Alistair Coleman - Angry People in Local Newspapers

Alistair Coleman

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ANGRY PEOPLE IN LOCAL NEWSPAPERS

UK | USA | Canada | Ireland | Australia

India | New Zealand | South Africa

Michael Joseph is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

First published 2018

Introductions copyright Alistair Coleman, 2018

A full list of the copyright holders of the articles contained within this book can be found

The identifying details of those mentioned in the articles have been altered to protect their privacy.

The moral right of the author has been asserted

ISBN: 978-1-405-93896-9

Britain is a country on the edge.

A country lost in its own impotent rage.

And its not because of the big issues in the news like the state of the NHS, an impending Third World War, Brexit and err Brexit.

Its also about those trivial things that get up your nose the bins not being emptied on the right day, stepping in dog poo for the third time this week, getting an unfair parking ticket, or finding some squamous nightmare creature from the pits of Hell lurking at the bottom of your tin of Heinz Cream of Tomato soup.

Most of us know how to react when a politician lies. You get to vote them out at the next election, and in the meantime you can moan about them in the comments section of Mail Online.

But when your bus timetable is suddenly changed, bringing minor inconvenience to your daily commute; or if say you received a 900 bill from your cable television supplier for adult films you swear blind you didnt watch, where do you go?

Obviously, the correct and logical answer to these questions is the bus company and Virgin Media, but angry people tend not to be logical, and the people who wronged them are invariably the last people from whom they seek satisfaction.

Angryism has changed along with the times.

While furious local councillors crouching over potholes like theyre going to the toilet are still the staple of local newspapers where editors have to somehow fit thirty-two pages of stories and photographs around the adverts and make money in the process, there is now the very real chance that a particularly ridiculous photo story will go truly viral, making editors and accountants very happy indeed.

For one thing, angryism perfectly illustrates the British habit of I dont like to complain, but , and combines it with the off chance that there could be a few quid at the end of this while the person who doesnt like to complain makes a concerted bid to join the British Olympic complaining team.

A nice hamper from the supermarket, perhaps. Or the bus company offering a chauffeur service from your front door, for life. This never happens.

Ive been doing this long enough to know that when they say, I only ever wanted an apology, their eyes in the accompanying photograph say, And a gift voucher would be nice as well.

Add in lunatic letters, daft headlines and some of the dullest news stories ever committed to print, it makes you wonder why local newspapers are struggling to survive.

Theyre part of us. We cannot afford to lose them.

But if we do lose them, Ill be the first to be photographed pointing angrily at the space where my local rag used to be. Because thats how it works.

I spent my formative years when I should have been at university working for an obscure branch of the UK government tasked with the job of counting Britains cows.

After I had come up with a one-hundred-per-cent inaccurate figure of the number of cows in the United Kingdom (rated by whether they were alive, or dead and in an industrial-sized freezer somewhere), I would telex this data to an office in Brussels, where, for all I knew, they put it straight into the bin.

Yeah, telex.

The reason I am telling you this is because these three years of my life were not entirely wasted; they were an education.

And the thing that I was educated about is this: What goes into your food.

Distilled down to a single sentence, this knowledge boils down thus: You do not want to know what goes into your food.

That being the case, I have made it my lifelong mission to try not to find out what goes into my food, because life is short, and you shouldnt make it any shorter by for example worrying that you might be munching through an animals anus with your Friday-night dirty kebab.

Because theres every chance you might be eating anus, and unless you have an extremely varied personal life, thats not the kind of thing we do in polite society.

Unfortunately, people do have a regrettable habit of finding out what goes into their food, and when they do, it makes them very angry indeed.

Then they go to their local papers to make sure everybody in the whole world knows what theyve found in their food, and with the thought that a four-figure compensation cheque at the end of it wouldnt be the worst outcome.

Food fury has a very special place in the concept of angry people in local newspapers, because it is one-hundred-per-cent suited to angry faces.

Food items such as the tinned meat pie with additional meat factory workers thumb photograph very well alongside the disgusted consumer who is grappling with the thought that they may have eaten a finger well before the thumb revealed itself, along with the very clear thought of getting enough compo out of Global Tinned Pies And Lead Figurines Ltd to go and retire on an island somewhere.

In reality, Global Tinned Pies And Lead Figurines Ltd will offer them a replacement pie and a 10 goodwill gesture, entirely in Global Tinned Pies And Lead Figurines Ltd gift tokens.

And that is all you will ever get if you complain through the correct channels.

So thats why if you find a packet of chocolate biscuits which have been coated with ham instead of chocolate your first port of call should be your local newspaper (see for a perfect example).

There are two types of people who go to local newspapers when they have found something disgusting in their food:

People who want to warn other people of the potential horrors waiting inside a popular brand of instant coffee that could make you glow in the dark. This accounts for 0.00001 per cent of something wrong with my food local newspaper stories;

People who want compo (the other 99.99999 per cent of these stories).

The oxygen of publicity, this 99.99999 per cent think, will raise the offer of a free pie and the insulting goodwill gesture to something closer to expectations, to what: a Caribbean beach holiday to get over the shock, and a free pie?