Close to the end of the pier

I KNEW I WAS RIGHT

by Julie Burchill

Heinemann, 15.99, pp. 193

You remember the Vicar of Stiffkey a Church of England Reverend who behaved so badly, pissed off so many people that he got thrown out of his parish and defrocked? He ended up humiliated and pitiful, a tuppenny curiosity at the end of a pier, in a cage with a lion, protesting his innocence and reciting psalms. Finally, presumably out of sheer embarrassment, the lion ate him. The Vicar of Stiffkey is a chilling modern parable of celebrity, vanity and hubris. If you go to Brighton Pier today you may catch a glimpse of the whale that swallowed Julie Burchill.

Burchill's decline and fall should send a shiver down the spine of all columnists. Is this how it ends for us - with the petulant whimper of a self-righteous autobiography, the title a juvenile exclamation yelled from the street at the slammed door? Where do we go when the bile turns to whimsy? If we are lucky we become Keith Waterhouse. In fact I wish Keith would hurry up and die so that I can be Keith Waterhouse. Or you turn into Katharine Whitehorn, the agony aunt for Saga magazines, or a humourless social-working shrew like Polly Toynbee. It's a worry, because whatever you think about Julie Burchill, however much reading her was like chewing silver paper, no two ways she was the dog's bollocks, simply the best. Of a recent collection of columnists, a reviewer started by saying, `The best thing about this book is that there is no Julie Burchill.' Like Achilles, Burchill absent was still Burchill. (No one bothered to say there's no Gill - except Gill.)

At her splenetic best she was one of that meagre handful of golden writers who are a `must' read, an editor's bona fide, 18-carat paper-shifter. It didn't matter that a lot of it was nonsense, contradictory, repetitive or said purely to tease. It was the panache that was important, the lightness of touch, the power and accuracy of the punch. It was magic, and deeply enviable. Burchill's decline was as precipitous as her adolescent rise. She left the Mail on Sunday to write, a page along from me, half-hearted film reviews for the Sunday Times. She wasn't good at it. You could tell she didn't care, but her defence was that even when she wasn't concentrating she was still better than anyone else on the block. Well, perhaps, but you can't bite the hand that feeds you and treat your readers like cretins forever. Then a careering dash to the Sunday Express, and finally she managed to part company even with Punch, which is about as close to the end of the pier as most of us want to get. She just is Fleet Street's Norma Desmond. `I'm ready for my cockup now, Mr De Mille.'

There is a technical term for this book it's one off the wrist. It is the bare minimum, just enough to meet the word-count, the deadline, to pick up the cheque. Except that it doesn't read as if it were tossed off in a taxi. It reads like hard work, as if it was excavated with a proctologist's speculum. There's a repeated tic - heh, heh, heh, what's this supposed to mean? The radar ear for language has turned into cheesey cloth. Burchill boasts that it may all be lies, it may be made up, heh, heh, heh. Well, I don't care, but if you are going to lie, why make up something this chronically wimpy and bland?

Burchill struts her working-class credentials with repetitive pride, but this life, real or not, is as middle-class as mine. Her upbringing and parents were utterly bourgeois; they just had badly paid jobs. Cocaine, Marxism, starting a cute little culture mag, being queen of that Soho Surrey golf-club the Groucho, all the drugs and the Krug and ambidextrous sex. It's really only Mr Pooter moves to Islington and spits in the focaccia. You are offered the sad vision of Julie and her girlfriend excitedly getting togged up to be doorstepped by the paparazzi. Class warrior turns Tara Palmer-Tomkinson.

Tragically she writes:

I used to believe that penis size was important . . . [Now] . . . it doesn't really matter a damn. All that matters is having brilliant sex and being in love.

Oh please pass the vom sack. All you need is lurve. Burchill is Virginia Ironside. But then she would say size doesn't matter. The slim, sharp, svelte, hard, cool chick turned into a woman who could only sit on a seesaw with Dawn French, wearing a chin where her cleavage used to be. This wouldn't merit comment were it not so obviously nature following art, like Job's boils, a judgment from the Great Subeditor. The thing that is missing from this book is that thin file of photographs in the middle: me on the beach, Mum and Auntie Noreen. Well, you can see why. The cover snap is 20 years old, hardly a vote of selfconfidence.

Naturally the purpose of most of this is to settle scores. It's the Parthian shot's esprit d'escalier. But the enemies and allies have moved on and up; only she's left at a table in Waterstone's with a smaller readership than Punch. Oh, and the incontinent exclamation marks - what printers called dogs' dicks. It's sad and embarrassing, from dog's bollocks to dogs' dicks. Life's a bitch.

Burchill's paean of self-justification trumpets over and over again that she doesn't care what others think of her, that she's much better and brighter and wittier and smarter than all of us, but then she goes and spoils it all by devoting the last chapter to `Nice things people say about me in the papers'. You can't have it both ways, and anyone who has written a column should know better than to swallow what others write in theirs. However, I would like to add to Julie's yellowing cuttings file: with her word-play, puns, razor-sharp observation and her sex-and-laughs blockbuster, at her best she was the urban Jilly Cooper and I can't think of higher praise than that. This piece has given me no pleasure to write; just a bleak premonition.

A. A. Gill writes five columns for the Sunday Times and is at present writing a sexand-laughs novel.

Copyright Spectator Jan 24, 1998
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