Paul Callan

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Paul Callan is a celebrated British journalist who has worked on most major national newspapers, excepting The Independent , which he judged "Too, too precious for words, dear boy".

1 Early career
2 Celebrity interviews
3 Radio
4 Innovation
5 Notes
6 Further reading

[edit] Early career

He was born 13th March 1939. Despite an early setback when caught imitating his editor (who affected a phony upper class English accent)^[1] Callan first reached prominence as editor of the "Londoner's Diary" in the Evening Standard in the 1960s, and subsequently raised establishment eyebrows with the sharply written Daily Mail diary column. He achieved a succession of scoops, and was largely responsible for training up a generation of gifted young journalists, notably the irreverent gossip columnist, Nigel Dempster. Callan said of Dempster: "Nigel has a fine instinct for an exclusive and would be brilliant if he could only overcome his dislike of the English language and its nuances."

Dempster proved an unreliable assistant however, and Callan was obliged to have him removed from the column. Callan himself later moved to the mass circulation The Daily Mirror where he wrote the "Inside World of Paul Callan" column which broke a number of major stories embarrassing to their subjects. Fortunately the paper maintained a substantial libel budget with which to fend off—or buy off—the aggrieved.

[edit] Celebrity interviews

Tiring of the gossip columns, Callan moved over to the celebrity interview, which proved to be his natural milieu. Callan's amiability and nose for a story made him a favourite of actors and publishers alike, and he has interviewed virtually every major Hollywood star in the last forty years, and members of the ordinarily tight-lipped British royal family.

Whenever the private telephone number of Cary Grant or the Pope was required it was to Callan's little black book (specially bound for him in crocodileskin by the royal stationer) that editors repaired, usually with a First Growth claret as an offering.

He is credited with the shortest interview ever published. Meeting the reclusive Greta Garbo at the Hotel du Cap Eden Roc near Cannes, Callan got as far as, "I wonder . . " before Garbo cut in with, "Why wonder?", and stalked off. The story ran across a full page in The Daily Mail. Managers computed the resulting expense claim as the highest ever filed per word used—by a factor of several million per cent.

Access to the great and the bad was enhanced by his marriage in 1973 to the prominent New York journalist, Steffi Fields, who moved over from being London correspondent of the fashion bible Women's Wear Daily to the position of news editor of the London bureau of the NBC television network.

[edit] Radio

Callan and the writer (later national newspaper editor) Janet Street-Porter are credited with inventing a new form of radio, albeit unintentionally. At the launch in 1973 of the London Broadcasting Company, or LBC, the pair were pitched as co-presenters of the morning drive time show.^[2] The intention was to contrast the urbane Callan with the less couth Street-Porter, whose accents were respectively known to studio engineers as "cut-glass" and "cut-froat".

In the event friction between the ill-assorted pair led to an entertaining stream of one-upmanship that became required listening for many Londoners, the sharper put-downs being blamed for several collisions by motorists incapacitated with laughter. The programme was the first in the the UK to combine interviews with celebrities and heavyweight political figures on the same show, blurring the line between classic British comedy and analysis of international affairs.

[edit] Innovation

In parallel with David Frost's approach to television Callan has since developed a technique known as "news colour" in which a hard news story is reported in a feature style. It has the effect of placing the reader as if he is actually witnessing the story, and is now taught in journalism school.

As one of the last representatives of old Fleet Street he cuts an unmistakable, if portly figure clad in pinstriped suit and trademark spotted bow tie, regardless of geography or climate. In 1991 he moved to the Daily Express where he combines feature writing with news colour as well as contributing regularly to the comment pages.

Callan is also known for his acerbic book reviews despite being described by the critic Clive James as "having the literary sensibilities of a vampire bat". ^[3]