Journalism 101 – a course I have yet to complete – dictates that if you have something salient to say you should get there fast. So right now, I should mention that this is my last ever column for the Guardian. I’ll level with you: I spent a long time wondering how to write it. At first, I thought it should be about all the things I’ve learned, purely because that would be a hell of a lot shorter than a column about all the things I keep failing to learn, no matter how many times I make the mistakes. For example: if you’ve got a good joke, you’d best put it in the intro. (Why is there literally no joke in this intro?)
Or: remember that people love the piss-taking until it strays into the arena of something they like, when it suddenly becomes wholly unacceptable. Take the time I wrote: “Arguing on the internet is like playing real tennis: even if you win, you’re still a twat”. This prompted an immediate missive from a member of the Cambridge University real tennis club, which appeared on the letters page under the headline “Real tennis has been served badly by this unfair slur” and began: “Like many Guardian readers, I have thoroughly enjoyed and always look forward to reading Marina Hyde’s witty and caustic commentaries on the world about us. However …” Incidentally, I told this story at one book tour event, and then at the signing afterwards, a lovely young lady came up to get a book dedicated to her father, Jeremy. And of course, she said: “I should probably mention, he’s the guy who wrote in from the Cambridge University real tennis club.” Truly, the circle of life. To Jeremy, and the many other Jeremies who have written in over the years, let me just say: we all know the real twats are rackets players.
In the end, though, this could only be largely a column of thanks. I’ve ended up covering so many things over my time at the Guardian – from World Cups to Olympic Games to just the 47 general elections – but for the past few years, my permanent berth has been here in the Opinion section. And I want to pay tribute to all the people on this hallowed desk. I have tried to be the easiest columnist to deal with … like that means anything. Columnists are very possibly the worst demographic in journalism. And as you know, that really DOES mean something. As I say, I’ve tried to keep my interventions in the editorial process very limited, but I do have to accept I have basically said three things to the Opinion desk, on repeat. 1. “So what if it’s in bad taste?” (I stand by that one.) 2. “It’s not offensive – what you’ve done is confuse the subject of the joke with the object of the joke.” (I mean … that genuinely is so obnoxious. I can only apologise.) And 3. the extremely timeworn: “why have you put a headline on this that makes me look like a – ”. And then I have to use a word that even in the Guardian you’re only allowed to use if it’s in reported speech.
The amazing editors and subeditors have borne all of that with good humour and equanimity. I don’t know what they’ve said after we’ve put down the phone to each other, but God knows they’d have been entitled to it.
I think we can all live without my retrospective, but I will say my time at the Guardian began in lively fashion, working on the Diary column. Quite soon after starting, we were given a one-off Osama bin Laden puppet by the Spitting Image creators, which I was dispatched to get photographed on the steps of the French embassy in London. (But why?) The only problem was that the latex Osama was carrying a toy AK-47, and just as I’d propped him against the door of the embassy to get the picture, it swung open and I was pulled inside by French security. Things escalated fast. In the end, the incident was attended by 10 police squad cars and five police motorcycles, and Knightsbridge was brought to a total standstill.
Again: why? Why did we do this? Genuinely the reasons for it are lost in the mists of time for me. Like so many stunts pulled by what we used to call newspapers, it made absolute sense in the context of the news cycle in which it happened, and makes absolutely no sense once ripped from those temporal moorings. But over two decades on, I would obviously like to thank the various police forces on the scene – French, Met, and diplomatic – for deciding not to press charges, which would, I sense, have made the rest of my so-called career rather tricky.
Over time, that old Fleet Street wild west gave way to the digital wild west in which we live now – a place of no less remarkable incident. One of the bizarre things that came with the advent of social media was seeing which famous people reposted your columns. Probably my favourite was when I wrote one about a new ITV show where Rob Lowe played a police chief in Brexit Britain. (I know – how did it not get a second season?) In the course of this column, I happened to digress all the way back to that time in 1988 when Rob was campaigning for Michael Dukakis at the Democratic national convention, on the eve of which he ended up making a sex tape in his convention hotel in Georgia with two girls, one of whom was 16. And then I mentioned that at my school, we were all totally thrilled and excited when that story came out, because it meant that Rob Lowe was definitely open to sex with 16-year-old girls. (cf “so what if it’s in bad taste?”)
Imagine the lift on my eyebrow when Rob Lowe only went and reposted this column, particularly bearing in mind that for the past few years his timeline had consisted of incredibly wholesome content about dropping his children off at university and so on. Did it indicate that he still had a bit of the animal left in him (my preferred reading, as I don’t think you ever truly kill it off) or had he simply not read through to the relevant bit? We will, I think, never really know – and I always enjoyed such mysteries.
While we let that one settle, it feels like a great moment to begin my lengthy thanks to the Guardian’s legal department, with whom it may not surprise you to learn I have shared many, many intense moments over the years. There was a point not so long ago when someone on the Opinion desk relayed to me that someone in the legal department had said: “really the best person at legalling Marina’s column is Marina”. First: no. But second: this honestly might be the greatest compliment I ever got. It’s like the old proverb goes: legal a woman’s column and you feed her for a day. Teach a woman to legal her own column and you feed her for a lifetime. I want to thank legal for all the incredibly nutritious masterclasses.
And, speaking directly to the department, I am very much hoping we don’t get a complaint on this last column, although that would in some ways be amusingly on-brand. Looking back over what I’ve typed so far … I feel like Rob Lowe is the most obvious vulnerability? Alas, my Guardian email address will no longer work, so – hate to say it – you guys will be on your own with this one should it materialise. What we had was simply too special to be exported over to my new inbox. (This regretful bounce-back also applies to any rackets players who may now be seeking to get in touch.)
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Finally, then: that email address, and what it has meant to me. Many people don’t believe this, but in all the 25 years I have worked for the Guardian, I never had a private email address. Thus I have been in a constant – constant! – dialogue with Guardian readers who write in about my columns. Long before all the amazing digital metrics that we now have on where and how deeply our work is read, I had multiple daily emails from Guardian readers with subject headlines like “thank you”, “screw you” and – occasionally – “shame on you”. They ran the full gauntlet from adoring to bracing to skin-flaying. I would honestly not have had it any other way.
If you write opinion on the news, ultimately you are in the audience business, and to have an ongoing back-and-forth with the one you’re serving has been as much of a privilege as it has been endlessly enlightening and stimulating. So how could I not save the most important people in this column to last? Thank you so much, dear readers – and I hope to see you down the trail. In the meantime, my very best wishes to you and yours. It has, I promise you, been an absolute honour.
