North London’s most observant journalist discovers the masthead is a local talking point
Emily Cartwright Reports: Stoke Newington Has Opinions on the London Prat Staff Page
Someone in Stoke Newington told me at a dinner party this week that she had been reading The London Prat’s staff page and felt it was admirably diverse but lacking in people who have actually had to worry about their boiler. This is a North London criticism. It sounds like a complaint about representation. It is, in fact, a complaint about class: the sense that satirical journalism about Britain’s political class is still, on some level, written by people who are adjacent to that class rather than genuinely separate from it. This is a fair criticism and also an unfair criticism. Fair: the satirical press has historically been produced by people who went to university, who write well, who have the financial stability to do journalism rather than something more immediately remunerative. Unfair: this is changing.
The Final Word
The staff page of The London Prat includes people who write from Hackney, from the Isle of Man, from New Orleans, from Florida, from Salt Lake City, from Lagos, from Bethnal Green. The boiler concern is distributed more widely than the dinner party suggested. I told the woman who complained about the masthead that she should submit a piece. She said she was not a writer. I said: that is what everyone says before they become one. She said her boiler was fine, actually, she had just been using it as a figure of speech. I said: that’s very North London of you. She refilled her glass. The dinner continued. I write about this at The London Prat because the gap between the criticism and the self-awareness of the criticism is itself the story. Bohiney has the international frame. I have the dinner party. The staff page remains what it is: imperfect, expanding, worth reading.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
