Yesterday's blog got more hits than any of the previous 88 that I've written though that includes a lot of people who didn't agree with me defending tabloid journalism.
Working on tabloid newspapers, particularly the years I spent at The Sun, means I long ago had to accept being below lawyers, estate agents and politicians in the popularity stakes in many people's eyes.
That's why I was disappointed rather than angry about Charlie Brooker's attack on the industry in his column yesterday. Unfortunately a lot of people agree with him, but not everyone.
Being a tabloid hack was even harder during the period in the late eighties and early nineties when I covered industry for the currant bun. As you can imagine, it is not easy to represent a Tory supporting newspaper, three or four years after it moved to Wapping, while covering the TUC.
To their credit though many unions accepted that their membership and our readership were often one and the same. Sometimes the general secretaries would be from public school and read the FT but the rank and file were often made up of the aspirational working class who flicked through a red top paper in their tea break, if only to read the cartoons or racing tips.
Mind you I still had a couple of NALGO minders threaten to cut me into pieces and bury the various body parts on Blackpool beach during one TUC conference. I told them it wouldn't matter as I was a clone produced at Wapping and if I disappeared they'd just send more of me. If I remember rightly my mate from the Morning Star stepped in and came to my rescue.
I can remember getting my first contract on the paper, from Kelvin, who asked me, like he asked everyone, why they wanted to work for The Sun.
Usually people crawled up to him and told him it was because of the way it represented the people of Britain or stood up for the ordinary man or because of the top quality journalism or how much they loved Kelvin.
I was living in Stepney at the time so I simply said 'because it's my local paper' which amused him. I used to nag him for a contract every day for a year while I was doing shifts. When I got one he wrote a short letter to me which said 'Dear Solly, At last, a contract. Well done, Kelvin' and that was it.
Later he told me that it was to stop my nagging and that I was doing so many freelance shifts at the paper it was actually cheaper for them to give me a full time job.
During my six years there I used to maintain that half my life seemed to be spent working at The Sun and the other half trying to defend it.
I'm sure this will resonate with a lot of those in the industry but here are the top ten questions and comments I got from friends, strangers and others when I worked at The Sun:
1.Do you get to choose the Page Three pictures (fnarr fnarr)?
2.When did you give up journalism then?
3.You make it all up, don't you?
4.What's Kelvin really like?
5.Don't you feel ashamed?
6.I bet it's a real laugh there.
7.Do you know Garry Bushell?
8.How can you work for that scum?
9.So come on, what's the gossip they don't publish?
10.F*** off you c*** I don't talk to News International (copyright John Prescott)
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And as if to prove tabloids don't cheer us up - here's a story on the BBC that first appeared in various tabloids. It's not so much the words but the picture of the bottom half of a burly farmer being chased by a vicious otter that gets me. It's hilarious.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-13126139
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It was only a matter of time. When she first announced she was bipolar there was a general outpouring of support for Catherine Zeta-Jones but less than a week later the first stories appeared with headlines like 'why are so many celebrities bipolar?'
The question mark at the end will tell you which newspaper it is. The same one that poured scorn on climate change on the basis that among those campaigning against global warming is Charles Manson.
For anyone seriously wanting to know more about bipolar disorder, I suggest a couple of books by Cara Aitken on this link. http://www.jkp.com/catalogue/author/579
Not least because she's a cousin of mine who I haven't seen since we used to get on the 129 bus to our respective schools.
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The London Underground system is a wondrous thing when it works but it can't cope with good weather.
Tempers fray as the temperatures rise. There's no air conditioning and people lose their cool in more ways than one.
You also see a lot more tattoos and it was a woman with some strange and probably meaningless Chinese symbol on her ankle who started the row with another woman as one got on and the other got off.
It involved a shove and a slap and that was it, at Stratford station, but it's my first of the year. Naturally, with a majority of the passengers being East European or Asian, it was two white English women involved.
I'll say this for the burly Polish builders and musclebound Moldovans on the tube each day, they are exceedingly polite. More than anyone else they stand up for women or let you go in front of them on the platform and apologise profusely if they bump into you.
When the Olympics are over and The Shard has been built, I expect many of them will leave but it will lower the courtesy quotient on the underground when they do.
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It's Easter, it's Passover and though I enjoy both chocolate eggs and matzos, the religious side will pass me by but I know it's an important time for many of you out there so have a good one...Solly
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