Proper
It's been a while, but I'm in the Observer this morning. (I used to write for them about films and TV every week between 1999 and 2001, but it's amazing how quickly you can fall in and out of favour. The last words I wrote for them were in August 2001, then nothing.) If you want to read my thoughts about why Hollywood films are suddenly so dark, the column is here. When you do, try to picture this:
It's Friday night. I have long since clocked off for the weekend. Watching a taped Kitchen Nightmares. The mobile rings. (I don't even usually have my mobile switched on after hours, so it was pretty lucky.) It's the Comment Editor of the Observer and he asks if I fancy writing 800 words on Hollywood's heart of darkness - he needs it by midday on Saturday. I say yes, very pleased to have been asked. I wake up early on Saturday, already writing the first paragraph in my mind, and sit at the laptop with a cup of tea. The piece is finished an hour and a half later and I'm pleased with it. It's a subject close to my heart, and doesn't exactly require a lot of research beyond checking the exact wording of a No Country For Old Men quote, and running through the Oscar nominations to make sure I haven't missed a good example. (I had.) I email the piece to the Comment Editor, then go shopping. He rings back to tell me he likes the piece. We negotiate a couple of small tweaks over the phone and we're all square. Job done.
At 2.00, I set out for Northampton on the train, as it's my Mum's birthday party. En route, my phone rings. It's the Comment Editor, who has run the piece past his editor and now wants the middle section cutting down and two extra paragraphs adding. I explain that I'm en route to Northampton and won't have access to a broadband connection until I get to my Mum and Dad's at around 4.30. We put our heads together and agree that I will do the changes on my laptop, on the 3.20 to Northampton, and - eek! - phone them in.
Now, I'm not a journalist. Not a proper journalist. I have never phoned in copy in my life. (I know what you're thinking - why not get wi-fi? Because I am suspicious of its effects on my brain and don't wish to add any more microwaves to our already polluted world. Also, I'm not a journalist. I don't need wi-fi. I never work on trains, and indeed always feel a mixture of sympathy and contempt for those who do. I don't even have my phone switched on when I'm on the train.) So, I get on the train at Euston, which is mercifully empty and get to work. I have the changes done in about 15 minutes, by which time the train pulls out of Euston and is now packed to the brim with people. The next half an hour is spent with me on my mobile, reading out my article, word by word, comma by comma, to anyone in the carriage who's interested, and many who are not. Every time we go through a tunnel, the connection goes. This drags the process - and the agony - out forever. I hope you are now feeling my blushes. It had all seemed so painless just a few hours before.
Anyway, I apologised to the couple sitting opposite when they got off at Milton Keynes Central. They were very nice about it, luckily, and asked which newspaper it would appear in, even though they had, in effect, already read it.
It's one thing being a ponce, it's another thing announcing to the world that you are one. Anyway, appreciate the suffering that went into those 800 words. It was like filing copy from a war zone or something.
posted by Andrew Collins @ 8:49 AM
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34 Comments:
Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
PS Hope your mum enjoyed her party
I have always wanted to do that exclamation mark new paragraph Was it extremely embarassing question mark
haha that sounds well embarrassing, I would have went and hid in the toilet to do it.
Though it's slightly ironic you being frightend of wifi and so having to use your mobile phone instead.
Except for viewers in Scotland who have an article about AL Kennedy instead.
Wow, phoning copy in... now's that's true journalism. Good on you, Andrew.
I'm glad you 'advertised' your piece, because I tend to overlook the Comment section of the Observer normally.
It's a good read. The subject matter is really interesting - I always tend to think that at least one or two of the movies nominated is pretty serious, but clearly this year the darkness is more evident than normal.
Not just one 'Crash' or 'United 93' - they're all pretty serious, aren't they?
I don't work in the media, so have no idea how it works, but isn't it a bit disorganised to be commissioning such articles on the Friday night, for publication on Sunday? I mean, they have seven days to plan what to put in the Observer.
This piece is in reaction to the Oscar nominations, which came out on Tuesday - did it really take them over three days to decide to run an article commenting on them?
John
Anyway, I apologised to the couple sitting opposite when they got off at Milton Keynes Central.
They probably got off the train thinking, 'Ooh, that Mark Steel, he's very nice...' :-)
The couple who got off at Milton Keynes have, naturally, written posts about it on their very own blogs.
It's OK, they both agreed that, while you might have been a bit of a ponce, you were very polite about it.
It's all very well reading copytakers intellectigent movie analysis; try being overheard as you're reading copy about an awful celebrity wedding down the line to OK! magazine...
John, as you can probably guess, I believe something had dropped out and they had an 800-word gap to fill. I imagine Andrew Rawnsley and Will Hutton had been commissioned well in advance and had filed their pieces by Friday! Perhaps even from trains just outside Leighton Buzzard. (I'm used to being called in at the last minute - it happens on most of those TV list shows, and my recent appearance on Richard Bacon's Five Live show was after Danny Wallace had dropped out. They often need someone who may not be as glamorous as some of the other contributors but is considered a "safe pair of hands". I could take it as a back-handed compliment or as faint praise, but as I say, I'm not proud, and I'm glad of the work. Better to be asked than not. I am nothing if not realistic.)
