Absolutely everything and everyone is just incredibly, overwhelmingly, fantastically interesting. Except football.<\/p>\n
I especially love — not remotely too strong a word — the detail behind things that you never normally think of. I just learned why door frames<\/a> are the size they are, for instance. Unbelievable. Fantastic. My 58keys YouTube channel<\/a> is named after the number of keys on one single computer and I could justify that to you, I could enthuse about why, but that was yesterday’s fact and today I have a new one.<\/p>\n Follow. I need to tell you upfront that there’s only so much of this I can tell you upfront. I found out something while researching a book I’m writing and not only will the detail be in that, but it’ll chiefly be in a footnote. So I’m not saying this is big, except to me it’s so huge it’s making me beam.<\/p>\n I was having trouble with the book, having a problem trying to move from one particular topic to another. I’ve always called that finding the bridge, which I only now realise is a term from music. I told you, everything is interesting. Anyway. The book is about the TV show “Lou Grant”, a newspaper drama, and I’d written this huge bit about the authenticity of the newsroom set design. I wanted to move on to the authenticity of the scriptwriting but it was a surprisingly big leap to make mid-paragraph.<\/p>\n I’m not going to say that I thought about this for days, because then you’d look at me like that. At some point, though, I remembered that this newsroom set, this city room set, had a poster in the background. In five years of the series, it was never referred to and it wasn’t ever really in shot, it was just back there, behind that, next to her, above him, a piece of nothing set dressing amongst perhaps a thousand other pieces of set dressing.<\/p>\n But it was a poster of a clich\u00e9. It was line art drawing of a typical reporter of years gone by. He’s wearing a felt hat with “PRESS” sticking out of it, he’s smoking, he’s holding one of those phones that were like candlesticks with a separate earpiece. And he’s on a story, he’s got breaking news, so he’s barking out “Hello, sweetheart, get me rewrite.”<\/p>\n I figured it was worth a sentence. And I figured that here was a bit of set dressing that mocked old-style reporter clich\u00e9s. So it could be a bridge between two different forms of journalism authenticity. Sold.<\/p>\n Only, because that poster was never focused on, in any sense of the word, I wasn’t sure I’d got the caption right and if you’re going to quote something, you have to be sure. So I looked into it. I figured it was worth a Google and if I couldn’t find the right caption, I’d chuck the whole thing and find a different bridge.<\/p>\n But this tiny, insignificant, never-really-looked-at poster turns out to have the most enormous history and to be enormously significant in US journalism. It was made for a journal called “(MORE)” which had the stance that newspaper journalism of the day, the 1970s, was appalling bad. That newspapers were just printing whatever companies and politicians told them. I don’t believe they had the word churnalism then, but I also don’t believe the makers of (MORE) would be able to look at news coverage today without sobbing.<\/p>\n Anyway, they were doing this then and they were influential, they were doing the right thing and someone — probably art director Sydney Z. Litwack but I can’t yet prove it — put their poster on the “Lou Grant” city room wall. If you were a US journalist at that time, you’d spot it instantly, you’d know what it meant and you’d know that this was a drama whose creators did their research.<\/p>\n That’ll do me. That’ll make a bridge, that’s made me agog and just so happy.<\/p>\n Only…<\/p>\n I also love that there is always more to everything. Not a single thing in this world exists without something more behind it. So while this does definitely have to lurk in my book’s footnotes, I also found out that this (MORE) group held a series of annual conventions about journalism.<\/p>\n And that their first one was organised by Nora Ephron.<\/p>\n Once I was waiting outside a book store in California, actually doubled over in pain, I mean holding my stomach, because I was laughing at something she’d written. Behind me right now I have a newly-bought book collecting her journalism.<\/p>\n And if you remember the film “When Harry Met Sally”, you remember Meg Ryan in the diner, but you may not remember that Nora Ephron wrote it.<\/p>\n But then the making of that film… No, stop, you get the idea. Nothing just happens or just exists, everything has a story behind it, everything has people in it. I just cannot get enough of everything.<\/p>\n Okay, except football. There are limits, you know.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Absolutely everything and everyone is just incredibly, overwhelmingly, fantastically interesting. Except football. I especially love — not remotely too strong … Continue reading