The Sigla Blog

I finally got around to watching the BBC4 documentary When Toby Met Julie last night. Toby is Toby Young who now writes restaurant reviews for the Evening Standard. Julie, is of course, the inimitable Julie Burchill, doyenne of the British Press since her days as The NME’s star writer in the 1970s and former Guardian columnist famous for her Battle of the Bitches fax scrap with Camille Paglia.

The documentary focused on the collapse of The Modern Review, a magazine the two ran along with Julie’s then husband Cosmo Landesman. Burchill and Young fell out so badly over the magazine that they haven’t spoken in years - until agreeing to meet for this documentary. Before the programme even aired, both Toby and Julie had given their differing accounts of where it all started - and fell apart. Toby weighed in with his version the Friday before in The Guardian while Julie’s take on the whole explosive end aired in her column in The Sunday Times.

The Modern Review first appeared in 1991, with Young as Editor and Julie Burchill as a contributor. They were united in their desire to create a kind of journalism that is the norm these days but wasn’t in early 1990s London. It tackled mass commercial culture with lofty essays on everything from Arnold Schwartzenegger to Roland Barthes on Bart Simpson. Its slogan, “Low Culture for Highbrows”, heralded a new approach to writing about popular culture in a way the literati would never have dared do before. It prided itself on knocking the kings and queens of English Literature off their perches and writers like Martin Amis came in for a hard time.

The paper was niche, obviously, and didn’t shift in massive units, but the stories of excess, of casting couch sexploits, of names written in cocaine and general Bacchanalian mayhem more than make up for that. It also introduced the world to up and coming writers Will Self and Nick Hornby. When it all finally ended - Julie’s lesbian affair with Charlotte Raven being the catalyst - Toby Young committed literary hari kari and shut the magazine down. Torching it before, as he put it in the documentary, “it fell in to enemy hands”.

I came away from the documentary with a few thoughts, mainly the sheer impressiveness of putting together a publication of such quality on a minute budget. I’m not for one moment drawing comparisons with Sigla, but I identified with so many of their ideals and the reasons they worked so hard to do something outside of the mainstream.

Watching it, I’ve never had more respect for the stellar Burchill and Toby Young comes across slightly better on TV than in his writing. On a personal level, I had to smile about one aspect of the programme. In an interview with Will Self, he admits to slating Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch but admitted the magazine had a policy of ripping books to shreds and that he’s “not proud of it” now. Last year, The Dubliner invited Toby Young to speak in Dublin at a series of vaguely literary events in Ron Black’s. I contacted the Editor, Trevor White, and requested an interview with Toby. It was all set up and ready to go when he called me a couple of days later.

TW: “There’s a bit of a problem with the Toby interview”.
Me: “What’s up?”
TW: “It appears you reviewed his book and didn�t like it”.
Me: “So he won’t do the interview just because I didn�t like his book?”
TW: “Eh, no, sorry about that.”

Funny that. I reviewed his book How To Lose Friends and Alienate People for RTE over three years ago. In reading back over it now, yes it’s not overly flattering, but I think there are a lot of positives in it. So what was he so afraid of? To this date, my review doesn’t appear in the collected reviews of the book on his website.

It is truly baffling to me that a man responsible for something as ground-breaking as The Modern Review and a ubiquitous foil to Julie Burchill for years should fear a review that’s tepidly critical. But then that, as the documentary illustrated, is the difference between Burchill and Young. Julie doesn’t care what people think about her, but it seems Toby maybe cares a bit too much.