Back then, the West of England [tennis] tournament was in the run-up to Wimbledon, and there were players like Hoad and Rosewall wandering around in the clubhouse, but the people I was ogling were the Fleet Street stars such as Peter Wilson, who was my favourite sports writer (later it was Ian Wooldridge. Remind me to tell you about my mother and Ian Wooldridge). I still remember bits of Wilson’s report on the first Marciano-Walcott fight when I was at school. Anyway, there was Wilson at the clubhouse bar and I finally plucked up courage to talk to him. I asked him why he’d left the Express for the Mirror. He said: “Because I couldn’t stand their bloody politics.” I couldn’t think of a second question, so that was that. I was 17 and out of my depth.

Oh, yes – my mother and Ian Wooldridge. My mother – you know she was Czech – read the Daily Mail every weekday from 1946 until she died, aged 85, ten years ago. In her way she was a witty woman and she loved reading, and I liked to think that whatever I’ve got, I got from her, but it never really came home to me until I found out that my mother would never miss Ian Wooldridge. You have to imagine a woman who had no interest at all in sport, who knew nothing about the people she was reading about and cared less. She read Wooldridge simply because she loved the way he wrote. It moved me. When she died I wanted to write to Wooldridge to tell him, to thank him for her, but I never did.

I started at the Western Daily Press in 1954. It had its centenary in 1957 and was a very old-fashioned newspaper. It was a broadsheet, of course, and had everything a local paper is supposed to have, probably in about 12 pages. And I was in heaven – I loved everything about it. I got on to features – not that there was a distinction in your employment – you did features, breaking news, the diary, whatever. I started writing features and I did a weekly column which tried too hard and was indefatigably facetious. The news editor of the Bristol Evening World, in Northcliffe House across the city centre, liked my stuff and in a very low-level way he poached me. I was easy to poach – my demands were absolutely pathetic. So after four years at the Western Daily Press I did a couple of years on the World.

Charlie, the buzz-saw

I had a great time, actually, and then around 1960, after I’d done about six years of everything, the idea of not being at anybody’s beck and call was very attractive and I’d got turned on by what was happening in the theatre. I wrote a play in 1960. That year on my 23rd birthday I was on holiday in the Mediterranean somewhere and I was suddenly overcome by this appalling depression – I’d left everything too late, I was so old. So I got back and handed in my notice and started writing a play. I lived cheaply for a year on a couple of freelance columns for the paper I’d started on. The Western Daily Press had been taken over by the Bristol Evening Post and had acquired an ex-Fleet Street editor who revamped it.

One of the by-products was a weekly Arts page which was in the charge of my best friend, Anthony Smith. We fancied ourselves – in Anthony’s case justifiably – as intellectuals. So I had a sort of crash-course in culture, because I was writing pieces about things I knew nothing about on Tuesday, but knew enough about by Friday to do 800 magisterial words. Harold Pinter came to Bristol for a public discussion with students and I turned his comments into an 800-word quote – I was a great admirer of the Robert Muller interviews he used to do in that style for the Daily Mail. The Arts page was Anthony’s fiefdom, and Eric Price, the editor, treated us with genial contempt – he wasn’t quite sure why he let us continue. Sometimes we’d push him too far – I remember an incredible layout where we used the headline “The Theatre of the Absurd”, and the word “Absurd” was done like kiddie blocks, and then because it was Absurd we put the letters in the wrong order, so it read “The Theatre of the ABSUDR” or something. And Eric came down to the stone and blew his top and had the kiddie blocks put in the right order.

I think I had a very lucky beginning because I ended up doing almost any kind of job there was, and learned to sub. I was a good sub. I would have been all right in Fleet Street, I think. A story told about me is, I’m afraid, more or less true. Nick Tomalin interviewed me for an opening at the Evening Standard on Londoners’ Diary. It went OK, but then I was shown in to see Charles Wintour. Wintour asked me whether I was interested in politics. “Yes” seemed the safe answer. He asked me to name the Home Secretary. My mind went blank. In the story, I told Wintour I’d admitted only to an interest in politics, I hadn’t claimed to be obsessed by it. But that’s not true. I said it only to myself. Anyway, that’s how I didn’t get to Fleet Street.

