Corrections and Clarifications

Ian Mayes

155pp, Guardian Books, £6.99

Buy it at BOL



I bought the Guardian (a rare event for me, not being of the leftie persuasion) the day after I was invited to review Ian Mayes's collection of the paper's boobs. My first thought was that he had been hasty with his publication date. Nine pages of ranting anti-royalism swamped me and could have afforded him a whole chapter of major lunacies. However, it would not have chimed with his elegant compilation of the endearing bloomers that are the most attractive feature of his paper.

There is a scene in Act 2 of Noel Coward's play Design for Living where a playwright discusses with a friend the reviews of a play of his which has opened on the previous night, and skewers the style and content of various newspapers. The Manchester Guardian (as she then was) is ignored - it's unlikely to have published an overnight review of a West End play in editions that escaped to London back in 1933.

Today Coward would certainly have embraced Private Eye 's inspired typo-happy renaming of the paper as the Grauniad. And he would probably have had a go at Michael Billington's penchant for punning, perhaps giving his playwright a line lamenting his play's lack of high seriousness: "'The play on the whole is decidedly thin' ... My God, they've noticed! I shall write fat plays from now on. Fat plays filled with very fat people." In 1933 Coward went on to call his play "emaciated"; would he have plumped in Grauniad-speak for "emancipated" or "masticated"?

Soon after the invitation to grace these pages, I learnt that Mr Mayes was to appear with me on Radio 4's Loose Ends. When I introduced him I unconsciously called him Ian Hayes; with an awful symmetry, it turned out that this was how his paper named him when his byline first appeared in its columns. Mr Mayes described himself as a "readers' editor", retained to stand between 370 staff plus 2,000 freelances and 1.2m readers as a sort of "internal ombudsman" who can't be sacked by the editor.

I predict that he will survive. He has a pretty wit and the best deadpan style since Jack Benny. As a favourite he offered: "The building illustrating Simon Hoggart's Diary was not the Cheltenham Town Hall, as the caption suggested it might be. It was Boots the Chemist's." "Quite close for us," he added, sotto voce.

Earlier on Loose Ends, Sir Nicholas Henderson had confirmed a story about the politician Ernest Bevin ringing down for dinner while staying at the Waldorf Astoria in New York. "Just a steak and a bottle of newts," he said. The concerned kitchen staff phoned the Embassy for a translation. The unsurprised reply was "That's right, a steak and a bottle of Nuits St Georges." Needless to say, Mayes had a newts correction. "The Great Crested Newt shown on the front of the Society section on September 30 was, as sober inspection confirms, upside down." "Sober inspection" is a typical subtle Mayes touch. However, he fails to explain how a newt, Great Crested or not, got into the Society section - or what the egalitarian Grauniad is doing with such a section in the first place.

Some corrections are too good to need embellishment: "Readers of the obituary of Mel Tormé in the early editions of June 7 will be glad to hear that his nickname, which appeared as the Velvet Frog, was in fact the Velvet Fog." Sometimes a note of weariness enters Mr Mayes's prose. "We spelt Morecambe, a town in Lancashire, wrong again yesterday. We often do."

In Grauniad land, poor Joan Heal starred in Grab Me A Gondolier, "pees" are "mushy" and Devon is identified as Cornwall. "Readers who thought they saw the same Austin cartoon on page one on successive days yesterday and the day before, did. Sorry about that." Shades of the Spectator disclaimer: "Jeffrey Bernard's column does not appear this week as it bears a remarkable similarity to the one we printed last week." Can it have been Billington or a sub-editor who referred to a famous American short-story writer as O'Henry? He certainly can't be fingered for referring, in Act 2 of Giselle, to the "Queen of the Willies".

The Guardian claims to be the only British paper to offer a daily corrections service. The New York Times has long done it. In his Christmas Cracker 1992, John Julius Norwich cites an exchange between his friend Mary Lutyens and Owen Ketherry - Mr Mayes over the water. The paper corrected Samuel Butler's "'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have lost at all", believing it to be a misquotation from Tennyson's In Memoriam ("never to have loved at all").

The reply went as follows: "Dear Mrs Lutyens, thank you for reading our pages so attentively. It is always a pleasure to hear from a well-informed reader although in this case the pleasure is bittersweet ... we do pride ourselves on accuracy, but you know what pride goeth before. It is particularly mortifying to have made an accusation of error which is itself erroneous. We are chagrined, we are contrite and we are genuinely grateful to you for correcting us. PS: we cannot answer your question about the number of readers who spotted the error, because their letters are still pouring in every day."

There is a note of triumph in one of Mr Mayes's apologies. "The absence of corrections yesterday was due to a technical hitch, not to any sudden onset of accuracy." I am submitting this in longhand. God help us.