Season’s greetin’ faced

The sheer horror of the Gail Sheridan column will be with me forever, like one who has locked eyes with Death but cruelly been given time to reflect.

Graham Martin Posted by on November 25, 2011. Filed under Graham Martin,Opinion. Posted with the tags:,
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Season’s greetin’ faced

Santa Smashed in Subway Sensation - Christmas time for hacks

God help us one and all – because it’s Christmas time in local newspaper land.

Throughout the country, jolly hacks are rummaging in attics and bringing down last year’s ‘man who eats Christmas dinner every day’ and ‘woman who never takes her decorations down’ stories and draping them like thread-bare tinsel over schedules so that they jostle merrily next to ‘paedo caged’ and ‘missing cat can bark, claims owner’.

As you sleep snugly, dreaming of the Big Day, teams of eager work experience elves are combing the electoral role looking for Mr Claus’s (79 of them in the UK, last time I looked) they can bother and ‘behind the scenes at Santa’s grotto’ tales are being fished out from the cracks in the couch and dropped, like grubby, unhygienic sixpences into the big news dumpling mix.

Meanwhile, the first ‘cash-strapped council wastes money on cockshaped lights’ tale will formally be getting switched on, with perhaps a former Sugababe or Atomic Kitten ceremonially, if clumsily, dragging it into an Atex box and Christmas will have been getting cancelled since July for vandal hit sports clubs and cheerleaders who’ve had their pompoms pinched.

I’m a journalist, and this is the end of the market that I work in.

This is what we do and is what we’ll always do, till the last print hack files the last ‘mechanical Santa toy that looks like it’s wanking ban call’ story in the last printed paper.

However, the fact that this, on current reckoning, is scheduled for any time in the next six weeks should give us cause for reflection.

The flesh-shearing tempest crashing across the face of the globe from capitalism’s collapse is leaving little standing and nothing that does stand is left unscarred.

Consider the plight of us local paper hacks.

OK, I know that engendering sympathy for journalists is, these days, a hard sell, like siding with the farmer that pitch-forks the otter at the end of that 70s kids film.

But I’m talking about us at the bottom, at the roots, not those gaudy blossoms in their lovely suits on the nationals, cherishing their expensive degrees and relishing every minute of their 14 hour day as they lovingly craft an I’m A Celebrity Freddie Starr break-out fact-file from cuts.

Substructural changes are reflected in the superstructure – as capitalism’s geology heaves, splits, crashes and cracks, the topology is twisted, to a chorus of screams. All that is solid melts into air. Like my Christmas intro. In journalism, your intro is everything. This is where you set the scene.

It should be an utter zinger – the rest of the story hangs on it.

Unless you work for The Independent, who specialise in incomprehensible stories, or my favourite weirdy leftie paper, the Workers Hammer, organ (titter) of a mad-eyed sect whose sole purpose is to shout at other leftists when they’re trying to eat a pie in peace on a demo (I’m speaking from personal experience here) where “What’s needed is a socialist revolution to overthrow the capitalist state and replace it with a workers state that will lay the basis for building a socialist society, for which you need to build a revolutionary workers party” on a review of TOWIE is considered the done thing.

So, the intro’s everything, and I’ve built my entire career, such as it is, on about five of them.

I should mention this ‘career’ in passing, because it’s not all been about local papers. For a period, I mixed it with the nationals, before I got found out.

Practically the last thing I ever had to do on a shift at a national was to sub Gail Sheridan’s column in the Mirror (Gail Force – Let’s Go Airside with Gail Sheridan!).

The sheer horror of it will be with me forever, like one who has locked eyes with Death but cruelly been given time to reflect.

“See that Annabel Goldie. Ma man says he doesnae like her, but I think she’s pure gallus.”

There are nights when, as in a fever, I twist, tortured and these words feel like they’re being pounded, letter by letter, with stamps dipped in shit, onto my soul.

So, my intro. It’s one of my favourites. It goes “Ching, ching merrily on high – in (insert the name of town you’re working in here) the tills are ringing!”

There follows 300 of the ripest words, often including the phrases ‘this year’s must-haves’, ‘shoppers stampede’ and, in 1997, ‘Furby’.

But not this year, thanks capitalism. For the first time, I can’t bring myself to do it.

Since, I confidently predict, the system will finally collapse on Boxing Day, and we’ll be facing our first ever post apolcalyptic new year, the last thing I want is for whatever remains of humanity to be huddled round a smouldering Argos catalogue, grunting in a new, barbaric argot (language will go by the 27th), worshipping the manically ho-ho-ho-ing, half charred, soot blackened wanking Santa toy which has become their idiot idol, giving up offerings of their own severed genitals to it wrapped in a paper with THAT intro on it.

I’m not going to leave much of a mark on this world (I reckon I’ll get eaten on the 28th), I’m more of a grubby stain on the couch kind of guy, but I can’t have that.

Anyway, ding dong merrily on high, readers – it’s socialism or wanking Santaworshipping barbarism!