No time to read, not even Old Nick
I tuned in to listen to Celia Imrie talking to Michael Ball on my car radio on Sunday morning and had a bit of a shock.
Celia said she doesn’t read reviews till the show’s all over (fair enough) and then said…she doesn’t really have time to read anything at all anyway. Good grief, I’ve only ever heard the footballer Michael Owen admit he never reads a book before.
Ball-ey of course saids he reads all the reviews of himself and anyone else he can get his hands on. But he won’t be reading Nicholas de Jongh for much longer. Nick says he’s planning to keep more in touch with his creative side after seventeen years as the Standard’s critic, and is working on a new play and a screen adaptation of his current one, Plague Over England.
Celia is playing Sybil Thorndike in Plague Over England and having said that she thought the title was a bit of a bummer went on to say that having agreed to be in the play at all would surely guarantee her nice reviews in perpetuity from old Nick.
Hard luck, old girl! Nick’s picked you up, exploited you mercilessly for his own greater glory and chucked you back on the scrapheap with nary a critical thumbs-up to show for it.
So who will succeed Nick at the Standard? Sheridan Morley is almost certain to have phoned in his application from wherever he now resides beyond the grave, and Robert Gore-Langton cheerfully admits he’s thrown his hat in the ring.
The speculation in these matters is always as unseemly as the rush to try and take advantage, and I always cringe quietly in the corner while everyone else gossips and natters about who should get the job.
For myself, I’ve never applied for a job in my life — not strictly true; I once applied to run the Edinburgh Festival and never even received a letter of acknowledgement — in the firm belief that if they want you they know where you live.
The new editor of the Russian-owned Standard is Geordie Greig, the former editor of Tatler, so he might want a bit of posh on his arts pages and the Hon Robert Gore-Langton might fit that bill. Or he might be looking at younger critics who might fit the posh bill less snugly, to whit Sam Marlowe or Dominic Cavendish.
And who knows, if rumours are true that the lively editor of Time Out Gordon Thomson is joining his features staff, then perhaps Jane Edwardes, lately retired from editing the Time Out theatre pages (and admitting she was wrong in the first place about Cheek by Jowl) , may be in the frame.
But all candidates should beware the kiss of death in these matters. Many years ago Kenneth Tynan tipped me as the young man most likely to succeed Harold Hobson on the Sunday Times, and I never even got a phone call. The job went to Bernard Levin.
And long after he left the Evening Standard, arts editor Michael Owen told me that I was about to be approached to succeed Milton Shulman when our mutual friend Jack Tinker intervened big time with the powers that be on behalf of Nick de Jongh.
So it’s always best to let history take its course, and if Geordie Greig doesn’t know what he wants then he’s unlikely to find it by people battering at his door.
One thing I hope he doesn’t do: appoiont a “celebrity” metroplitan — Will Self, Jodie Kidd, Nicky Haslam? — who then discovers he or she has to actually go and sit in a theatre four or five nights a week. It’s a very important job, for London and the London theatre.