The play, Ink, by James Graham offers a fascinating insight into the demise of the Daily Mirror and the rise of the Sun newspaper.
Owned
by IPC, which also owned the Mirror and other titles, the Sun had made
unspectacular progress since its launch in 1964. However, in 1969, Rupert
Murdoch decided to buy the title. It was his entry point into the British
newspaper market.
The
play focuses on what happens, as Murdoch appoints former Mirror man Larry Lamb
as editor. An anything goes approach to news, which effectively had a dumbing
down effect on the whole newspaper industry ensued.
The
Mirror, under its legendary editor Hugh Cudlipp, was viewed as the ideal of
what a tabloid newspaper should be, standing up for the mass of people against
injustice, yet also witty entertaining and informative. Cudlipp’s Mirror caught
the spirit of Britain in the post war years.
Ink
is an entertaining play with dark humour, illuminated by some excellent
performances, especially from Bertie Carvel as Rupert Murdoch and Richard Coyle
as Larry Lamb.
The
play reminded me of John Pilger’s documentary Breaking the Mirror the Murdoch
Effect (1998). I was fortunate enough to work on that program, which told the
story of the Mirror and the damaging arrival of the Sun on the scene. Pilger’s
programme was uncannily accurate in providing a critique of the Sun.
The
ensuing years have seen the phone hacking scandal and other instances of
journalism being drawn into the gutter. This form of journalism has in many ways
led to the post truth world and fake news.
For
a brief period in the early noughties under the editorship of Piers Morgan, the
Mirror did try to return to its basic principals. Pilger, Foot and others came
back, the readership responded positively but sadly the owners were not
prepared to give the experiment time and normal service – as it had then become
– was soon resumed.
The
halcyon days of the Mirror when it boasted the likes of Pilger, Paul Foot and Keith
Waterhouse seem long since past. The
present day incarnation of the Mirror does a reasonable job in keeping the red
flag flying in a largely blue market but it is a pale shade of what went
before.
Certainly
today, we could do with a decent newspaper with the values of the old Mirror,
prepared to stand up for working people against injustice. Such a publication
would nowdays no doubt have online as well as a print presence but it would
surely succeed if tried.
*Ink
finished its run at the Almeida theatre on Saturday, it transfers to the Duke
of York’s theatre on 9 September, running until 6 January
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