A perpetual clown show: The silly season is just a comforting media myth
British newspapers are ridiculous all year round…
Journalists’ nostalgia is a strange and specific thing. Any summer when there is a surfeit of hard, horrifying news produces pangs among a certain sort of hack for “the silly season” — a time when newspapers and the reporters left holding the fort while the big names are basking in the sunshine somewhere turn their focus to ridiculous stories that are overblown in the absence of anything else to cover.
During Times Radio’s mid-morning newspaper review yesterday morning1, the reliably unctuous India Knight capped off a discussion about incels by saying:
It’s a depressing August, isn’t it? Traditionally the silly season. You find yourself really longing for front pages about cheeky seagulls stealing chips.
It’s ironic really that a Times columnist should be pining for “silly season” since The Times is the paper about which the phrase was first coined.
In an article headlined ‘The Silly Season’, published the Saturday Review on 13 July 1861, The Times was comprehensively shaded:
… during the months of autumn, when Parliament is no longer sitting and the gay world is no longer gathered together in London, something very different is supposed to do for the remnant of the public from what is needed in the polite portions of the year.
The Times’ great men have doubtless gone out of town like other great men… the hands which at other times wield the pen for our instruction are now wielding the gun on a Scotch moor or the Alpenstock on a Swiss mountain.
Work is left to feebler hands… In those months the great oracle becomes — what at other times it is not — simply silly. In spring and early summer, The Times is often violent, unfair, fallacious, inconsistent, intentionally unmeaning, even positively blundering, but it is very seldom merely silly…
In the dead of autumn, when the second and third rare hands are on, we sink from nonsense written with a purpose to nonsense written because the writer must either write nonsense or nothing.
Anyone, like me, who keeps a close eye on The Times’ comment pages would tell you that it does not need a silly season to write nonsense nor that silliness (cut with the blundering and violence the Saturday Review writer mentioned) is an all-year-round pursuit.
Over at The Daily Telegraph, Judith Woods joins in with the wistfulness for the mythical months of no news (Silly season is off this year… but Dominic Raab didn’t get the memo). She begins:
Whatever happened to August? Sunshine. The crack of leather on willow. Lazy salad days. Messing about in boats. The silly season. August used to be the month of heroic animal trivia.
Remember the Tamworth Two, the pair of escaped piglets that made headlines for days when they went on the run for a week before their bacon was saved by an animal sanctuary? The front-page death of Benson, Britain’s best-loved carp? Edinburgh Zoo being forced to deny that it employs a “penguin erector” to pick up the birds when they fall over gazing up at planes taking off from the nearby airport?
That made me wonder what else was going on while the papers turned their focus to porkers on the run and perpendicular penguins?
Firstly, the Tamworth Two story didn’t happen in silly season. Butch (the sow) and Sundance (the boar) made their escape on 8 January 1998. The porcine prisonbreak drew media attention from not just the UK but the US and Japan. BBC News reported that “100 journalists [were] on the trail of the bolshy porkers” including NBC News’ Donatella Lorch who said:
These pigs have become celebrities. The British reaction to the whole thing is what has caught our attention and, after all, we are the makers of Babe.
Butch and Sundance were recaptured a week later on January 15 and saved from slaughter by The Daily Mail who bought both pigs in return for exclusive rights to their story. And was there no news while the world’s media pursued two pigs through the Wiltshire countryside, right?
Well, on the day they escaped Ramzi Yousef was sentenced to life in prison for planning the first World Trade Centre bombing. While they were still at large, 100 people were killed in the Sidi-Hamed massacre in Algeria (January 11) and nineteen European nations agreed to forbid human cloning (January 12). Still, nothing to compete with fugitive hogs…
The death of Benson2, a female fish who was allegedly “Britain’s biggest and best-loved” carp, did at least occur during the “silly season”. In August 2009, Benson who had been voted Britain’s Favourite Carp in 2005 by readers of Angler’s Mail, was found dead aged 25.
At the time of her death, The Daily Telegraph claimed that Benson “weighed the same as a large dog” and was worth £20,000. The paper also ginned up a murder mystery by printing suggestions from the owner of the lake where the fish lived that she had been poisoned by anglers using uncooked tiger nuts as bait. It was later reported by… and I can hardly believe I’m writing this — The Wall Street Journal! that Benson actually died of reproductive complications rather than nut-based foul play.
