Abstract
Until recently, on Tuesday mornings I took the tube to Elephant and Castle and headed for one of London's more hideous buildings. It used to be called the London College of Printing but is now the London College of Communication, where students from around the world come to experience “the cutting edge of new thinking”. Or so the college boasts on its website.
I used to walk through the plastic canteen, inhaling a potent mix of disinfectant and overcooked brussels sprouts, before taking a rickety lift to the eighth floor, where a group of post-graduate French students was waiting for me with all the enthusiasm of vegans at a Burger King convention.
The course I taught was called the Newsroom. Its aim was to scratch the surface of the enlightened (and dark) arts of broadsheet and tabloid journalism in the UK so that when those young men and women returned to Paris, Lyon or Lille they would be at an advantage in the job market because British newspapers are (they had been told) the envy of the world.
Except it was painfully evident that the students regarded the British media as beyond the pale – and they didn't have much time for me either. I realised this early on when at the end of a class I started handing out copies of the day's newspapers. There were quite a few takers for The Times, The Daily Telegraph and The Guardian, and I was able to part company with some Daily Mails, but no one wanted to be saddled with The Sun, Daily Mirror or Daily Star.
“I am not interested in these papers,” said one confident female student, who seemed to spend a lot of time checking her Twitter feed during my classes. “We would never have such things in France.”
Maybe not, I told her. All the more reason to take a look, all the more reason to vive la difference. After all, despite the gloom and doom about print journalism, those three papers still sell a few millions of copies a day. Read all about it.
I couldn't persuade her. Just as I couldn't get any of them to appreciate a lead item that day in the Mail's diary about David Beckham taking one of his sons to have a first ear-piercing session. I explained that the story was a cracker because it worked on various levels – a twist on father and son rites of passage such as a first pint in the pub, first visit to Lord's, first blazing row about politics.
“This is not news,” they chorused.
At one point, we also considered the plight of President Hollande and whether or not his private life should be laid bare for public consumption. This led to a heated discussion about leader writing. I read aloud an example from The Sun about something or other and then asked them to write a leader about Hollande and his relations with the media. But first I called for a show of hands. Nearly all of them thought the president's untidy domestic life should be his business and his alone.
So I got them to write a leader saying the exact opposite. “Writing is a craft,” I said pompously, before regaling them with a story about how several years ago, Peter Hill, then editor of the Daily Express, employed me to write leaders for the paper on Sundays.
When I asked for clarification about the paper's general outlook on the issues of the day, Hill was brief: “There are only two things you need to know. The Labour party can do no right and the royal family can do no wrong.”
It became obvious after only a few lessons that my French students were not learning much from me. But I was learning a great deal about them and about the unique way in which British newspapers go about their business.
On the one hand, my students piously looked down on the British print media while on the other they kept telling me that Britain was a far more tolerant and open society than that of France. I was hoping that they might find a link between those two positions. I even suggested that French prejudices had become a national burden rather than an endearing quirk of character, and that a robust print media espousing the full spectrum of political and social opinions would be good for France and the world.
Eventually, they started to get my point, because for all their bolshiness, their contrariness, their snobbishness about the British media, deep down the majority of them said they loved the way you could wander around in pyjamas in London and no one batted an eye, whereas in France a simple walk to the shops was like striding down the catwalk. They loved it when complete strangers struck up conversations and gave them directions, sometimes going out of their way to do so. They loved our sense of the absurd, our bonhomie.
In fact, almost half the class said they would give anything to live permanently in our easy-going country (though not necessarily in Elephant and Castle, I grant you) and that they dreaded returning home.
I said they should give Britain a try and that they would come to love our newspapers in the process.
I no longer teach my course, but I was delighted to receive an email from one of my most difficult and disdainful students, asking if I would give him a reference for a job with a French paper. Either he has seen the error of his ways or he has come to learn that double standards in the media is not always something to be ashamed of.