries of \u201cclot!\u201d.\u00a0 <\/p>\n <\/i><\/a><\/i><\/a><\/i><\/a><\/i><\/a><\/i><\/a> No related posts.<\/p>\n YARPP Thumbnails <\/p>\n No related posts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Stephen Glover’s Fleet Street novel Splash! is a burlesque treat<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6920,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-613","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/613","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=613"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/613\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6920"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=613"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=613"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=613"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
Splash!<\/em> is a burlesque treat: its hacks are sozzled, but crusading; its MPs slippery; its media pundits satisfyingly lanced. There\u2019s a groovy, tweeting candidate for Archbishop of Canterbury who calls himself \u201cBishop Bob\u201d, and Ambrose Treadle, a PR slick whom Entwistle summons \u201cmuch as a medieval monarch with a touch of ague would call for a favoured physician, who had occasioned a great deal of pain in the past, to bleed him\u201d. Also, Arthur Bagg, chief book reviewer of the high-minded Chronicle<\/em>, \u201cwho once wrote and dispatched an excoriating review of a novel which the paper\u2019s literary editor had forgotten to send him\u201d. Honest Injun: I read to the last page of Splash!,<\/em>\u00a0 enjoying it too much to skip.<\/p>\n
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