Until the World packed up, it was the last stage, the last period, when there were competing afternoon papers. So the World was immediately a very exciting place to be for someone with my rather romantic ideas of being a reporter. There was real competition with the Bristol Evening Post in terms of comparing how the story was treated, which paper got the story out first, which paper had the story to itself. When the World packed up, being on the Post was like playing tennis without a net. So I was glad I caught that [time]. I was glad I caught hot metal – I loved being on the stone – and I wrote pretty well. I wasn’t cut out to be Harry Proctor, but I was cut out to be something and I would have been OK. It was a very happy time, which was, if you like, ruined by my getting a job in London with Scene magazine.

I went to London to be interviewed by the editor of Scene, which was quite a flaky affair that went through various formats. They were looking for people who would be stringers in different parts of the country, but to my astonishment I was offered a job as their theatre critic. That’s when I moved to London. I used my own name, but also used the name William Boot when I had more than two pieces in the magazine. So I wrote theatre pieces for that, and by then had also written a couple of unperformed plays. I had a TV play and a couple of radio plays broadcast in the early 1960s.

On Winchell’s beat

I stopped being a journalist because I wanted to write plays, but I missed journalism. Both ambitions co-existed for quite a long time. My favourite review of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was spoken to my friend Gordon Williams by a Daily Sketch reporter, I forget his name, who said to Gordon: “I get it. It’s two reporters on a story which doesn’t stand up.” Gordon and I shared an office in Soho for a while when I was working on my play. He’d written a novel by then, the first of several, including one which was on the first Booker shortlist, and also one which tells you exactly what it was like to be a provincial reporter in the period when I was one. For my money, his book, The Upper Pleasure Garden, is right up there with Frayn’s Towards the End of the Morning. Anyway, at the time I’m talking about, Gordon was ghosting footballers for the Sunday papers and he came in one day with a hangover, unshaven, the whole thing, and he’d had some argy-bargy with his wife. He said: “Clairwyn said, ‘If you go to the office this morning, don’t come back!’” And Gordon said, helplessly: “What could I do? The News of the World can’t come out with a big white space on page 17.”

I take only three morning papers now, but I’m thinking of going back to four. I stopped The Times when Simon Jenkins left, but mainly because I thought it had gone wrong. I got through it so quickly, that’s how you know. I still buy it occasionally when I’m out, and lately there’ve been two or three pieces which made me think I should get The Times delivered again. I’ve taken The Independent since day one. I’m not crazy about using the front page for a news feature or editorial every day, but it’s a sensible paper, and I like the media section. On Sundays it’s The Observer, Times, Telegraph and Independent. I also take the TLS, London Review of Books, New York Review, Spectator, New Statesman, The Week… sometimes I think I’ll cancel the whole damned lot. My papers are on my doormat, five floors up, before seven o’clock. It’s one area of life that’s still like the good old days. I once asked the delivery people for the Evening Standard to be added to my order. They said: “We don’t do the Standard, obviously”. I said: “I mean yesterday’s Standard.” I realised I might be slightly deranged. Look at this place. I’m drowning in newsprint and I have to look at it all because I live in fear that my next play is somewhere in there. It’s a neurosis. And, of course, it isn’t true. My next play is in the South China Post or Los Angeles Times – or maybe The New Yorker, which I had to cancel when the pile-up reached its first anniversary.

