Sober reality

Have you noticed how nearly everyone in the media has won an award? Is there even such a thing as a documentary maker who isn’t ‘award-winning’? Most journalists my age have picked up some sort of bauble. I sulked about this for years until a colleague reminded me that I did have an award: Private Eye’s ‘drunkest person at the Spectator party 1991’. I’d forgotten, perhaps because there was no awards ceremony. Shame. I like to think of myself clutching the prize — perhaps a tasteful statuette of someone doing a technicolour yawn — while insisting modestly that it should really have gone to the vicar who fell backwards into the rose bushes.

Likewise, I was cross that I had never merited a single article about me in a national newspaper. Again, not true. I was once in the Sun, no less. It’s not in my cuttings book, but from memory the headline was ‘Journalist’s “joke” costs him £1,000’.