Abstract
Had Mark Twain been able to wait around for confirmation, the Barnum and Bailey world in which we now live would have shown how perceptive he was to embroider Byron and observe: “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; truth isn't.”
Quite right. Consider Rudyard Kipling's plot for his 1914 short story, The Village That Voted the Earth Was Flat: a group of friends, including two newspaper proprietors and a reporter, seek vengeance for unfair traffic violations imposed by a rural squire and construct a stunt that sees his village become an international laughing stock. Or take the farcical 1949 Ealing comedy film, Passport to Pimlico, which depicts the inhabitants of a London district declaring independence from the British government and rejecting post-war restrictions, prompting support from other disgruntled citizens.
Fanciful stories both, but surely not so fantastical as the majority of the UK electorate swallowing a dubious and ill-informed scenario promoted by many politicians and much of the media, and opting for an isolationist role outside a network of nations pursuing peace and prosperity for all and constituting the world's largest market. And, oh yes, the political chaos that follows. Too bizarre for words, although someone somewhere doubtless is now scribbling a shooting script titled Passport to Oblivion.
The same stranger-than-fiction argument might have been made for the emergence of Donald Trump had House of Cards not already provided us with the sociopathic, Machiavellian Francis Underwood. Underwood is a two-time murderer, but far smarter than Trump and doesn't have silly hair. Call it a draw.
The media academic Sarah Lonsdale wrestles with fact v fiction comparisons in her new, scholarly book, The Journalist in British Fiction and Film (Bloomsbury, £19.99), and invariably the fictional characters fail to match up to some of the extraordinary media professionals to be found roaming Fleet Street or various beats abroad from the beginning of the 20th century.
Only within the stratosphere of the news business — occupied by a collection of proprietors whose quirks and extravagances have been freely borrowed by novelists and playwrights — does fiction provide arguably the most disreputable, and murder is again the deciding factor. Victor Kingsbrook, owner of the Daily Dispatch paper in Defence of the Realm, may lack the eccentricity bordering lunacy of Northcliffe, the track record of Rupert Murdoch, the skids that appeared under Robert Maxwell shortly before his mysterious denouement and the rampant megalomania of just about every media mogul, but he does have two journalists killed by the secret service to protect his business interests.
As played by Fulton Mackay, best known as the fierce prison warder in TV's Porridge, Kingsbrook is wholly unscrupulous, yet due to the constraints of film drama is underwritten. Where's the brio of Conrad Black or the intriguing past of Richard Desmond, so chequered one could play draughts on it if one dared?
David Hare and Howard Brenton's threatening Lambert La Roux, in Pravda, Arnold Bennett's Sir Charles Worgan, a press baron with social ambitions that almost match his obsession with the bottom line in the 1909 stage satire What the Public Wants, and Lord Copper, the deluded and fearsome amalgam of Lords Northcliffe and Beaverbook who owns the Daily Beast in Evelyn Waugh's Scoop, are all infinitely more interesting, but none more so than Maxwell, whose idiosyncrasies included urinating from the helipad at the top of the Mirror Group building on to Holborn Circus and once, on requiring my presence “urgently”, coming within a heartbeat of dispatching a helicopter to the narrow London street where I lived to airlift me to the office. When I did arrive, by car, he had forgotten what he wanted to discuss.
Many real-life foot soldiers litter the pages of Lonsdale's book, their footsteps echoing from the law courts to Ludgate Circus, where a wall plaque in memory of Edgar Wallace records: “of his talents he gave lavishly to authorship — but to Fleet Street he gave his heart”. Journalism is a theme that permeates many of Wallace's 170 novels, but they tend to feature nobody with the magnetism of the author who, having left school at the age of 12, became internationally famous as a war correspondent turned novelist and screenwriter.
Cyril Ranger Gull, a journalist who took the pseudonym Guy Thorne to write novels, emerges as far more fascinating than the characters he created, if only because, as Compton Mackenzie recalled, when going to live in Cornwall he adopted the habit of hiding bottles of whisky all over the moors so he could boast that if out walking he was never more than a quarter of a mile from refreshment. The late showbusiness journalist and critic Fergus Cashin fails to make an appearance in the book, but is fondly remembered for boisterous behaviour when in drink — famously he had to be cut free by the fire brigade when theatrically pounding his typewriter and jamming his fingers in its keys at the Daily Sketch — as well as his fine turn of phrase.
Having not written fiction or been fictionalised, the late Jeffrey Bernard doesn't make the cut, either, but he was immortalised by Keith Waterhouse on stage in Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell. Bernard was among the greatest undisciplined, unruly, gifted journalists of his generation. And like all the other glittering stars in the past's journalistic firmament, you couldn't make him up.