The first hour-and-a-half of my day is spent reading the papers. The first one you read spoils the others, and for a long time I read the Telegraph first – it was the best paper of the four. Now, it’s The Guardian. This is nothing to do with the Berliner size. The Berliner is fine but I loved the broadsheet. I don’t care about colour panels either, and as for G2, it’s a disaster, it looks so mingy, it’s like a throwaway. I’d rather have 16 Berliner pages of culture without the staples. I gather the half-size G2 is something to do with having it stapled. Who cares? But switching to The Guardian as my drug of choice is nothing to do with politics, either – it’s only to do with being treated like a grown-up. I take that personally and I’m critical. I hate The Daily Telegraph’s “living” page, the look of it, the assumptions it makes about what it takes to get my attention. It sums up why I no longer get the same buzz out of opening a fresh Telegraph. (Remind me to tell you about me and David English.)

Better off with the cartoon

Oh yes, David English. I was always fascinated by him and one day I met him somewhere, and the weird thing was I met him two days after I had cancelled the Daily Mail. I came to England when I was eight, and from the age of eight the Mail was our paper at home – as was the Sunday Express – so I read the Mail from when I was eight until two days before I met David English. And I said: “Oh, how do you do, very nice to meet you. How extraordinary, I cancelled your paper the day before yesterday, after reading it for 45 years.” And he said: “What?” And then: “Why?” So I said: “Because you’ve started printing a Saturday paper every day of the week and I don’t want that. I want a proper newspaper.” He said: “Do you want to come in and talk to my people about that?” And I said: “If you like,” and he must have gone back and said: “I met Tom Stoppard and he’s stopped reading us because we’re doing a Saturday paper every day and I said he should come in and tell us what he’s talking about.” And, quite clearly, everybody said: “Tell him to go and fuck himself,” because two days later I got a letter from him saying he was going away and so on, so I was spared that.

Not that I’ve got anything against Saturday papers. The Saturday Telegraph,when Charles Moore and Sarah Sands were doing it, was sometimes the paper of the week for me. The new Sunday Telegraph looked OK, I thought. Stella, after all, isn’t aimed at me. But I was sorry to see the reviews turfed out of the main paper as if they were travel. Seven will have lead-time problems and you’ll get plays being reviewed 10 days after they open, like in The Sunday Times Culture section. The message is, people don’t care about plays enough for it to matter.

This week – because of BJR – I’ve been buying the Daily Mail and all the other papers, even the Daily Star, and I have to admit that the Mail, maybe because it’s now richer and fatter, feels like a “proper paper” to say the least – mostly hard news all the way to the centre-spread, 40 pages, you can’t complain. But I still think 11 pages on “Health” is a bit weird – you can’t be that unhealthy without being dead. The surprises were the red-tops. I’d pretty much discounted them as comics obsessed with soaps, soccer, and celebrities I’d never heard of – I mean, that side of the red-tops in my mind had wiped out what they do well. I still wish they wouldn’t take pride in talking to their readers in that jokey semi-literate way as if the core readership had one O-level in hairdressing, but look at The Sun’s coverage of the Blunkett resignation – a completely brilliant splash (“WALKIES!”), plus four strong inside pages led by Trevor Kavanagh, superbly laid out, you couldn’t ask for better. But then you get the splatter layout of the showbiz gossip pages. They hurt to look at. Reading them is out of the question. You can’t believe it’s for the same readers. Ditto the Mirror.

As a matter of fact, ditto the Telegraph – my point about “Telegraph living” is that this all-singing, all-dancing look irritates the Telegraph-type reader. Or perhaps it doesn’t. What do I know? Anyway, I’ve got a thesis about what’s happened to the newspaper landscape. I’m an old codger, that’s understood, and I look back to days when there was some kind of line that divided the popular press culture from what you might call the educated, “Top People Take The Times” culture, which meant that you could choose between a paper that exploited the meretricious, the vulgar, the trivial and the frankly fake, on the one hand, and on the other hand a paper which considered this dross beneath its readers’ dignity. What’s different is that the line now goes through each paper. This is what the dumbing-down debate is about. The good stuff is still good. I’m a divided soul. Most of me is elitist without apology – and bear in mind that the heroes and martyrs of populism, the early radicals like Leigh Hunt and Cobbett are on my side here, the journalism they put themselves on the line for wasn’t the “journalism” of Piers Morgan and Max Clifford. Morgan’s book is fascinating but it upset me, to be honest. It diminishes journalism to a game played with newspapers. In Clifford’s book, David Mellor’s Chelsea-strip comes back, read all about it, yes, what a laugh, Max and Kelvin cooking up the invention of Mellor having sex in a Chelsea shirt. Is this the first time a fabrication was sort of acclaimed? OK, it’s not the Zinoviev letter, but it says it all – I mean about what upsets me. It says the readers are rubbish. They don’t matter. Take the money, they’ll never know and they’re too stupid to suspect, too stupid to care.