The opening line of The Wall Street Journal piece must hold the title for most hyperbolic introduction to a story about a dead fish:
Benson, the giant carp whose death in Britain this month sparked an international outpouring, was probably not a victim of foul play, the taxidermist charged with examining her sudden death said on Monday. Instead, the fish likely died from reproductive complications.
On 4 August 2009 when apparently serious papers were breaking the news of a fat fish’s untimely death, Bill Clinton arrived in North Korea and secured the release of two American journalists, police in Australia said they had foiled a terror attack in Sydney, a Bangkok Airways flight crashed in Thailand, there were clashes between Algerians and Chinese citizens in Algiers, opposition groups in Iran called for protests ahead of the inauguration of President Ahmadinejad, a Sudanese woman’s trial for public indecency (she wore trousers) was adjourned for the second time, the Kenyan president commuted 4,000 death row sentences, and Nigeria released a Ukranian aircraft and its crew after it was caught with arms bound for Equatorial Guinea.
The Edinburgh Zoo “penguin erector” story — which was based on a joke tweet that went viral — also happened in August. The 2018 story picked up traction on August 19 and was humorously shut down by Edinburgh Zoo’s own Twitter account two days later.
On the day the penguin tweet was picked up by news websites there were…
…earthquakes near Fiji and the Indonesian island of Lombok (the second killed 14 people), Italy’s then-Interior Minister Matteo Salvini threatened to return 177 refugees aboard an Italian coast guard ship to Libya, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani called for a conditional cease-fire with the Taliban, Brazilians attacked Venezuelan migrants at a border camp and the Brazilian military was sent it, Venezuela sent attack helicopters and a brigade of 30 soldiers across the border with Colombia, and Novak Djokovic beat Roger Federer to become the first player to win singles titles in all nine ATP World Tour Master 1000 tournaments.
The “silly season” is not merely an affliction of British journalism. Germany has the sommerloch (“the summer newshole”), France has la morte-saison (“the dead season”) and Sweden has the extremely Swedish nyhetstorka (“news drought”). In the particularly pickle-loving section of the globe, “silly season” names are related to cucumbers3 — “cucumber season” (komkommertijd) in Dutch, “the cucumber time” (gúrkutíð) in Icelandic and “season of the cucumbers” (עונת המלפפונים/onat ha'melafefonim) in Hebrew.
My favourite terms though come from Sweden (rötmånadshistoria) and Finland (mätäkuun juttu) which mean “rotting-month story”. And that’s because I actually do think there is something rotten about the whole notion of “the silly season”. While it was perhaps more understandable in the 19th century when it was originally coined — news being slower and far more parochial than it is now — the notion of the silly season is ludicrous now and has been for years.
When each of the ridiculous stories that Woods mentions in her column were taking the attention of the British press, interesting and important things were still happening. The truth is that there’s no such thing as a slow news day, only slow journalists. The longevity of “silly season” as an idea speaks to how narrow the notion of what is “newsworthy” has become in a lot of hack’s minds.
Woods recognises that in a solitary paragraph squeezed between her nostalgia for ridiculous animal stories (while admitting that 2021 still gave us Geronimo) and a predictable Daily Telegraph kicking for “the left”:
In truth, tragedy and chaos, raging wildfires and humanitarian catastrophe don’t recognise any calendar. Consider the appalling carnage caused by a Plymouth shooter. Surgeons in earthquake-stricken Haiti operating outdoors because the crumbling hospitals are unfit for purpose.
But the thing she’s never likely to admit is that whether it’s red tops like The Sun and The Daily Mirror or tabloids with more expensive thesauruses (The Daily Telegraph and The Times), there is no silly season because it’s silly season all year round. It’s why we’re fed contrived culture war tales on a daily basis and tweets are constantly turned into multi-day mini-’scandals’ that are forgotten by the following week.
You don’t get to have a ‘silly season’ when you’re presiding over a clown show every single day of the year.
A torture to which I subject myself so you don’t have to…
She was originally part of a pair but her male companion, Hedges, disappeared in a flood in 1998.
There are loads of others which you can find listed on the ‘Silly Season’ Wikipedia page. A story about the history of pickling cucumbers as something German merchants did when business was slow would make a good ‘silly season’ feature.