THE LADY AND THE REVAMP

Once the Grazia of its day, The Lady was a highly respected and influential magazine featuring on its pages anything from the correct length of hem for a Sunday Service to a cure for baldness.

But 125 years later The Lady is in need of a new lease of life. Circulation has fallen dramatically and the Budworth family who own the magazine are digging into their own pockets to keep it alive.

Cutting Edge follows the magazine's new Editor, journalist and novelist Rachel Johnson, as she faces one of the toughest jobs in her career and tries to turn around the fate of this longest standing women's weekly.

Laura Barton Thursday 18 March 2010

This evening's The Lady and the Revamp makes for quite scintillating viewing. This is the story of the The Lady magazine – the oldest-running weekly women's magazine and the Queen's favourite read, no less – and the woman brought in to save it after sales slumped (or "swooned" perhaps; a lady would never slump).

The new editor is none other than Rachel Johnson, successful novelist and journalist, as well as sister to Boris, who despite not editing a magazine since her student days, has replaced the previous incumbent Arline Usden (rueful, deflated, handsomely be-scarved) and set about a process of glorious modernisation.

Historically, The Lady was where people found their nannies and their butlers, and ruminations on life's gentle pleasures – spring blooms, say, or the history of the cucumber. The magazine's target audience is still women over 45, the type of person its owner Julia Budworth, describes as "Essentially English, honest, kind-hearted, reasonable people."

With its tendency towards cover photographs of cats and owls, and the kind of article that would make Reader's Digest read like a copy of Zoo, by the time of Johnson's arrival its owners are already admitting that the magazine had grown "bland" and "lost its way". Johnson, however, has ideas for its revival: Kate Humble on the cover, more male writers, articles on Rigby and Peller, and a lot more sex.

Initially, it seems the readership of The Lady is not for turning; they rather loved their articles on cobnuts, the quiet observations on modern British life. With Johnson's arrival and the exiling of several key members of staff, they begin to cancel their subscriptions in their droves (I recall a similar thing happened to Smash Hits once, too, when they got rid of the jokes and the biscuit tin).

You wonder where the Lady readers go now. To The Gentlewoman? To Country Life? To the parish magazine? Or are they cut adrift from their magazine-reading days forever? As you listen to their letters of complaint (handwritten, and rather pinched in tone) you begin to wonder, too, must everything be so relentlessly sexed-up and celebrified this way? Pushed and prodded until it resembles little more than a rather mild version of ES magazine? Is there still a place for The Lady in our modern world?

THE TIMES ONLINE

The Lady has been around since 1886 — and declining for almost as long. Enter Rachel Johnson, the new editor who also happens to be the younger sister of the Mayor of London, Boris. Like her brother she is magnificently entertaining and gaffe-prone. She starts off the programme by describing the magazine’s appearance as a cross between an in-flight magazine, a funeral parlour brochure and a Bupa catalogue, and towards the end of the programme says angrily: “In the real world this is a piddling magazine that nobody cares about or buys.” The film follows her first few months in office as she crashes around, talking a lot of sense but alienating everyone in the process — all of whom give as good as they get. It’s a hugely entertaining, eccentric and genteel bloodbath.

Nancy Banks-Smith The Guardian, Friday 19 March 2010

PG Wodehouse got a lot of fun out of a fictional magazine called Milady's Boudoir, which continually teetered on the brink of bankruptcy. If a millstone can be said to teeter on the brink of anything. The editor was Bertie Wooster's florid Aunt Dahlia, a jolly good sort whose view-halloo could awaken the dead. She was ruthless on behalf of Milady's Boudoir, demanding unpaid contributions from Bertie (who called it a weekly for the half-witted woman) and life-giving injections of cash from her husband (who referred to it sourly as Madame's Nightshirt).

When I say fictional . . .

You couldn't fail to smell the potpourri whiff of Milady's Boudoir in The Lady, a 125-year-old weekly. Or to see Aunt Dahlia in the new editor, Rachel Johnson, who, in The Lady and the Revamp (Channel 4), arrived full of beans ("It's going to be bags of fun!"), took it by the scruff of its neck and shook it till its dentures dislodged. Rachel is the younger sister of the sublimely Woosterish Boris.

And, at first, it was the most tremendous fun. Who wouldn't enjoy Rachel's breezy description of her new offices ("A cross between an undertakers and a lunatic asylum") or her collision with the almost hereditary staff ("His father was here and his father's father before him")? Her management style owes something to Boudica: "Ben's a dear boy, but he hasn't wielded the hatchet enough." The dear boy was the proprietor, and loathe to massacre long-standing staff in case they sued his socks off.

The literary editor was slaughtered on the spot. The assistant editor was not sacked (see above, under socks off) but moved out of sight to a room with rat poison on the floor and a leaking roof weeping into wastepaper baskets. The previous editor, game girl, took some shifting: "I feel as if I'm prising each finger off and she's clinging to the ledge." But in the end, they'd all gone.

And still the circulation hesitated around 30,000. The Lady needed 35,000 to break even. Joan Collins drifted through to do, as Rachel said vaguely, "something". Julie Andrews stared icily out of their Christmas cover ("It looks like an open casket"). In a flash of inspiration Debo, Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, was approached as an agony aunt ("What would you do if children persisted in eating with their mouths open?" "Bash 'em!"). Rachel was launched on a media charm offensive ("Get Rach on to sofas!"). A Sunday Times profile described her as putting dancing shoes on a corpse, and sometimes she sees the force of that. "In the real world this is a piddling little magazine that nobody cares about. Or buys." Pause. "I don't mean that."

She has started writing a diary about being an editor. I expect it to sell well.

Andrew Anthony The Observer,

If we're not very good at inserting the real world into comedy, we can still find comedy in the real world. The Lady and the Revamp (C4) was everything that a behind-the-doors documentary should be. It's the opposite of Inside John Lewis, which is taking three programmes to produce less insight than might be gained by a fleeting visit to the shop's loo. Access is all very well but what's really needed is excess. And any film that features Joan Collins, the Duchess of Devonshire and Rachel Johnson couldn't be accused of restraint.

The Lady is the magazine for gentlewomen that was once the place to find domestic staff. But since its heyday in the 50s it has been on a steady decline to anachronism status. Enter Johnson, sister of Boris, with a brief to usher the 21st century into the magazine's funereal offices. Had a fighting bull been invited to Wedgwood's showrooms, it couldn't have had more fun.

Johnson was charming, impressively dentured, bitchy and ruthless. In short, utterly delightful. But she had to contend with a publisher who combined a feudal sense of entitlement with a chronically timid character. "What's the point of buying a dog," he asked, "if you're going to do the barking yourself?"

Then there was the staff, a brilliant cast of eccentrics led by the former editor, who sat in her heavily ornamented apartment, lacking only a white cat on her lap to complete the image of conspiratorial intrigue. It would be astonishing if Johnson managed to transform the fortunes of The Lady. But on this evidence she's done her own no harm.

 

GRIERSON NOMINATION 2010