Escaping The Summerpocalypse

(Let's enjoy it while it lasts...)

I hadn’t intended to bunk-off from Substack this summer — that’s just the way it panned out. Because, as much as I enjoy it — and I really do — writing this is a luxury I can’t always afford.

Having retrained as an interior designer in 2017, after a couple of years working in a London architectural practice (running their materials library) while being a part-time restaurant critic on the Telegraph, since losing that column after the second lockdown these days I largely earn my living by developing/letting/selling property. After spending the first six months of this year mostly twiddling my thumbs as a tediously complex purchase unfurled circuitously between me, the solicitors, the lenders, the estate agent and back again, inevitably it was all systems go when we finally completed, in mid-June.

Since then I’ve project managed the refurbishment of half a mid-Victorian coachhouse near my home in St Leonards-on-Sea, during/after which I squeezed in a couple of weeks’ worth of holidays — hello Mallorca, hello Cornwall — and then I was delighted to be asked to stand in as holiday cover for Sarah Vine’s TV column in The Daily Mail, because while Rachel Johnson occasionally gave me a column during her tenure as Editrix at The Lady, it’s 12 years since I left my TV column (and indeed the rest of The Observer) and I’ve not really written about telly for a decade.

As an aside, I’m pretty sure this wouldn’t have happened if I’d previously been a leading male critic on a national newspaper — which still very often seems to be a job-for-life, with all sorts of interestingly tentacular professional off-shoots and no requirement to retrain as anything in order to pay the mortgage — but hey, I was lucky to have such a great gig in the first place. Because, yes, writing about telly at The Observer was the best job I ever had — and I like to think it showed. It was also one from which I was suddenly removed not because I’d become rubbish at it but because I pissed-off Alan Rusbridger.

Rusbridger was (during the summer of 2009) trying to close down The Observer — the world’s oldest Sunday newspaper, every Sunday since its first edition published Mozart’s obit in 1791 — and turn it into the Guardian-on-Sunday, while also ostensibly being its Editor-in-Chief. Some loyal Observer staff rather took against this and I was one of them.

The intended demotion of The Observer by Rusbridger was partly a cost-cutting exercise — though he had arguably previously squandered tens of millions buying the monumentally expensive new presses to accommodate the Guardian’s newly-designed ‘Berliner’ format, back in the late 1990s, at a time when even shop-floor grunts like me could see the future was digital and that dead trees were, basically, for the birds. (The Guardian and Observer were at that time mostly kept afloat by the vast profits from AutoTrader—at that time also owned by the Guardian Media Group though long since asset-stripped). It’s fair to say that, for all Rusbridger’s undoubted skills, managing the bottom line was not one of them.

So, 13 years ago this very summer I wrote a thinly-veiled attack on Rusbridger’s mean-spiritedness towards The Observer … under the guise of a review of Top Gear. Commenting on an episode in which Clarkson and Co reported on a spate of Smart cars being dumped into Amsterdam’s canals, I cheekily suggested this trend could soon catch in The Observer’s own neighbourhood, Kings Cross. Most readers will not have been aware that The Guardian and The Observer’s HQ is adjacent to a canal and that (at the very forefront of the Eco-virtue-signalling trend) in 2009 the Guardian’s Editor drove a Smart car. You might think hat the distinguished former editor of The Grauniad would be a tiny bit classier and possibly marginally less thin-skinned, but no, Rusbridger did not see the funny side.

A few months later, after an odd period in which (for the first time ever) my columns were sent back for rewrites, the then Observer editor, John Mulholland, called me in for a meeting and promptly axed both my columns (I had one in the magazine, too). I asked why and he said ‘it’s my prerogative, Kate. You can be a features writer. Plenty of people would kill to be a features writer on The Observer.’

I’m sure they would, however at that point I had been an award-winning professional journalist for, ooh, a mere 25 years… so after politely pointing out that The Observer was awash with brilliant features writers while my skills self-evidently appeared to lie in criticism and commentary, I told him not to be ‘so fucking patronising’, turned on my heel and went over to the-then Deputy Ed’s office, where I promptly burst into tears and asked for voluntary redundancy. (For the record, Paul Webster was a) lovely, and b) is now the editor of The Observer).

So, that was that. I was briefly naive enough to think I’d walk into another great job elsewhere, however it was 2010 so I didn’t. A situation that was not helped when the Guardian’s Media editor contacted me saying, ‘we really wanted to do an interview about your career and leaving The Observer … and then we were, uh, told not to. Sorry!‘

So, y’know, for (albeit inadvertently) destroying my career Jeremy Clarkson arguably owes me at the very least a beer—if not a lunch, or even an actual job*

But I digress.

This summer, when not refurbishing property (or indeed not writing this Substack) I’ve stayed in and watched much more telly than usual. My first Mail column (from a couple of weeks ago) is (click) here: My TV Week... and the next is out on Sept 3.

And because the finale of ‘Better Call Saul’ won’t be making the Daily Mail cut, I’m just going to say, right here, entirely gratuitously: I’LL MISS YOU, JIMMY + KIM. No spoilers for the uninitiated/the still-on-season-threes/the OH-MY-GOD-NO-PLEASE-DON’T-TELL-ME-I-HAVEN’T-GOT-THERE-YET!s… but what a great, emotionally hefty finale; a fitting tribute to the peerless Bob Odenkirk and Rhea Seehorn… and you really can count on the fingers of one hand the times in your life you’ll see TV acting with the emotional bandwidth of Seehorn’s close-up breakdown on the bus in the penultimate episode. Indeed, I’m going to stick my neck out and say that only Edie Falco as Carmela Soprano has been a female lead with whom we were anywhere near as emotionally invested.

Do feel free to disagree with me, though — there’s a right of reply here on this page and I’d love it if you wanted to get stuck in about telly… If only because it beats dealing with (what passes for) Real Life right now, right?

I mean, didn’t I do well in not mentioning the Tory *leadership race* right up until the pay-off line? Now, in your head, all you have to do is re-cast Jimmy and Kim as Rishi and Liz and, hey, my work this summer is done…

Photo by Ross Findon on Unsplash

(*The first time we were introduced, Clarkson won me over effortlessly with an heroic display of flattery: ‘Aha, it’s the second best TV critic in Britain!’. Given his best mate was Adrian Gill, I was fine with that. No hard feelings, Jezza).