MICHAEL Holroyd doesn't have to try hard to sell his first major biography for 15 years. First, because he is Michael Holroyd, pre-eminent biographer in a golden age of biography, his every book acclaimed, its scholarship definitive, its readability assured.
Secondly, just look at his subjects. As he told his audience yesterday, the story of Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, king and queen of the Victorian stage, encompasses dangerous liaisons, elopements, attempted kidnaps, illegitimate children, heterose
xual and homosexual love affairs, and epic levels of fame and fortune. "What sane novelist or dramatist could ask for more?"
Irving was the great tragedian of his age and the first knight of the stage; she its greatest beauty. According to Bram Stoker, manager of the theatre they turned into a cathedral of the arts, she "embodied sunshine". And then there were their two children: Edward, the revolutionary stage designer, and Edy, who founded a feminist theatre company and "a largely lesbian community which makes the Bloomsbury group look conventional".
Holroyd, pictured, doesn't labour the point, but Irving and Terry would have had at least an inkling of our own obsession with celebrity. Irving's plays were lavishly expensive spectacles, in which he was forever in the spotlight. Terry had been a star since childhood, setting fashions through her choice of clothes, as much an icon in her century as Marilyn Monroe was to be in the next.
The difference between the media then and now, he said, is that then they left private lives alone. Any indiscretions, any unpleasantness, reflected badly not on the stars themselves but on the newspapers that had the temerity to report on their private lives.
This was just about the only thing over which the media was not accused by Hugh Aldersey-Williams and Nick Davies. While the former's critique of media scaremongering seemed little more than a Mock the Week-type commentary on headlines that overhype horrors, the latter's was altogether more substantive.
Davies has a point. His critique that journalism has been replaced by "churnalism", with journalists recycling PR handouts rather than researching and checking their own stories does have some factual basis. His argument is, essentially, that job cuts and increased pagination mean that journalists produce three times more copy than they would have done, say, 20 years ago.
That fact alone, coupled with the slashing of the freelance budgets for national newspapers, means that there is less reliance on original material.
Into that gap come PR agencies (there are now, he says, "more flacks than hacks"), whose operations have grown so sophisticated that they often form fake organisations to provide newsworthy material. In the US, he said, these are known as "astroturf" outfits – "grassroots organisations without any real roots".
If, however, such spin is odious, Davies warned that it would be nothing by comparison with the "information chaos" that would ensue if we replaced mainstream media by relying on the internet for our news.
The full article contains 500 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
