from the BBC news web site

Julie Burchill Speaks Out Shock!

By BBC News Online's Giles Wilson

To nearly anyone who has held a British newspaper at any time over the last 15 years, the feeling of being irritated or even shocked by Julie Burchill will be familiar.

A succession of publications has played host to her particular brand of vitriol, which at times has made her the UK's highest-paid journalist. Like it or not, she has become a British media institution.

Now rehabilitated in the Guardian - after a rare period out of fashion and out of the papers - every weekend she turns out 1,000 words which, you might be forgiven for thinking, amounts to "Everything and everyone sucks except Julie Burchill".

Shock is her stock in trade. And yet a documentary shown on BBC Two on Tuesday could, in its own way, be as shocking as many of her columns.

Thankfully for Burchill she is endowed with a flair and chutzpah which not only makes her words easy on the eyes, but to many, strangely likeable as well. She has the same unquestioning self-confidence which gives Chris Evans his appeal - it would not be completely surprising to find he had been genetically-modified to include the appropriate part of the Burchill DNA.

Like Evans, however, she is not short of critics, who claim that if she ever had an edge, she has certainly lost it. The evidence of even the past few weeks does not bear this out, though.

Celebrity hitlist

Her hitlist has included the saintly Radio 1 DJ John Peel ("He needs taking out; if only in a caring way, for his own good"), author Helen Fielding ("who, before Bridget Jones, was a comic writer of real style and originality"), and Peter Mandelson ("it was a strange day indeed when the stewardship of Keir Hardie's party [was] handed to Hyacinth Bucket for safe keeping").

In fact apart from communism, Brighton and Jewish men, there seem to be precious few things she does like. Apart from her own talent, of course.

This is a woman whose autobiography was called I Knew I Was Right, and for whom comments such as "Even when I'm not keeping my eye on my work I'm better than most people" are pretty normal fare.

Michael Bywater, a columnist himself who could be bilious for Britain, said last year: "Her writings were, and remain, negligible, on the level of a toddler having a tantrum. I want. I hate. You're my bestest friend. You're horrid."

He added: "She excoriates some poor bastard for being too old, too fat ... but the sad irony is that she is too old, too fat herself."

Sadly for her critics, though, Burchill has found a particularly effective way of taking the wind out of their sails by happily referring to herself as a "fat, dark Eighties grande dame".

On the other hand, woe betide anyone who criticises her Talent, for they will surely find themselves mercilessly deconstructed.

Her television appearances are infrequent, so many people who have been acquainted with her in print for years may be unaware of what the flesh and bone Burchill looks and sounds like, which is why many may find themselves gawping in disbelief at their TVs.

For her voice is so shrill and girlish, it seems almost impossible to reconcile the Burchill in print and the Burchill in audio.

She doesn't sound confident, she doesn't sound forceful, arrogant, or indeed opinionated. She doesn't even sound like she's someone who knows what's going on. If ever there were a case for not judging a book by its cover, she is it.

The programme takes her back to her old school in Bristol - there is a clear remnant of her Bristol accent. Going back to the school, she rather too grandly claims, would be as bad as taking Nelson Mandela back to Robben Island. "I'm not exaggerating," she exaggerates.

Pressing her nose against the school gate, her later accession to the throne of the Groucho Club (the Soho haunt of many of the media's cognoscenti) and to the position of Britain's highest paid columnist seems unbelievable to say the least.

It traces her progress, running away to London, working in Boots, then on to the NME with Tony Parsons, and then into the bosom of Fleet Street.

So what was it that made made her beat the odds? Like many of the most talented people, not fitting in as a child led her to the library. Whatever it was she fostered in her mind when she had her head in a book, it paid her dividends. Some of the Fleet Street's finest are clear about what it is that makes her special.

Peter Preston, the former editor of the Guardian, says: "I think she's one of the best columnists operating in Britain.

"You don't know quite what she's going to be talking about. You don't know quite what the opinions are going to be, either. You do know that they are going to be pungently, often beautifully, written, pretty outrageous and that they have got that edge of danger."

Stewart Steven, the former Mail On Sunday editor, says: "What Julie Burchill was brilliant at, I thought, and perhaps still is, is that she's able to see through astonishingly complex political issues and get to the very heart of them."

Even if you don't share this view of her, it's difficult to deny that her impact has been felt, not least through her now defunct magazine, The Modern Review. Through it she can claim some credit for the fusion between high and low brow cultures, the way intellectual discussions in the media are now as likely to be about Bart Simpson as Roland Barthes.

An end in sight?

In a recent column she wrote that she had finally had enough of herself. "I have, frankly, had a bellyful of Me, and I bet you have, too."

And then - in case any loyal fan should fear that she planned to quit - said: "No, you've seen the last of Little Me: all that's left, I hope, is my Talent - which is why I went into the racket in the first place - brought to bear on things that matter."

This is a woman who, although only aged 39, has already been writing for 22 years, and must - it is to be hoped - have many more years of columns left in her.

Who is to say when all her contemporaries have joined her in the move to a nice seaside town and are sitting in bionic bathchairs on the pier, that Julie Burchill will not be raging in some paper somewhere about something or other?



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