Not enough clams

Confessions of a newsboy editor, by Peter Jackson (Grayling Publishing, pp340, £10.99)

During the first year of Sunday magazine, the colour supplement created for the "News of the Screws" in 1981, page proofs would ascend either one floor to the editor’s office in Fitzrovia’s Ogle Street or, more often, two floors to the flat Peter Jackson shared with his second wife Marie. They would come back neatly marked. A familiar word in the margin was "cliche". Enough said, it was to be avoided.

So perhaps this is not the kindest point to challenge "confessions" in the book’s title. At Sunday, it was already widely known that Peter had had a long affair with the celebrated Eurovision Song Contest host Katie Boyle, from which his first marriage had not survived. Explaining the background to that romance — and its Notting Hill waterbed — might just about justify the title.

Anyone who had worked under Peter will be aware of the cliche taboo. This part-memoir, part-tutorial on UK magazines reveals that this instruction had been absorbed in 1956 when he was a 25-year-old, new-to-London trainee feature writer on the historic magazine John Bull. Early experience clearly made a big impression.

Born in 1930 to a 34-year-old shell-shocked survivor of the First World War, and an aloof mother, Peter attributes his interest in journalism to a boring paper round during which he matched different houses and social standing to the titles and headlines. As a result, the editor of the local paper took a punt on the teenager. Peter dedicates this book to his mentor of three-quarters of a century ago Dave Moore, chief reporter of the Tamworth Herald.

This is a collection of stories of the type any journalist of the "those-were-the-days" 60s, 70s and 80s is able to recount to friends and family working in less varied careers. Celebrities met, expenses scams (in Peter’s case, it was putting in for too little), bluffs that paid off, and brushes with royalty and dictators.

Peter’s yarns are not in the league of Keith Waterhouse, despite an escape from death at the hands of Burmese bandits. But even this comes across as more of a Boy’s Own jape, involving a faceful of cockroaches from an exploding lavatory and a lot of dead baddies.

For students of journalism, the more relevant content is the births of Drive, TV Times as a national magazine, Sunday magazine, and Elle UK, for which he was publisher, and his interactions with Rupert Murdoch (whom he admires despite being sacked) and Robert Maxwell (whom he did not). Though these are so immersed in anecdotes that it’s a bit like hunting for a tasty clam in a fish soup.

In 1967, Odhams pitched a magazine for the AA’s four million members and Peter was tasked with creating a dummy. The result was to be Patrol, a newsprint "magazine for people who happened to drive cars", he says. But Readers Digest successfully counter-bid, on the basis that it could mailshot the AA’s mag. Not willing to lose his baby, Peter called the Digest with his target-reader idea: the family with a car. In short order, at 38 he was editor of a full-colour, glove-pocket-size magazine called Drive.

With his name attached to full colour and big circulations, the next call came from the Independent Broadcasting Association, which wanted a single magazine for all 14 TV regions that would take on Radio Times with TV glamour. In 1968, TV Times magazine went national to three million homes: Belfast TV was so unamused at losing its own publication that the staff burnt a copy on air.

In 1980, TV Times moved its now-3.8 million copies from Murdoch’s under-funded Eric Bemrose printworks in Liverpool to Robert Maxwell’s British Printing Corporation. This left Murdoch with silent presses and a

News of the World with a flagging circulation. The result was a call to Peter at a TV festival in France about a new massive-circulation magazine. "Might he be interested?" He was. Jackson describes his and Marie’s dash back sticking pages from French magazines into a dummy that, he told Murdoch would "save the News of the World because it will have something for everyone, instead of just catering for Dad as a dirty old man". The flat in Ogle Street was part of his deal and Sunday was born.

Peter remained part of the Murdoch business family until he wasn’t. Despite successfully launching English Elle in four months, in a blaze of publicity stunts, a requirement to "leave the building" came two years later in 1987, following an aborted teen magazine. So Peter launched Grayling Publishing.

Dealings with Maxwell left a sourer memory, almost bankrupting Peter’s fledgling company following the very Maxwell-sounding opening line: "I have an exciting proposition…" The deal was that Peter would provide and fund a new all-channel TV magazine for the Daily Mirror in time for listings deregulation on March 1, 1991. A long-term contract would follow. After four weeks of Maxwell attentiveness, breakfasts and drinks, impenetrable barriers went up. TV Weekly was taken in-house and the bill was not paid — until after Maxwell fell from his yacht that autumn. Grayling Publishing was saved, and produced this book.