Earlier this year something approaching a journalistic miracle took place. I sat down to dinner with Sir Terence and Lady Conran as a guest of BMW at the Durban Hills wine estate along with fellow members of our illustrious trade. I had been invited partly because I am a sort of motoring journalist and, therefore, on the BMW media mailing list but mainly, I suspect, in the hope that I would write a few words about the evening at some future date.
The meal was prepared by a team of South Africa’s top chefs and the idea was that Sir Terence (a restaurateur of note for the past 40 years) would comment on what he had eaten. I really had no idea how to turn the evening’s proceedings into a decent story until Sir Terence got up at the end of the evening and went on to criticise the entire menu, demoralise the chefs and reveal something we suspected all along, viz: rich old men may take young wives but when it comes to matters of digestion what they really want is a nice bit of steamed fish.
BMW’s Richard Carter gallantly attempted to rescue the evening while restaurant staff kept a wary eye on Lady Conran who had become rather tired and emotional by this stage of the evening and wanted to go back to her hotel. I had my story and a week later in the Lifestyle section of The Sunday Times I reported on the evening’s slightly surreal proceedings.
I now come to the journalistic miracle to which I alluded in my first sentence. Among my many fellow guests at the Friday evening dinner was the restaurant critic of the Cape Argus, who managed to get her review of the evening’s proceedings into the following morning’s paper. This is a mightily impressive achievement I think you would have to agree, particularly as we had all left the dinner at a rather late hour.
Instead of going home and flopping into bed with the early warning signs of a hangover, she had apparently dashed off a few hundred words. Most people would have not known anything was amiss had her description of the evening borne any resemblance to the actual proceedings and had somebody not pointed out that the section for which she writes goes to press three days before the rest of the newspaper—gotcha!
The kindest interpretation is that she had travelled on the astral plane to a function to be held four days hence and faithfully reported on it when she had returned to her physical body. The unkind interpretation is that she made the whole thing up having been given the menu for the evening. At least she got the food right even if she didn’t correctly anticipate Sir Terence’s comments on it. Five out of ten for accuracy isn’t bad for a journalist. Needless to say, any reputation she has among readers as a restaurant critic no longer exists, although I doubt if many journalists would find her behaviour particularly reprehensible.
It’s all part of a general lowering of industry standards. Plagiarism is already tolerated and I even know of a prominent journalist who favourably reviewed a weekend retreat she had never visited on condition that they gave her and a partner two free nights accommodation at a more convenient date. I have a copy of a letter from another hack requesting a free business class ticket to a certain destination plus five star accommodation in return for the possibility of a future review. I would really love to name names but one doesn’t want to use up all one’s ammunition just in case of future skirmishes. So I will allow the guilty parties to sweat for a bit while I decide whether or when to release this juicy gossip to The Media readers.