An Irishman's Diary

I SUPPOSE it’s good news that the national journalism awards are be expanded to include a category for headline writers (Page 7, April 13th), even though, in a respectable newspaper like this one, one worries about where such competition might lead.

The news will certainly be welcomed by reader Frank Neenan, who wrote to me a while back lamenting what he saw as a missed opportunity by our own subeditors.

On the night previously, the RTÉ news had featured a court report about one of those periodic hill-walking disputes. And in the case at question, a judge had ruled that there was no public right of way.

Which would have been a fairly unremarkable occurrence, ordinarily, except that on this occasion, the decision had been welcomed by the land-owner, who happened to be a Mr “Walker”, and by an IFA spokesman, Mr “Hill”.

So, understandably, Frank opened his Irish Times the following morning expecting a suitably witty headline: “Walker, Hill hail reverse for hill walker” perhaps. But in the event, he was disappointed.

The problem, of course, is that we broadsheet newspapers have to maintain a certain sobriety of tone, especially on the courts pages.

And although what is called “colour” reporting may sometimes allow both the reporter and headline writer a little of the licence enjoyed by tabloids, there are limits.

Whatever about wry summaries of hill-walking disputes, I can’t imagine any situation wherein our entries for the headline-writing competition would include the likes of “Freddy Starr ate my hamster”. But only time, and the next awards ceremony, will tell.

For the moment, one of the more celebrated examples of a broadsheet paper letting its hair down, headline-wise, continues to be a story in the London Times circa 1986.

It concerned the former Labour leader Michael Foot, whose surname combined headline-friendly brevity with obvious humour potential. But as it happened, the report in question was both very serious and rather undramatic: concerning his appointment to chair an international disarmament committee, or something such.

Fortunately, words like “committee” and “disarmament” do not easily fit into headlines, even in broadsheets. So the subeditor, tasked with a single-column head in large type and seeking mere concision, rather than wit, first came up with “Foot chairs arms body”.

Then, only to give his revise editor a laugh, he changed it to “Foot heads arms body”, assuming this would indeed be revised before going into print. And nobody was more surprised than he when it wasn’t.

Perhaps the relative lack of sobriety in that published headline reflected the condition of the journalists working the late desk. In any case, the Foot precedent led for a time to the journalistic equivalent of arms proliferation, if only as an office game.

A vogue developed whereby subeditors dreamed up situations that might allow them use a royal flush of anatomical terms in headlines. One barely-plausible scenario involved Foot becoming prime minister, then discovering that his Defence secretary was a secret admirer of the National Front and its strong-arm tactics – a situation that could have been summed up as follows: “Foot knows arms body head backs front muscle”.

It’s one of the occupational hazards of journalism that, sooner or later, you start thinking in headlines, even for stories that haven’t happened yet, and maybe never will. There must be many classics already fully formed in the minds of subeditors waiting only for real-life circumstances to justify their use.

I’m quite sure, for example, that long before the fateful night 12 years ago when no-hopers Inverness Caledonian Thistle beat the mighty Celtic 3-1 in the Scottish Cup, the Sun’s headline “Super Caley go ballistic Celtic are atrocious” already existed in somebody’s head, and had been waiting its unlikely chance for years.

Indeed, speaking of heads, the New York Post’s famous page 1 banner – “Headless body in topless bar” – also sounds like one that might have pre-existed the story. Given that this was New York in the early 1980s, the events it described were probably more likely to happen, eventually, than Caley Thistle humiliating Celtic.

Mind you, the Post headline’s comedic quality is diminished somewhat by familiarity with the reality of the case. And there was a reminder of all the grisly details earlier this year when the killer, a man named Charles Dingle, sought parole (unsuccessfully).

So doing, he repeated his long-standing claims to be innocent. But it’s just as well for him that New York didn’t have the death penalty when he was convicted. Otherwise, not only might he have suffered the ultimate punishment, but the Post might have been gifted yet another headline of questionable taste, probably involving the words “Dingle” and “Dangle”.

fmcnally@irishtimes.com