She's gone! (No, not who you think)

[zotz]

Julie Burchill has taken Murdoch's shilling. Can I be the first to say Good Riddance? What I want to know is whether she kept the Guardian slot by bribery or blackmail. I suspect the latter, because she had it for an awfully long time and doesn't come from a rich family (or have any other visible means of support).

She'll fit in better at the Chunderer anyway. Of course, time was when it wouldn't have stooped to employing La B, but it's a long way down from where they were to where they are.

And in other news, something I saw reposted on ed.general today. For fans of the accursed Xena who recognise operetta when they see it: http://groups.google.co.uk/groups?q=Basileia+Makhetes&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&safe=off&selm=36AB2D83.77CFC845%40imrryr.demon.co.uk&rnum=1

Comments

[lovingboth]

From an editor's POV, she's ideal. She gets a reaction.

Personally, I have a little smile every time I see her books in a remainder shop.

[zotz]

She gets a reaction.

I could never work out why people bothered. In her time at the Guardian, she managed to make an interesting point with her column exactly once that I noticed, and was funny once as well (when she said she alwasy wore out the I key on her keyboards first). Against that, I did keep noticing people pointing out on the letters page the blatant logical or factual errors she'd made. She was almost never worth the effort of going past the first paragraph.

[childeric.livejournal.com]

Thank goodness for that. I've never been able to stand the woman. She has that Germaine Greer quality of sometimes being absolutely spot on, and at other times being utterly wrong-headed and barking. Germaine, though, is considerably cleverer, a thousand times more charming, and gets it right a *lot* more often than Julie B.

Ms Burchill irks me particularly as there clearly is a glimmer of intelligence and sense lurking there somewhere: but too often it gets lost amidst the general misanthropy.

I wonder who the Guardian'll get in instead?

[inulro.livejournal.com]

Yay! I might even start purchasing the weekend Guardian again.

[devilgate.livejournal.com]

I for one am slightly disappointed. She's the columnist I love to hate. Sometimes spot on, often completely off. More the latter, as I suppose is now proved by her going over to Murdoch.

And of course Tony Parsons has been at the Telegraph for years. This is the final end for the "hip young gunslingers".

(Not, I ought to add, that I was actually reading the NME in those days.)

[reddragdiva]

I was. Parsons was a much better writer then. Burchill was about as good and bad as she is now - clearly capable of more than pissing people off, but never quite achieving it. At least then she kept to the field of popular culture.

[inulro.livejournal.com]

Nope. Didn't even love to hate her. Just despise her.

It was, of course, the column about how we 30-somethings should be at home looking after our mortgages and babies instead of still going to gigs, and that music is only for Young People that did it for me.

[swisstone.livejournal.com]

Ah, I'll miss her appalling inverted snobbery, her bizarre prejudice against the acting profession, her hypocrisy and inconsistency on homosexuality, her irrational way of taking an initially sound point to absurd and irrational links ... actually, no I won't. I always used to read her column, just to see what she said, even though I knew I probably wouldn't agree with it. But about six month ago, I decided life was too short for Julie Burchill.

[reddragdiva]

Ah, but have you ever read one of her bloody novels? Now there's a waste of valuable seconds of one's life.

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

Why do people use the phrase 'pleased as Punch'? He never strikes me as particularly content with his lot, more maniacal in a "HERE'S JOHNNY!!" sort of way.