And yes, my Mum enjoyed her party very much. I spent quite a lot of it telling my Observer/train story to relatives and friends I hadn't seen for years.
I feel for you. I still hate having to use a mobile in public when I know people can hear. I get really quite self conscious and start to mumble and sound unenthusiastic so that the other person might terminate the conversation early. I think it stems from some 70s childhood thing when I wasn't allowed to answer the phone: 'Don't touch it!', as if it were some bomb that might go off. So, to have to phone in your copy sounds to me like my idea of hell! I can also feel quite uncomfortable when other people are blathering on on their mobiles. Unless it sounds potentially interesting, which 99% of the time it isn't.
I saw No Country for Old Men last weekend. I have to admit that, although I loved it, for a lot of the film I found the dialogue incomprehensible. My girlfriend's recently been diagnosed as being a bit mutton in one ear and she thought her lack of understanding of the dialogue was down to that til I said afterwards that I also found it difficult to understand too. And we're still trying to work out exactly what happened at the end. I still wouldn't want to bump into Javier Bardem's character in a dark alley though. Or a well lit one come to that.
Clair, had I been dictating a celebrity wedding story I suspect more people on the train would have been interested! (Remember, I had to read out sentences like, "It was as if the shock of the Sixties - President Kennedy, Martin Luther King - took a decade to percolate through." Why not just wear a smoking jacket and a beret!)
You should know, Beth, for you are Girl On A Train!
Ross, I salute you for the spotting of the wi-fi/mobile phone irony. If I'd had my way, I'd have used neither and emailed the copy from my Mum and Dad's spare room when I got there. (The irony being, the editor said he couldn't wait that long, and yet by the time I'd dictated it and he'd read it, I was in my Dad's car minutes away from a broadband connection. How did newspapers ever come out before these new-fangled devices?)
Since the only films you mention that I've seen all the way through are Citizen Kane, The Exorcist, and Jaws, I can't really comment on what you said but it was a good piece of writing. I envy anyone who can turn that stuff out to order.
On an only vaguely related point, I was reminded of a recent interview in English on my favourite French music show of a UK band (can't remember who). A band member made reference to the "film noir" feel of a song and the presenter apparently misunderstood and added "et blanc" as if to correct him. So: does anyone happen to know if the term film noir is actually French in origin and/or do the French use it? Unfortunately it's not in either half of my French-English dictionary. (And if it is genuinely French then should the English plural be films noirs?)
Howard Jacobson's piece in Saturday's Independent was about not being able to understand/hear (perhaps a mixture of both) film dialogue, and mentioned No Country for Old Men as a prime example.
Film noir was coined by a French critic, and applied to certain American films, but mostly after the fact. In other words, most films noir didn't know that's what they were until afterwards.
Here's the thing I don't understand. Presumably there are lots of intelligent people who can write and know the basic rules on English grammar at a newspaper office. Right? So why do they need you to do the whole "comma, blah blah blah exclamation mark. New paragragh" etc thing? Can you not just read them what you've written in the hope that they will be able to write it up correctly using the right punctuation?
Actually, it would be interesting to get 10 people each dictated the same story (without puctutation spelled out) and see how differently the final stories come out.
One more thing. There's no need to worry about the wifi thing. There's no evidence of any harm and the evidence also shows that electrosensitivity is essentially a psychosomatic phenomenon. The Panorama exposing the "dangers" of wifi in school was guff from start to finish. Even the BBC's internal watchdog thinks so: http://www.bbc.co.uk/complaints/news/2007/11/30/51156.shtml
Thanks for the reassurance, Tristan! Unfortunately, I am a very psychosomatic person and must remain vigilant.
touche!
(with an accent over the e!)
Keep it plastic.
Glad to hear someone else also tapes Kitchen Nightmares if they miss it Andrew. I thought I was going mad.
At a risk of self promotion, there's quite an interesting song all about Australia's involvement in the Vietnam war over at another blog with a name rather similar to me.
Actually, that's not actually a risk of self promotion is it? It's pretty darn blatant self promotion. Sorry.
Your Observer piece raises a similar question : Do you think it is possible to ever actually attain closure over any military conflict when people involved within it are still alive / have direct descendents who knew them personally ? It seems to me it only starts to happen once it is safely lost in the mists of the time, more than a few generations ago. Unfortunately, usually by then another has taken place for the whole process to repeat itself one more time...
andrew
surely you could have connected the phone by bluetooth to the laptop, got a gprs connection and emailed it in?
technology could've help you be less embarrased, save your brain and speed things up....
i think you should get a 50s reporters hat with a ticket in the band now.
