'Poison Pens...', The Evening Standard

Wednesday, February 21, 2001

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Poison pens and slime, gentlemen, please.

JAMES SILVER

THERE are certain subjects, says Anthony Howard, guaranteed to get the crackpot brigade going. "Water quality, opinion polls and anything to do with the railways ... You learn to recognise the envelopes. The moment you see green or mauve ink your heart sinks. One man would begin all his letters to me 'Dear Twerp'. Others send you their plans for world peace. I don't answer them. It's a waste of time. They only write back."

The green-ink brigade generally dishes up a pungent combination of pedantry and abuse. According to The Daily Mail's Ann Leslie, racists are the worst of the bunch. "These people send you hideous drawings to 'prove' how all black people are in fact apes. They cite pseudo-academic sources, like 'the famous anthropologist William H Witherspoone III'. I bin them straight away."

Next in the litany of crank letter-writers come the conspiracy theorists.

The Guardian's chief reporter, Kevin Maguire, recalls one correspondent from the West Midlands. "He wrote to me every fortnight about how he was under surveillance by the security services. He would send in these cassettes to show that his phone was being tapped. Finally I listened to one, but all I could hear was half an hour of intermittent hissing noises."

Two subjects certain to provoke a number of poison-pen letters are religion and sexuality. "The most abusive stuff I get is from the God squad," says Maguire. "I was on Sky News grilling Ian Paisley. I got hate mail afterwards telling me I will go to hell when I die; tirades saying I was a sodomite. The same thing happened when I defended Peter Mandelson in The Mirror.

Strangely, the letters were very literate. They weren't in green ink or crayon."

Just occasionally, mail can be more sinister. A few months ago, razor blades were sent to This Morning presenter Richard Madeley, while several BBC radio journalists have received a curious anonymous letter which consists of just four typewritten words, all in capitals: BLOOD SILENCE MEDIA KILLS. No one knows what it means.

Whether to answer mail or not is a moot point. BBC producer guidelines state that staff must reply "quickly and courteously" to letters from the public, but some individual broadcasters take a different line. The broadcaster Brian Hayes has received mail from one woman fan every fortnight for years. "I decided not to write back some time ago," he says. "It gives the impression that you want to develop a personal relationship."

And spare a thought for the folk on Radio 4's Gardeners' Question Time. A staffer recalls the man who sent in an envelope full of sludge. "This is slime scraped from my roof," wrote the listener.

"Is it safe to eat?"

He didn't get a reply.

(The Evening Standard, February 21st 2001)

Posted by James Silver - On Wednesday, February 21, 2001

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