In an interview in yesterday’s Independent with Kamal Ahmed, The Observer’s former political editor who was recently accused in Nick Davies’ book on the British media of becoming too cosy with Alastair Campbell so that he became “a conduit for government announcements”, it is suggested that colleagues feared that Ahmed “had crossed the line between dispassionate journalist and government aide”.
Of course a lot of arts journalism is PR led, too – and there’s an increasingly worrying trend for actors to employ personal PRs who not only set the terms of an interview (and even sometimes sit in on them, too) but also seek to control the outlets it can go to, requiring you to sign a release that says you will go back to them if you seek to use it elsewhere than the place originally agreed to.
When I recently did exactly that regarding an interview I had conducted with one young actor – a Cambridge graduate who is both clever and charming enough, I would have thought, to fend for himself in the big bad world of journalistic sharks out there – his personal PRs suddenly shifted their position, and asked to see my first interview before agreeing to a second one being used on the basis of it. I replied that the release I’d originally signed was to do with where it would be published – not for copy approval. It was their (not so) subtle way of not only of trying to exert control, but also I suspect of justifying their fee to their client.
In a recent blog on The Guardian website, Andrew Haydon referenced the fact that Davies’ book “examines the way that newspapers have gradually been overrun with stories planted by PRs, reprinted by journalists with scarcely enough time to fact-check. Generally these take the form of ‘news items’ created largely to draw attention to the product that the PR in question is trying to flog.” Andrew went on to say, “Theatre publicity machines operate no differently. After all, few journalists spend their time loitering around the National Theatre buttonholing actors and stage management, cultivating contacts at the Donmar and having off-the-record lunches with back-benchers from the Royal Court.”
Actually, I do – only yesterday, as a matter of fact, I was having lunch with the Royal Court’s frighteningly youthful press officer Stephen Pidcock, just two years out of University, at his invitation. We see each other, after all, at press nights every few weeks, but these are only cursory, informal exchanges – but yesterday we had a chance to go a little beyond that. Was I being courted by the Court? Not really – this was merely opportunity for us to get to know each other a bit better, so that we could both do our jobs better. (And Stephen, for the record and not thanks to the lunch, has always been exemplary at his. But he wanted to find out what sort of interviews he could pitch to me, and also gave me a heads-up on the forthcoming Royal Court season).
Have I ever been Trevved by Trevor (as the infamous body hug that Trevor Nunn bestows on favoured friends is sometimes referred to)? No, but I have interviewed him a number of times – both privately, on the phone; I’ve asked questions of him in National Theatre press conferences when he was running it; and I once hosted a NT Platform performance with him and Peter Shaffer when Nunn was directing Shaffer’s The Royal Hunt of the Sun there.
I, in common with many other critics, obviously talk to people on both sides of the critical fence all the time, whether directly doing my job as in National Theatre platforms just mentioned, or more informally. Yesterday, after my lunch with Stephen, I had two more formal interviews lined up: first with Rosemary Squire, president of SOLT regarding the marking of the organisation’s 100th anniversary next week, then with actor JJ Feild who is currently starring in Ring Round the Moon, now in previews at the Playhouse. Today, I am speaking to two of the four young actors playing the Jersey Boys on the phone, then meeting The Sound of Music’s next Maria, Summer Strallen, at lunchtime.
A couple of weekends ago when I was in New York I had a long coffee with Caro Newling, formerly executive director of the Donmar who is now in charge of the theatre arm of Neal Street Productions, Sam Mendes’ producing company, who is currently steering Shrek – the Musical to Broadway. I have known Caro for a long time, ever since she was a press officer long ago for the RSC and she once, after an RSC regional tour date, drove Irving Wardle (then theatre critic of The Times) and myself back to London (I’m not sure Caro would even remember this!). In her subsequent Donmar years, we even worked together when, before I was a full-time critic, I suggested the original Divas at the Donmar season to her (though the naming of the season as such was hers, not mine – credit where credit is due), and helped programme the opening season in 1998.
Of course over time you get to know people in the business, in the various guises we go through. I know plenty of producers from my years, again prior to journalism, when I worked for West End advertising company Dewynters (where, fresh out of University myself, I used to be responsible for the theatre programmes and souvenir brochures they publish — and to which I still, as it happens, contribute now). But as a critic and commentator, I have also cultivated, or been cultivated by, even more. Following Nick Hytner’s now infamous attack on dead white male critics, I wrote a blog, as well as a feature in The Stage, calling him on the lack of diversity at the National – in particular, drawing attention to the fact that, at the time, there had been just six new plays by women, while 32 contemporary male playwrights had new work seen there, three of them multiple times. Nick duly invited me to lunch – and it wasn’t to dispute the statistics. It was a chance for us both to set out our professional stalls. Ditto, with Nick Starr, the National’s executive director, who again suggested lunch after I wrote a piece wondering why the National Theatre had not (at the time) transferred The History Boys to the West End sooner, but kept it in the repertoire.
The reason they do it, and the reason I welcome this kind of dialogue, too, is to get a sense of how the business works in its entirety. We’re all after the same thing, after all: they want to produce great theatre and we want to see it. Anything that helps that to happen, instead of the climate of distrust that sometimes operates around the work journalists do, is to be welcomed. It makes me a better (or at least better informed) journalist, too.
It may indeed make you better informed, and the situation with critics in the UK is much more about being part of the community. Thats a healthy situation.
What is worrying is that when critics are biographers or profilers of theatre personalities that are powerful ( and sometimes past their prime) are we - the audience - getting honest responses from the critics about their current productions or critics going soft on their "friends"? One only has to look at the notices of every Andrew Lloyd Webber musical and notice that while none in the past decade or so have been particularly good ( or commerically successful) all have been able to find a quote from someone that reads "Andrew Lloyd Webber's Best yet" or "His Best show in years!"
Mark, the spin doctor problem around Westminster (I worked as a lobby correspondent for two years) is slightly different from theatreland. There's relentless pressure on political correspondents to come up with exclusive stories and the spin doctors exploit this by offering advance leaks and tips on what No 10 will do tomorrow. In arts journalism there's less hard news. Refusing tickets for press night to reviewers regarded as hostile is a nuclear option and I don't think it happens much. What I suspect does happen is the denial of interviews and access to those who won't play the game. Copy approval on interviews and profiles isn't usual in political journalism (I don't think I ever agreed to it) but is common in arts and magazine journalism. Getting to know people and having lunch with them is normal practice in all journalistic fields and nobody should object to it, providing the journalist's critical faculties don't get washed away in the Merlot.