TOM UTLEY: Day the landlord of the Whitchurch Inn in Tavistock taught me the power of the pen – by barring me for life!
There’s a salutary lesson for us all in the fate of Wiebke Hüster, the distinguished ballet critic of Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper: never underestimate the written word’s power to wound.
Frau Hüster is the unfortunate woman who so grievously offended a ballet director by writing an unfriendly review of one of his productions — she said it was ‘boring’ and ‘disjointed’ — that he took his revenge in a most disgusting way.
After accosting her in the foyer of the Hanover state opera house on Saturday, Marco Goecke first abused her verbally. Then he produced a poo-bag and smeared the poor woman’s face with its contents, which had been unwittingly supplied by his pet dachshund, Gustav.
Tom Utley writes that he was punished for writing a ‘less than obliging review of a dramatic production’
Well, I’m happy to report that nothing quite so revolting has ever happened to me since I started out in this trade, back in 1976. But in those early days I, too, was cruelly punished for writing a less-than-obliging review of a dramatic production.
Reader, I was barred for life from the Whitchurch Inn, just outside the market town of Tavistock, Devon.
Now, that may not sound like a terrible fate to you. But in those days, this was one of my favourite pubs (though of course I can’t tell you what it’s like today, since I’ve been banned from crossing its threshold ever since).
Enough to say that pubs meant a great deal to me, then as now, and I felt my punishment keenly throughout the rest of my time in the West Country.
Indeed, the Whitchurch remains the only hostelry from which I’ve ever been barred in a lifetime of happy hours frittered away in pubs from the north of Scotland to the southern tip of Cornwall.
As for how my exclusion came about, I was employed at the time as a cub journalist on my first newspaper, the Tavistock Times. There, I served simultaneously as a council and court reporter, sports correspondent, feature writer, gossip columnist, motoring correspondent, book reviewer, sub-editor, agricultural writer and drama critic.
It was in this last capacity that I was sent at Christmas to review a pantomime put on by a local amateur dramatic society. I remember to this day the sentence I tapped out that caused such deep offence.
‘Cinderella managed to look charming,’ I wrote, ‘in a dress that was clearly not made for her.’
At the distance of all these years, I can see that this was an unnecessarily unkind and sneery thing for a smart Aleck Londoner in his early 20s to write about a jolly production in aid of a local charity, for which a large number of lifelong residents of Whitchurch and Tavistock had generously given up their time.
What I didn’t realise then was that Cinderella’s dress had indeed been made for her. Worse, it had been lovingly made for her by a woman who just happened to be . . . the wife of the landlord of the Whitchurch Inn!
When Tom next went to the pub, the landlord refused to serve him greeting him instead with a torrent of abuse and barking the instruction: ‘Don’t you dare show your face in here ever again!’
So it was that when I next went to the pub, hoping the regulars had seen and enjoyed my review, the landlord refused to serve me, greeting me instead with a torrent of abuse and barking the instruction: ‘Don’t you dare show your face in here ever again!’
Now, I like to think this experience taught me a lesson that has stayed with me ever since: before saying anything even mildly unkind in the media, we should be careful to consider its context and the likely effect of our words on the people we’re writing about.
I’m not claiming for one moment that I’ve never written a word that might give offence since the day that review appeared. On the contrary, even the briefest trawl through my output over the past half-century will net plenty of examples of acid comments — not only about politicians and other public figures but also (as our four sons will be only too ready to testify) about my own near and dear.
All I’m saying is that I’ve tried very hard not to be gratuitously rude or unfair, but to weigh my words, criticise only those who deserve it and avoid upsetting people unintentionally.
In this, I’ve often been unsuccessful. Indeed, I will always remember a column I wrote in another paper, which deeply upset my poor, late mother. In it, I attributed my robust health in adulthood to my exposure to all sorts of germs in my childhood, nurtured as I was by a mother who — how shall I put this delicately? — didn’t share the modern parent’s obsession with hygiene.
In that article, I recounted the story of the day she invited a dozen or so guests to lunch during one of our holidays in Northern Ireland. Some days earlier, at home in London, she had cooked a large ham for the occasion, and it had been sitting in the car ever since.
More fool me, I thought my mother wouldn’t mind my repeating that story in print writes TOM UTLEY (stock image)
When she unwrapped it, she found to her horror that its underside was crawling with dozens of maggots. But with the guests due any minute, and nothing else to feed them on, she knew what to do. As a true member of the wartime generation, she simply scraped off the maggots, swore her young to secrecy and served up the ham to our guests, who pronounced it delicious.
More fool me, I thought my mother wouldn’t mind my repeating that story in print. But on the morning my column appeared, she rang me in floods of tears, telling me she had invited guests for dinner that very evening — ‘and they’ll all think I’m going to poison them’.
As I pleaded for forgiveness, I protested that at least what I’d written was true. At that, she wailed down the line: ‘BUT THAT JUST MAKES IT WORSE!’
Once again, I was reminded of the printed word’s power to hurt, and a journalist’s duty to think hard about how his words will be taken.
It’s a lesson that most of us in my trade have taken to heart. Indeed, I reckon that if anything, many of my fellow jobbing hacks have become over-fearful of giving offence.
Over recent years, in particular, this fear of upsetting others has made many unduly reluctant to write about such horrors as the Tavistock Clinic’s practice of administering puberty-blockers to schoolchildren, or to point out what a hideously distorted, woke interpretation of history is widely taught in today’s schools and universities
Meanwhile, of course, another great change has swept over my trade since my time as a trainee in Tavistock. I’m thinking of the arrival of the internet, which has meant that we professional scribblers have long lost our monopoly on the power to cause offence through the media.
The paradox is that while newspapers and broadcasters have become more sensitive — not to mention more heavily-regulated — the world of social media has developed into a cesspit of unregulated filth and abuse, where trolls don’t pause for one second to consider the likely effect of their words on the targets of their vitriol.
I never thought I’d write these words, but I even felt a twinge of sympathy for Nicola Sturgeon this week, when she cited the recent descent of political discourse into ‘brutality’ as one of her reasons for resigning as Scotland’s First Minister.
Heaven knows, I would defend to my last breath the right of an opera critic to alert the ticket-buying public to her view that a particular production is boring and disjointed, even if that may upset a touchy ballet director.
But how many lives must be made miserable — and how many able figures discouraged from entering public life — before internet trolls are forced to understand the harm they do through their reckless disregard of the power of words?
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