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Tintin's Guide to Journalism

Mark Lawson
  • Posted at 11:22am
  • 22 November 2007
  • by SarahDempster-RT

What made you want to do what you do? Was it the money? The prestige? The fear of disappointing an overbearing, embittered mother? Or was it the prospect of receiving an H Samuel traditional gold quartz carriage clock from your 19-year-old line manager after 43 years spent licking envelopes behind a plasterboard partition?

Interestingly, it appears that "a considerable number of us" were inspired to enter our respective vocational fields - or, to put it in less florid/flagrantly inapt terms, our "job" - by a fictional character. How many of us, exactly? No idea. But Mark Lawson said it on Radio 4 so it's probably at least a hundred. It's certainly not less than three, as the following examples illustrate:

1) A doctor friend of a friend was compelled to take up her stethoscope and walk by a childhood fascination with nurse Helen Rosenthal from ground-breaking medical series St Elsewhere. Which is good.

2) So enamoured was my Dad of relentlessly reasonable TV cop Ironside, he decided to devote his life to The Law (though, sadly, he decided not to be shot in the spine by a mad sniper, even though this meant he'd never be able to fully emulate his hero by bumping into courthouse furniture in a massive 1960s wheelchair while going "gaahrr").

3) I grew up wanting to be popular 1980s TV character Barry Norman, even though the existence of the existing Barry Norman suggested that the chances of there being a vacancy for another Barry Norman were, at best, non-existent. Still, while my peers dreamt of arranging a new Miami Vice-themed espadrille window display at Chelsea Girl, I was sitting in a beige studio with a spongy side parting, being vaguely sneering about Terms of Endearment in a flammable three-piece suit.

There were further examples of the ability of fictional characters to capture the imagination of the nascent professional in BBC Radio 4's Tintin's Guide to Journalism although, as the title suggested, this particular career enterprise was restricted to alumni of the fourth estate.

Here, hack after hack doffed his bonnet to the titular "unlikely and unacknowledged careers master" who, while exhibiting many of the qualities vital to journalism (enthusiasm, dedication, innate suspicion of Latin Americans in felt fedoras etc), didn't file a single story in his entire 54-year career.

It was, perhaps unsurprisingly, an overwhelmingly male exercise. "Kate Adie said she'd never even read him," said narrator Mark Lawson, sadly.

While most contributors praised the historical accuracy of Hergé's comic-book adventures and his tiny protagonist's unfailing nose for a story, BBC Balkan expert Misha Glenny took a different tack. "Tintin's a bit of a prig," he harrumphed. (At least, I hope that's what he harrumphed.) "Even Snowy gets drunk on occasion."

Others stepped up to the plate with less misinterpretable eulogies for the clean-living reporter. Someone compared Tintin's trouncing of evil empires to John Simpson's "liberation of Kabul".

"He was extremely uncomplicated, morally," added ex-Daily Telegraph editor Charles Moore, presumably not referring to the time his hero bored a hole in a rhino's back and stuffed it with a stick of dynamite (see: 1931's Tintin in the Congo, but only if you appreciate the prospect of witnessing the young Belgian patronising black people and laughing as he liquidises a range of endangered species).

Hergé's dubious early politics aside, this was a wonderfully celebratory programme, stuffed with in-jokes and plump with nostalgia, though its final thoughts saw the venture turn unexpectedly glum. How many of today's popular children's characters, wondered Lawson, are influencing tomorrow's young professionals? Couched within was an unspoken yet unavoidable poser. Namely what fate awaits a generation weaned on the Tweenies?

Let us not think on't.

Tintin's Guide to Journalism (Saturday 17 November, 10:30am, BBC Radio 4).

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