There's an interesting article here by Eddie Butler, about how he ghost-wrote Austin Healey's newspaper column during the Lions rugby tour (that subsequently landed Healey in a heap of shit):
http://www.observer.co.uk/lionstour/story/0,8224,525763,00.html
As far as I'm concerned, as long as the views in the column are those of the celebrity, I don't care whether a journalist has been employed to put it into English. Most such columns are still so stilted and unreadable anyway, I don't bother.
A good example outside of newspapers is Apollo 13, credited to astronaut Jim Lovell and author Jeffrey Kluger. The fact that Kluger almost certainly wrote the whole book doesn't matter, because Lovell's personal experiences and knowledge clearly come through.
Of course, I'm not claiming that Austin Healy has as much to say as Jim Lovell, but there you go :-)
Ian Botham got quite a lot of money for his ghost-written column, many years ago.
In the publishing world, ghost-writing is often a way for a young writer to get a bit of experience and contacts when s/he wouldn't have a chance of getting his/her own stuff taken. I read an article by distinguished literary critic (and one-time Literary Reviewer for PE) D.J Taylor a while back, in which he lifted the lid on the whole business.
It was freely admitted by Jeffrey Archer's publishers in the 80s that the great man didn't write any of his blockbusters from "The Prodigal Daughter" onwards - he just wrote a 10-page synopsis (with Mary's help), and then a bunch of young chancers churned out the required number of pages. Looking at works like "First Among Equals", you really can tell.
I think Jeff resumed the writing duties himself later on, just to pass the time, until his political career looked up. Ah well.
As we all know (from PE, and Clive Anderson), he still had a bit of bother thinking up original plot ideas.
Don't forget "Swine" by Naomi Campbell.
i once helped ghost write a column written by Harry Redknapp in a local paper.
It was obvious we were just phoning him up and getting a fistful of quotes and making them into some vaguely coherrent piece. All quite fun, especially when it was John Hartson 'who took over'.
on a similar subject does anyon think the fact that the NME (yes back to them again) continue to interview the 'band members' in the gorillaz and quote them by name is a bit pathetic and 'look-in'? "murdoc said 'we dont want the mercury music prize'". no he didnt, hes a fucking cartoon!
>on a similar subject does anyon think the fact that the NME (yes back to them again) continue to interview the 'band members' in the gorillaz and quote them by name is a bit pathetic and 'look-in'? "murdoc said 'we dont want the mercury music prize'". no he didnt, hes a fucking cartoon!
Equally, is anyone else vaguely bothered by the japanese guitarist in said band? She's Japanese so therefore is small, never ever speaks (except to say 'noodles'. haha hewlitt, you cunt)and is obsessed with Tamagotchi and Pokemon. At this rate i'm surprised they didn't draw a fucking bone through the black drummer's nose. If anyone's intersted, the 'interview' which riled me so was in the June issue of Making Music.
The worst thing is, journalists will often defend the practice, saying 'well, that's just the way it is' - as if to voice concern over the situation is to be a young whippersnapper with a naive grasp on how the industry works.
'Well, that's just the way it is', of course, translates as both 'my house is in order' and 'I am a cunt'.
And then there are all those articles in The Sun by "Tony Blair" - actually A.Campbell or some other drone. But that's not much different than him reading out a speech drafted by someone else, which happens all the time in government.
Fair enough if you actually have a difficult and time-consuming job, and aren't able to do all the fact-checking yourself, but why on earth does Jonathan Ross need a ghost-writer??? Did he have a heavy voiceover schedule that year?
Personally, if I had the chance to write a newspaper column or a novel I would feel I'd squandered it if I didn't write it all myself. I'd love to have a platform to present my thoughts in my own way... as, er, you can tell. But - and I've met a few young journos who felt like this - I wouldn't want some pesky editor mucking about with my sentences either.
>Articles in the tabloid press written by 'Craig from Big Brother' even though they obviously aren't - why does everybody play along and accept it?
>
Because most of the readers are too stupid to clock that the piece has been ghosted. Not everyone is as media-savvy as the posters here. It is crap and cynical, but names shift copies, which is after all what most proprietors are after. If it means propping up some half-wit marsupial from a daytime home makeover prog in front of a tape recorder and letting a professional hack make some sense out of the recorded grunts, then I doubt that the subterfuge will trouble the editor's conscience for too long.
Anyway, it's hardly a new phenomenon. In the 1950s, articles like 'Marty Wilde's Quiff Maintenance Tips' would appear in Melody Maker, Disc and the like, and, far from being written by Reg Smith himself, they would have come from the pen of Ray Coleman or the criminally-underrated Nigel Hunter in consultation with a prominent society hairdresser. Oh, and Barbara Kelly's domestic column in Woman's Realm in the 1960s was written by a man.
> Anyone have any views on the morality of it
Not much morality to it. It's just an illusion created with mirrors and shiny paper. It's pretty low down the food chain of reprehensible journalistic practices.
> the idea that the celeb's name on the masthead is more important than the words they're writing?
>
For certain audiences, that's about the strength of it.
>Does anyone care?
You do, evidently, and some of the more absurd examples have occasionally caused me to splutter tea all over the newspaper (more through amusement than disgust, I admit). The key is not to say "This is a moral outrage, something must be done", but to try and make more people realise what's going on and question things more. Ask them: "Do you really think that Craig from Big Brother has strong opinions on the Euro?"
Another question: what about ghosted showbiz autobiographies? I think it's a very different thing. An interesting life doesn't necessarily correlate with an ability to get it down on paper. There are some good, sensitive ghost-writers (and an equal, if not greater, number of ham-fisted cut-and-paste merchants, it is true) out there whose main skill is to be transparent and to write the book that the subject would if they could. Anyone agree?
"Another question: what about ghosted showbiz autobiographies? I think it's a very different thing. An interesting life doesn't necessarily correlate with an ability to get it down on paper. There are some good, sensitive ghost-writers (and an equal, if not greater, number of ham-fisted cut-and-paste merchants, it is true) out there whose main skill is to be transparent and to write the book that the subject would if they could. Anyone agree?"
Reminds me of a short story by Aldous Huxley called "Chawdron", about 2 writers who hear the news that the famous businessman Chawdron has died. Which causes one of them to admit that, not only did he ghost-write Chawdron's accaimed memoirs, he also completely invented the rich inner life, youthful idealism etc. that they revealed. He then goes on to discuss his follow-up project: a straight biography, that will show what the old fraud was really like, and laments that no one will read it.
Sorry if that's not very interesting, but I was just reminded of it, that's all.
>Reminds me of a short story by Aldous Huxley called "Chawdron", about 2 writers who hear the news that the famous businessman Chawdron has died. ...
>Sorry if that's not very interesting, but I was just reminded of it, that's all.
>
That actually sounds very interesting. Is it in a currently available Huxley anthology?
This reminds me about a book I heard reviewed on radio a few days ago. Opinions seemed divided over it, but the subject matter was pertinent.
"About the Author" by John Colapinto
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/tg/stores/detail/-/books/1841156396/reviews//qid=997656932/sr=1-1/ref=sr_sp_re_1_1/202-3734668-2331036
"That actually sounds very interesting. Is it in a currently available Huxley anthology?"
It's in his 1930 collection "Brief Candles".