Before the red-tops…

It’s an us-and-them world, and journalists should be us. But Morgan’s book is called The Insider, and I understand why completely. Even a junior reporter on a weekly understands. That’s the great seduction of the job. When I was 18 in Bristol – at a bus-stop, say – you felt this, you knew things, you’d talked to the detective in the case or the councillor at the committee meeting, you were the only person at the bus-stop who was inside something, and everybody else was outside; they were the people who bought the paper. With Morgan, he wasn’t having a drink with a policeman, he was having tea with the Prime Minister – major insidership. But an editor’s book shouldn’t be called The Insider. It should be called “The Outsider”. It should be called “The Outlaw”. Though I must admit Morgan spent a lot of time screaming at Alastair Campbell and getting screamed at. Morgan is like two people, so the paper was like two papers. He was heroic in the run-up to the Iraq war but that was because he’d let down the team, from Blair’s point of view. But when Larry Lamb got a knighthood from Mrs Thatcher, it just felt all wrong to me.

But Mrs T was my heroine, entirely on the issue of print unions. I hated what the printers were doing to my precious newspapers. When Rupert Murdoch called the unions a “protection racket” he was absolutely right. Thatcher and Murdoch saved the day. I met Murdoch once, in about 1980, at Paul Johnson’s. I can’t remember anything, not one phrase, only that he spoke quietly. Anyway, I was gung-ho for Wapping, for Murdoch, for Thatcher. It gave me a reputation, which I’ve still got, like a faint aroma. Just recently I was at the same dinner table as John Pilger and I would have loved to talk to him but I was inhibited – I knew he’d have me marked down as a reactionary. Thatcher’s philistinism didn’t matter to me then, her lack of sympathy with the inner life, her shopkeeper’s philosophy – all that was less important than freeing Fleet Street from the protection racket. In the 70s and 80s, when I was involved in dissident stories in Russia and Czechoslovakia, my refrain was that a free press made all the other freedoms possible, and by that I didn’t just mean an uncensored press. I meant an untrammelled press.

This is what got me into writing a play about journalism in 1978. I knew I’d have to write one one day. There’s a line in Night and Day that people are always quoting or misquoting – “I’m with you on the free press, it’s the newspapers I can’t stand”, and because it’s the only line people remember, they assume it’s my entire view of newspapers. But, as I said, the good stuff is still good. I admire huge amounts of it, mostly people who go out there and file a story. From the very beginning I’ve admired foreign and war correspondents, all the way back to Sefton Delmer and Noel Barber, all the way forward to Robert Fisk. I don’t give a damn about Fisk’s so-called bias, I’m a thinking animal, I can deal with it, I can read round him – the point is it takes courage to be out there and get the story. News is what gives newspapers the advantage over TV. This is the opposite of conventional wisdom, but TV is competition only on the biggest stories. Sure, it wipes the floor with the newspapers when it comes to big breaking news, but TV covers so little of the news out there, it ignores almost everything. I think papers are too TV-conscious altogether. Very little sports reporting is descriptive now, it’s mostly comment, interviews, ego trips. Red Smith, describing how Randolph Turpin got knocked out by Ray Robinson, wrote in the New York Herald Tribune: “He zigged when he should have zagged.” In all the newsprint I’ve read there isn’t a sentence I’d rather have written.

It’s synthetic indignation

This article is an edited version of a taped interview conducted by the editor.