Sunday 2 June 2019

A Comedy On This Day: People Like Us - The Journalist (3 June 2001)


 Watching from a distance of seventeen years, I sense a particular note of unhappiness in this episode that the others don't have. It's because while, say, vicars or pilots are still with us the subject of this week's investigation - the Long Ashton Gazette, a local paper for a small East Midlands town with a staff of four - is an institution that wouldn't exist by now. Even though a lot of the comedy stems from the moribund nature of the paper, its a bit less funny watching something that's gone than it is watching something that hasn't got long to go at the time. The crumpled old editor is Tim Preece, the ambitious, thrusting (but sadly inept and desperate) unpleasant young journalist is Nicola Walker (amusingly described recently as "simultaneously luminous and miserable-looking" by Peter Hitchens in the Mail On Sunday).

 Even by the modest standards of tiny local papers, the Long Ashton Gazette is peculiarly terrible and the attentive viewer can have fun picking up the details of its low quality. I'm particularly taken by the front page story, "MIRACLE FOR JANICE - IT'S TWINS!" illustrated by a photo of a mother with only one baby.

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