At least you were genuinely speaking to someone, Andrew. I was once seated on a train near a ponce who was loudly 'delivering' some awful, self-aggrandising copy on Derrida, and I strongly suspected that there was actually nobody on the other end of the phone. Especially when the train went into Balcombe Tunnel and he miraculously did not lose his reception.
I am scared of Bluetooth.
AC - I have to take my hat off to you. I cannot stand talking to anyone on the train, even if I am sitting next to them. I look at my phone when it rings and I act like a nervous child with vertigo on the top board of a swimming pool- shall I, shan't I - just staring at the incoming number.
I would have got off that train at the first available stop and stood at the far end of the platform, rather than do what you did.
(It sounds like one of those jobs that went from '90 mins-nice topic-eeeeasy money' to the hardest job in the world.)
Well done you!
My old news agency boss was renowned for having full scale arguments with copytakers on the phone while trying to dictate football match reports to them.
There is an urban myth that a print hack was asked once to stand in as a radio reporter, and made the mistake of saying "point, new par" midway through his final piece to air.
you could have used a USB connection.
...or texted it in. 2 paragraphs condensed into 160 characters. If you can't do that then you're just not trying hard enough!
Anyway, Andrew, as I said before why do you need to spell out all the punctuation etc when dictating copy over the phone?
Talking out loud always reminds me of that scene in Annie Hall where some overbearing ninny in the queue is giving his opinions about Marshall McLuhan in a voice like a foghorn, and Alvy says 'It's at moments like this when I wish I had a sock full of horse manure'.
And Tristan, sometimes copy takers are nice middle-aged ladies who love to interrupt in the middle of your story for a nice chat, so adding 'new par' and 'Cap p, cap r'to your conversation are sometimes vital!
About Wi-fi, bluetooth etc;
You might be right.
You might not be right.
Articles like this
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-23397364-details/The+classroom+'cancer+risk'+of+wi-fi+internet/article.do
present all points of view and don't help anyone really.
Maybe you could get a commission from somewhere to write one of your own..
I switched off my wireless network at home, not because of safety concerns but because the useless junk kept breaking down. I suspect that my laptop wi-fi transmitter is still on though, as yours might also be AC...
Unless a computer spod knows different?
I had no idea they still did this copy-taking lark at the papers - do they have people whose job it is to take dictation over the phone?
Or is it lumped on somebody who's too slow to look busy doing something else?
I hope this is still common practice, there's something comfortingly old-school about it.
I don't know whether such technologies can cause harm, but if you're going to be wary of any of them then surely the order of fear should be in terms of power: ie mobile - wifi - bluetooth. Surely mobiles are by far the most powerful, as they have further to broadcast their death-rays (non-official term).
The Panorama programme was a pretty shoddy investigation, and the thisislondon link above seems to misrepresent the already spurious argument put forward in that. A couple more Chinese whispers steps and you'd be scared to sit between your radio and the transmitter. Maybe the article had been dictated over a few mobile phone calls.
Tristan, the reason you have to spell out punctuation down the phone (and I speak as a seasoned dictator of copy to national newspapers ie. I've done it once) is that you want precisely what you've written to appear in the Observer - or should do, it you take pride in your work. (Clearly, a sub-editor may change it anyway, but you still want your work to arrive in the state you wrote it in.) You mentioned "hope" - who wants to add "hope" into the equation when you can say the words "comma" and "apostrophe"? I used the word "borne" - that had to be spelled out too. And "Away From Her" doesn't sound much like a film title unless you specify the capital letters. It's a minefield, which is why email is the best method of delivery. (I once stood next to a friend of mine dictating a review of Chuck Berry to the Times from the payphone of the venue we'd just seen him in. This was in the mid-90s, pre-mobile saturation. I was mightily impressed.)
Gazebo, here's how my default paranoia works: anything that big, powerful corporations tell me is perfectly safe and won't give me cancer, I assume is unsafe and will give me cancer. The telecommunications industry is constantly telling me that mobiles, phone masts and wi-fi are safe. QED. (I rarely have my mobile switched on, by the way - I use it as a portable answerphone, pick up my messages at intervals and, if possible, call back from a landline. I never have it on when I'm on the train, as I ordinarily would rather die than speak on a train, hence the weapons-grade embarrassment of Sunday.) I don't care whether anybody else shares my distrust of technology and its innate safety - I must live my life according to my own rules.
I'm just glad to see I'm not the only one who feels uncomfortable talking on a mobile in public places. At least yours was work-related, Andrew, in my experience people seem to reserve the most banal and tedious conversations for when they're sitting near me on a train.
And I hear you'll be able to use mobiles on a plane soon. Can you imagine?! "Guess where I am... no... no... guess again... yeah... I know,... that's right... no, you're allowed to now..." ad infinitum :-(
Matthew Rudd - your comment about the urban myth reminded me of a former boss, an old school newspaperman who never really got into the whole interweb business. He used to give out our website address as 'www point [companyname] point co point uk', much to everyone's amusement. We never corrected him.
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