Full colour continues to wash like a technicolor river over Fleet Street. Roger Alton’s spunkier, glitzier Independent has been the latest paper to wrap itself in the coat of dreams, leaving Richard Desmond’s Dailys Express and Star as the last stop-outs. Alton’s Independent is a curious beast, at once more expensive yet superficially less authoritative, although the passionate layouts and colours of last week’s launch have settled down to something more legible since the launch.
As with most revamps, so come the updated byline pictures; the once long-locked Thomas Sutcliffe is now flecked with grey at the temples, but retains his boyish grin – with touches of youth added through a flamboyant shirt and the shortening of his name to ‘Tom’. Hermione Eyre, the Independent On Sunday’s TV reviewer, has morphed into an impossible glamour puss – while her counterpart on the page, radio writer Nicholas Lezard, appears to have had his picture updated for the first time since he took on the role ten years ago. The radio column – easily one of the more personality-branded in the critics section, and always very readable – has since been axed. It seems rather remarkable to make someone pose for a byline picture one week then fire them the next, especially as it was supposedly due to a ‘lack of funds’. Still, such is the way of these things.
Lezard’s last column (filed next week, we think) may take an intriguing departing line – he has rarely been shy of contrasting the merits of radio with TV in the past. Witness the recent ‘More people listen to the radio than watch television these days’ and a speculation on the future swap of ‘word counts and salaries’ between the radio and TV reviewers. (Speculation of a feud is, one thinks, symptomatic of too much thought on the topic)
News hour, with Jerry Caesar 