Abstract
On a spring morning in 1976, when I was editor of the diary column in The Times, I noticed that the newspaper circulation figures for March had the The Sun at 3.68 million and the Daily Mirror at 3.82 million. Ever since Rupert Murdoch had acquired The Sun some six-and-a-half years earlier, it had been eating into the massive lead that the Mirror enjoyed when the papers were under the same ownership. They were now engaged in a price war, with Murdoch's title at 5p and its rival at 6p, and it looked as though a change in leadership was imminent. So I decided to interview the two editors.
“I found Larry Lamb of The Sun less bumptiously confident than I expected,” I reported, “while Mike Molloy – appointed editor of the Mirror at the age of 34 last year – was less despondent than he might have been.” Molloy said he thought he would maintain his lead for a while yet, but “no paper has the God-given right to be the best-seller permanently”. Lamb was equally humble: “Maybe we're due for 10 years of ding-dong at the same level. I don't want to see the Mirror go down – it's a highly professional paper.” Many attributed The Sun's success to the introduction in 1970 of the bare-breasted Page Three lovelies, but Lamb insisted these were not especially significant, just part of the package: “We only started putting them in every day because people complained when we left them out – but not so many as complained when we left the dog racing results out.”
Both editors denied that the arrival of Murdoch's Sun had lowered the tone of British tabloid journalism. “I think we've always been upmarket,” Lamb maintained. “This is a very political newspaper. We had eight pages about Harold Wilson the day he resigned – that's 25 per cent of the newspaper… But it's no use having a message if you don't have an audience. We have expanded the market for popular newspapers.” Molloy, too, insisted that he was maintaining Hugh Cudlipp's tradition of covering crucial issues and campaigning for what was right. (Cudlipp himself had retired from the fray in 1971.)
As it turned out, my article was premature. The Mirror maintained its narrow lead for many more months, and it was not until 1978 that The Sun topped four million and gradually drew away.
But why am I telling you this today? Because the audiences for James Graham's hit play Ink, which Steven Barnett wrote about in the previous issue and has since been running in the West End, leave the theatre believing something entirely different. The plot revolves around Murdoch's purchase of The Sun in 1969 and climaxes on its first anniversary, when Lamb decided to extend the then-accepted bounds of what was permissible in a popular newspaper by publishing a photograph of Stephanie Rahn with an exposed bosom (birthday suit – geddit?).
The play's final scene depicts the arrival of the overnight sales figures. And, hey presto, Stephanie has done the trick. For the first time, The Sun has outsold the Mirror.
Except that it didn't. The paper's actual daily circulation at that time was 1.51 million, compared to the Mirror's 4.38 million. While the ground-breaking photo would certainly have lifted sales on the day, it is inconceivable that the boost would have been enough to close the gap.
Does it matter? I'll get to that, but first I want to take up Barnett, my colleague on the BJR editorial board, on a couple of points - and not just because he credited William Shawcross with writing “the earliest and probably the most interesting” biography of Murdoch. He overlooked my own contribution to the genre, Barefaced Cheek, published in 1983. This gave me a nine-year start on Shawcross, to whom I presented two boxes crammed with my source material in exchange for a case of excellent claret.
I agree with Barnett that the play is entertaining, even if excessively contemptuous of Cudlipp's Sun (where I worked throughout its five-year existence). I disagree, though, with his view that the on-stage characters of Murdoch and Cudlipp are two-dimensional. Graham departs from the stereotype of the ferocious ogre of a proprietor (viz Lambert le Roux in Howard Brenton and David Hare's Pravdd) and presents the Australian tycoon as a subtle, more rounded figure, not immune to self-doubt, in particular when it came to the reporting of the kidnap and murder of Muriel Mackay, the wife of a senior colleague.
As for Cudlipp, I thought Graham captured movingly his conviction that Mirror readers would resist the brash new rival and stick with his more responsible – and, let's face it, slightly patronising – world view, as indeed they did for a while. But his Welsh accent was wrong. After some 30 years in Fleet Street, only a trace of it remained - and I'd have liked to see him brandishing his trademark cigar. One character I didn't recognise, though, was Larry Lamb. Far from the loud-mouthed, adrenalin-driven bully portrayed, Lamb, though tough-minded, normally presented a cool and courteous demeanour.
In this, as in his fabrication of the circulation record, Graham can justifiably claim dramatic licence. Ink does not, after all, purport to be a documentary: obviously newspaper circulations rise and fall too gradually for the purposes of a stage play Yet although the theatre programme contains articles about Fleet Street and tabloid journalism, I searched in vain for any warning that the pivotal incident on which the plot hinges should not be taken literally. So what? No doubt a cynic would argue that, in the age of post-truth, fake news and alternative facts, it is wholly appropriate to base a play about the Press upon a falsehood.