PLATINUM PARTNERS
Back Page Bitch
Confess to the Bitch: backpagebitch@yahoo.com
October, 2009
Dear Dick, The Review, at last, is dead. Yes, Dear Dick, after 63-years it will publish its final issue in December. A round-robin email is currently bouncing between a long list of current and former FEER staffers asking whether the demise of the Review matters. But it’s irrelevant really. The magazine today is nothing like the crusading independent weekly that unearthed so many scandals and stood up to numerous big boy bullies. As former editor Philip Bowring so wisely, said, it’s a funeral that is happening five years after the actual death – when the paper got bought out by Dow Jones, went monthly and started it’s farright editorial rants that talked for corporate Republican America far more than they talked for Asia. The staffers should be retained and will continue to suckle on the huge Dow Jones corporate teat, including editor Hugo Restall who will be whisked back to the US. Restall will be remembered among the Main Bar gossips as the editor who suddenly saw the need to spike a book review he had commissioned – it had nothing to do with the fact it talked about Dow Jones owner Rupert Murdoch – and for allegedly referring to George Bush as a “pinko”. Farewell Hugo. You will be missed. Talking of the Main Bar, there is trouble brewing in your favourite watering hole. The Bar is split over a gargantuan question: should the sound on the telly be on or off when there’s sport on. Tricky. What would you say, Dear Dick? Would you have needed to
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THE CORRESPONDENT
hear the sound of a car running round in circles? Or the grunts of an Australian footballer? Do you think you would have still have been immortalised in John Le Carre’s Honourable Schoolboy as the enigmatic “Old Craw” if, instead of engaging the bar-flies with insight, repartee and mystery, you would have been sat looking at the small screen watching a rerun of United versus Fulham? And so from the small screen to the silver screen. Graham Uden, one of the (self-proclaimed) Asian Paparazzi Kings, employed an intern this summer. She was a confident yet quiet British Chinese girl who worked for him for three months and then went back to London. He thought nothing more of it until a client who met the girl on a shoot later asked if Graham knew who she was. He didn’t and more fool him. She was Katie Leung, star of three Harry Potter movies. She appears as the young Potter’s girlfriend and is a real front-page star in her own right. Perhaps the biggest tabloid story of the summer was sitting, quite literally, at the end of his well-used wide angle and Mister Uden was oblivious. Uden is not one to normally miss his man – or girl. SCMP Post Magazine staffers will know him for the many “assignments”, always with the ever-smiling writer, Tom Hilditch, that in the late ‘90s, exposed many Asian sex industry hot spots. The pair’s editorial dedication was extraordinary. Even Editor-inChief Jonathan Fenby was known
to take an interest in Uden’s investigative work, regularly making his way to the magazine office to check the snapper’s “BRoll”. And during his seven-figure tenure at the Post, Fenby was not known to pick up a loop – or indeed anything – without much deliberation. Talking of the Post, this bastion of English language journalism has left Quarry Bay. The lucky few will remain on Hong Kong Island, in a small metro news office in Causeway Bay, while the rest will have to make the daily schlep to the paper’s printing complex in Tai Po. Please, no jokes about spelling mistakes. The paper’s management have put on a staff bus to carry the many staffers that live on the outlying islands from the Central ferry piers to the New Territories – one wag has already dubbed it the “feral wagon” – and it is very easy to spot. It is the only bus leaving the ferry pier stand that is filled with enthusiastic, beaming hacks eager to start work and unearth the scoop of the day. And it is also marked. In the front window is a small sign that reads, simply, “SCMP”. And in the back window is a huge sign that boldly announces, “Caution, Children.” Dear Dick, is this a mistake?
Respectfully,
Bitch THE CORRESPONDENT
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