Expenses. Those joyous three syllables that, four decades ago, opened an Aladdin’s Cave of delights to pretty much everyone in the media world.
Including me. In 1988, at the age of 29, I had just landed my first journalism job as TV critic of the Evening Standard in London. I was in a state of shock. After four and a half years on the dole in the capital where I had moved without a job and knowing only one person, I had finally ‘made it.’ The lack of money, stress, unanswered letters and gatecrashed parties, trying to manoeuvre my way into London’s elite media circle, had been worth it. I was hired by the late, great editor, John Leese and his deputy, Genevieve Cooper, and it turned my life around.
Back in the day, there were many perks – freebies to launch new TV shows, PR trips, travel excursions and, yes, that joyous thing that has become anathema to those of us now struggling in a greatly diminished newspaper landscape: expenses.
The greatest of those perks was the annual Edinburgh TV Festival, where the Standard would put me up in the George Hotel and pay for me to get to Edinburgh and back (oh, yes, and pay for my food and drinks while I was there).
Executives and PRs from TV companies had much bigger expense accounts, and Edinburgh (along with the annual comedy festival in Montreux) was an endless carousel of drinking and fun, with a bit of work thrown in.
But as I’m packing my suitcase for the three-day event that begins on Tuesday, I’m acutely aware of how things have changed since I emerged on the scene. Although I haven’t been to the festival in about 10 years (no expenses, increasingly broke), I remember it as one of the highlights of my professional and social life – and it was the major pulling ground in the TV calendar. If you didn’t get laid at Edinburgh, your next best chance in the UK was the Royal Television Society Cambridge TV Festival, which came around only every two years.
Back in the day, before everything moved to the Edinburgh International Conference Centre in 1996, the talks took place at various points around the city. But the main action happened at the George Hotel, where anyone who was anyone invariably stayed – certainly anyone hopeful of getting some action in the bedrooms.
The first year I attended, I had eight hours sleep in three nights – not because of any hot sex but because the George bar stayed open all night and it was where everyone returned after the opening party and dinners.
Until it filled up around midnight, I felt a bit sad. At the party, everyone had an “in” crowd they were having supper with afterwards – executives, guest speakers, celebrities speaking on panels or just in town for the main festival – and I was always Billy No Mates and the last person to leave.
Everything changed when I was invited to the big dinner in 1990. Hosted by producer, director and presenter William G. Stewart, it was the most envied invitation. Bagpipers, haggis, more whisky and wine than you ever thought you were capable of drinking, it was always a riotous evening of the top brass in British TV. A dinner table made up of mostly men, I think I got my first invitation because I’d garnered a reputation as a real fun person to be around. I had also, in 1989, taken the microphone in a packed auditorium where Rupert Murdoch was the key speaker, and publicly denounced him for the hypocrisy he had just displayed in his speech. To wild applause, I became something of a hero at that point.
I can’t remember what I did to get myself invited every subsequent year, though I suspect it had something to do with that first dinner and my ‘dancing breasts’ party trick in which I could (and still can) get my chest to leap about in rhythm to any tune suggested by whatever assembled throng I’m with. It’s something I normally save for Christmas, though irritatingly everyone always wrongly guesses that the dancing breasts are bobbing along to Jingle Bells when they are performing Hark! The Herald Angels Sing. You have to see it, really.
The men with whom I ended up in intimate situations went one of two ways subsequently: they got huge promotions and reached the top of their respective trees, or they died. You had to be a of a certain age to succeed at either, but I have fond memories of them all. Except the Scottish one. Enough said. Promoted, yes, but a nasty piece of work and the only man who has ever frightened me.
The festival used to be held over the August Bank Holiday weekend, which meant that a lot of people left early, hence its being changed to a mid-week event. That took a feeling of wild holiday abandonment away from it, as did the move to the conference centre. Where once, a group of journalists headed for the local Chinese to wile away most of Saturday (already having been bored out of our skulls after arriving on Friday night and sleeping through the opening McTaggart lecture), suddenly everyone stayed en masse at the centre where they talked about the sessions they had just witnessed.
Now, all the bigwigs were staying at the nearby Sheraton, and we increasingly impoverished journos had to make do with B & Bs that were so far out of town, we were never more than a stone’s throw away from joining the reserves bench at Murrayfield’s rugby stadium.
The world of TV went serious. Edinburgh went serious. People went serious – especially the young ones. The language changed beyond all recognition in sessions. Every year, it had been a case of ‘Whither the BBC?’ Now, executives were being flown in from the USA, mainly to tell our own people – in particular, the money men and women – how it should all be done.
And sex certainly went out of the window. This new breed were in bed early, yes – to sleep and be rested sufficiently in order to arrive bright eyed and bushy tailed for the 9am session about HDTV. Jeez. In my day, they hadn’t even called last orders at the George Hotel at 9am.
Nevertheless, the increased quality and variety of sessions has turned the festival from a largely fun-filled freebie into a serious event that addresses TV from so many different angles. For example, one highlight this year is Graham Norton interviewing the genius that is Tina Fey. That is a great booking.
I’m really looking forward to it, though probably won’t know many people there. I’m paying for myself, won’t be staying at the Sheraton, and have only the ashes of past Edinburgh lovers as memories in my head. But, hey, you never know. Where’s there’s Glenfiddich, there’s hope. And, obviously, my dancing breasts can perform Flower of Scotland. Yep. I’ve still got it.
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