The Zeitgeist
THERE ARE a lot of urban legends in the world of journalism but my undoubted favourite concerns The Sun in its 1980s heyday. These were the days when the then editor, Kelvin Mackenzie, took seriously Private Eye’s suggested advertising campaign during the Falkands War: “Kill an Argie and win a Metro.” Yet even he knew the following idea was a bit beyond the pale.
A particularly tragic story of several girls who were almost raped in a laundrette by an escaped psychiatric patient who then promptly did a runner, was going to be placed under the following headline: “Nut screws washers and bolts.” This is perhaps a slightly tasteless example of the type of bon mots that appear to litter English history.
Now disputed, it is claimed that General Napier wired Calcutta with news of his capture of the Sind in the Punjab with the message Peccavi, which puzzled the Cipher Office until a clacissist pointed out it meant, “I have Sin[nne]d”.
Even earlier, in the days of merrie England, even Elizabeth I was not above the odd jest, acknowledging the return of the Earl of Oxford from his self•imposed exile for audibly breaking wind in the Queen’s presence, with the words: “My Lord, I had forgot the fart.
Even the most serious of political events in Europe was often reduced to a witticism, as Gladstone remarked on the complex Schleswig•Holstein question of the 1850s and 1860s: “Only three people truly understood it — one is dead, the other is mad and I have forgotten it.” But this spirit of wit and repartee has deserted Westminster. Leaders, politicans and also, to a limited extent, journalists are not as funny they used to be.
Tony Blair’s idea of joke is saying, “I can only go one way. I’ve not got a reverse gear,” while I am not even sure ‘Dave’ Cameron has actually cracked a joke yet. It is sad fact that we are creeping away from being a democracy with witticisms and becoming, to paraphrase Carlyle on ancienne régime France, a despotism tempered by soundbites.
25th May 2006