Book Review: Panic as Man Burns Crumpets, by Roger Lytollis, pub. Robinson 2021
The moment See Through News saw the pre-publication blurb for Panic As Man Burns Crumpets: the Vanishing World of the Local Journalist, we ordered a copy.
Stuart Maconie pronounced it
‘a very readable love letter to a disappearing world’.
Melvyn Bragg said it was
‘a classic and a gem’.
Followers of our pilot See Through News Newspaper Review Project will know why this book made our ears prick up, and our nostrils dilate. But more of that later, in part 3.
First, what’s the book like?
After ripping open the packaging (dispatched, natch, by a local bookstore, not a Silicon Valley Overlord with a penchant for phallic sub-spacecraft), we dived straight in.
After a couple of pages, we set the phone on silent, and romped through the first half of the book in a single sitting.
Panic As Man Burns Crumpets is a memoir by Roger Lytollis, an award-winning feature writer at one of Britain’s top local newspapers. Over 250 pages, Lytollis tells the story of his career at local newspapers in Cumbria, northwest England, and, briefly, Scotland.
It starts with the thrill he felt in 1995 when his local paper, the Cumberland News & Star published a speculative column he’d written at journalism college.
It ends with the despair he felt in 2019, when the same paper’s new corporate owners made him redundant.
The first 150-odd pages scintillate with what the title promises. Lytollis wangles us an access-all-areas pass to the boisterous hubbub of a local rag’s newsroom. He introduces us, warts-and-all, to his sweaty, sweary, cynical-with-a-good-heart hacks colleagues.
As they teach him the ropes of local news, Lytollis adjusts his own focus on the business of local journalism. As the initial shine wanes, he loses some (but by no means all) of his callow inhibitions. Among the quirky, random anecdotes, Lytollis examines the broader context of the local newspaper industry
But if you buy the book for such anecdotes, you won’t be short-changed. Lytollis’s yarns are plentiful, high quality, and expertly spun.
We share his delight, half shocked, half gleeful, as he and his colleagues tackle articles about local residents who claim Jesus has appeared via their living room wallpaper stain, or The Man With The Pigeon Tattoo. The latter gets an entire chapter, and quite right too.
Any local journalist from the past few centuries would recognise Lytollis’s tales of boisterous newsroom badinage, surreal local characters, colourful newspaper owners and raucous local rivalries.
They’d also recognise Lytollis’s gifts as a writer. Journalist or not, all good writers see their worlds with both clear-eyed detachment and moist-eyed compassion.
Lytollis is the kind of guide you’d want to navigate the parallel universe of the local hack. His wry, self-deprecating tone can induce a snort of laughter in one sentence, pursed lips of recognition in the next.
His irresistibly fluid, frank writing style makes it clear why he won his many feature-writing awards. The topic of local news award ceremonies occupies many pages, but typically, Lytollis devotes most of them to his stiff-upper-lip anguish at all the awards he didn’t win. Much funnier that way, but then Lytollis has funny bones.
If it’s been a few years since you read anything worthwhile in your local rag, you’re unfamiliar with Cumbria, or have never heard of Roger Lytollis, don’t let any of that come between you and this treat. You’re in safe hands. It’s hard to imagine a better Christmas gift for anyone with any lingering affection for their local rag.
Lytollis both is, and isn’t, ‘just’ a local hack. He’s too sharp an observer, too accomplished a writer, to indulge in any rose-tinted sentimentality about the ‘old days’ of local journalism. Yet his memoir is an incisive account of why your local rag used to have something worth reading in it.
Amid the revelations of outrageous headlines, newsroom bullying and school-of-hard-knocks mentoring, Lytollis reveals the bedrock of truth-telling, uncompromising ethical standards, and local solidarity that underpin every thriving local newspaper.
Amid the pigeon tattoos, crumpet-incineration and tales of the latest ham-fisted attempts at intervention from the owner, we get the impression that the News & Star, by and large, fulfils the critical role of all successful local papers. For better or worse - usually for better - it acted as the People’s Champion. Lytollis and his colleagues listened to their readership, put their awkward questions to the authorities, spoke truth to power, and held power to account.
Lytollis also writes for thoughtful football magazine When Saturday Comes, and as all football fans know, no rivalry is more passionate than a local derby. He explains the paradox of how local rivalry isn’t always negative - it has its benefits too. It cements community bonds, and reinforces local identity. As our world gets faster, and our lives more mobile, such things still matter. We’ve all learned that during Covid lockdown.
Lytollis’s dozens of newsroom colleagues all live locally. If they don’t have local roots, they soon develop some. They may take short-cuts, and may not always adhere to the highest moral standards, but they basically care about the people and places they cover. They may be reluctant to sound so sappy, but they cherish a professional journalistic ethic, one that transcends their status as employees. They can, and do, stand up to their owner.
Like all writers, Lytollis betrays a masochistic obsession with negative reviews. The bad reviews are always the funniest, but he also makes clear that many readers respected the work of local journalists. They were seen not so much as hired hacks, more as integral, if sometimes flawed, members of their community.
The first half of the book hums with the chaotic harmony of a local paper’s bond with its readers, and the shared Cumbrian home. As the editors put the paper to bed in the newsroom, the printing presses start to rumble downstairs. As the hacks leave the office to head for the pub, they exchange banter with delivery drivers waiting to deliver their words to their readers, vans emblazoned with the Cumberland News & Star masthead.
From the day he joined the News & Star as a trainee in 1995, until page 152, the book is a joyous romp for both author and reader. With Lytollis as our bumbling, self-conscious, apologetic guide, we celebrate our common humanity in all our imperfection.
We also get premonitions of where the story is going.
In 2005, the rambunctious tone takes a darker turn. In a chapter entitled Website Woes, the News & Star’s owner, along with all other local newspaper bosses, makes the fateful decision not only to put his paper’s content online, but also not to charge for it.
So began the Internet’s anaconda squeeze. With revenue falling, costs had to fall too. Redundancies and incremental ethical compromises follow. After decades of fastidious impartiality, advertising wrappers paid for by political parties cover the papers before polling days.
The wraparounds are printed in identical font to the real newspaper, sold to the highest bidder.. As Lytollis points out, whichever party pays for it, and however much they pay, such money-spinning wheezes carry a cost to their credibility as impartial journalists. Quite apart from being guaranteed to alienate at least half their readership.
Lytollis describes this gradual diminishing, and looming crisis, with a sharp eye and a warm heart. The ribald, rich stew of local life, once bubbling away in the newsroom, gradually reduces to a simmering gruel.
Staff adapt to the new realities of centralised printing, fewer photographers, feeding the website beast, and online multitasking.
But much worse was to come.
**
To discover why it took us so long to read the rest of this splendid book, read
Part 2: The Dark Side of Local Journalism.