Giles Coren is former Tatler totty. He fancied other Tatler totty. Not ‘alf. But to no avail, for the most part, except “a couple of snogs and the odd ‘blowie’”.
Coren, never one for holding back (who can forget his imperious “I have written 350 restaurant reviews for the Times and I have never ended on an unstressed syllable” email flamer to a Times sub during the infamous “noshgate” donnybrook?) coughs it all up about his time at the glossy in a Times piece on Tuesday. It comes on the back of the launch of BBC2 fly-on-the-wall documentary Posh People: Inside Tatler.
His job interview “towards the end of the last century” consisted of a brief phone conversation with the magazine’s then deputy editor (unnamed, for reasons that will become apparent), who he’d contacted for a quote for a Tara Palmer-Tomkinson story for his “grim desk job” at the Mail on Sunday.
“You’d be editing a thing called ‘Tatler About Town’,” she told him, “which is a review section full of pieces written by the editor’s friends, which you’re not allowed to change even though they’re total rubbish, so most of the time you’ll be having long lunches, going to parties and copping off with posh girls. We can only pay you £40,000 a year, which is probably half what you’re getting at the Mail but …” He replied that he could start on Monday. “And so began the best year of my life.”
Coren ends his affectionate portrait by saying he’d go back “in an eye-blink”, as no other publication has been as tolerant of “me, personally, and all my own failings”. He illustrates this point with an anecdote about the occasion when he was “sweater-pulled-over-his-knees-perched-on-the-editor’s-desk-hooting-like-an-owl drunk” one afternoon, and the next morning “when all those beautiful, smart, rather eccentric young women fluttered like budgerigars into work in their brightly coloured pashminas, nobody even mentioned it”. Giles, you’ve clearly never worked at Cage and Aviary Birds.
