Try living in the real world, instead of a shell (The Observer)

Member Name: tim_russell

Product:	The Observer
Date:	21/06/01 (89 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Sport Monthly, Review, Nigel Slater

Disadvantages: London-centric, yuppie-orientated, poor football coverage

Well, after over 10 years of regular Sunday reading, I've finally had enough of The Observer. It may be the country's oldest newspaper, but any sense of dignity or responsibility that may come with that title are strangely absent from this increasingly shallow little rag.

I originally began buying The Observer as it is, to all intents, The Guardian on Sunday. Not as right-wing as the Sunday Times or Telegraph, not as boring as the Independent, and not as trashy or lowbrow as the News of the Screws. However, in the 10 years I've been reading it the paper has deteriorated from an intelligent, readable journal into a London-centric style sheet, all surface and no substance.

So we now have Life Magazine, full of interviews with increasingly insignificant celebrities, ludicrously expensive fashion spreads, reviews of laughably-priced restaurants, gardening features aimed at people with several hundred acres of land, and witless female "lifestyle" columnists. The Sport section places too much emphasis on middle-class minority sports such as rugby and cricket, and what little football coverage there is is dominated by Arsenal, the team supported by two of the paper's main sports journalists, Ian Ridley and Amy Lawrence. The Travel section is chock full of unaffordable holidays, the TV Guide obsessed with unspeakably crap US sitcoms like "Friends" and "Sex & The City", and the Opinion columns are little more than fawning appreciations of Tony Blair.

Its good points? Sport Monthly is an excellent supplement which will probably keep me buying the paper once a month. The Review section, Kathryn Flett's vacuous TV column aside, is intelligent and well-written. Richard Ingrams' column injects a healthy dose of cynicism and reality. And the main News section does its job perfectly well. But that's it.

It's about time that the Observer's editor realised that not all its readers li
ve in London, work in the media, earn huge amounts of money, have children, live in big houses, and choose to eat at restaurants where a meal for two costs more than my annual holiday. Sadly however, the rest of the Sunday broadsheets aren't much better, if not quite as vapidly annoying as the Obs. One day someone will start publishing a Sunday paper for intelligent people who don't want to read aspirational lifestyle supplements, but who merely want the news, the sport, and the reviews, without having to plough through pages of witless, self-absorbed columns written by journalists who only leave their little cliques in Fulham & Docklands when it's time to go skiing.

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