When I was at university, I was the editor of a newspaper called The Sanctuary. It’s still going, but it’s not as funny since I almost got kicked out of university as a result of the trouble we caused with it. Since then I’ve been overtaken by Philip Laing, who pissed on a war memorial in Sheffield while on a pub crawl, as the most hated student in Britain. Now I can only romanticise those days spent with tabloid journalists outside my front front door, baying for blood and asking for comments.
As well as being condemned by the media and university, it wasn’t uncommon for our readers to rip the paper up in our faces when we were handing it out, because they didn’t understand why taking the piss out of Jade Goody when she was on her death bed was still funny. “Have you ever known anyone who’s had cancer?!” the girl screamed in the middle of the street.
We had been writing articles which said the rugby team had small dicks, and printing some idiot’s phone number advertising his services as a drug dealer for quite a while, to no great controversy. A couple of heckles in the street, a few people turning their backs in the pub, but mostly people thought our articles weren’t offensive enough to protest or take violent action against us. They just hated us silently and peacefully, as the British tend to do. But when the national press waded in to condemn our spoof advert for a serial killer commemorative tea set, we thought our cards were marked. We were putting the faces of child murderers on the tea sets which British newspapers sell usually emblazoned with portraits of Princess Diana and the Queen. The families of murdered children were offended.
We received an email from a reporter at the Birmingham Mail. It said we ought to respond to the criticism from the families of murdered children that our Peter Sutcliffe laurel edged plate and Fred West biscuit tin were causing offense. Instead of falling in to that trap, we decided to continue taking the piss. Under the name Christopher Philip Bacon, we sent them this statement:
“It is deeply regrettable that people waste their money on sentimental tat advertised in Sunday newspaper, which our ‘advert’ was clearly lampooning.”
The next day I saw this glaring at me from the news stands:
After that, the flood gates opened. I was receiving emails from press agencies and other newspapers, but refusing to comment. As a result, they all ran with the same story.
A couple of days later, the Birmingham Mail probably realised that we’d taken them for fools with our Chris P. Bacon pseudonym, so they sent a reporter round to my house to unmask me, Scooby Doo style. For the next few days I made sure that I showered and brushed my hair before leaving the house, in case they wanted to put my picture in the newspapers. I didn’t want to look like the suspected 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed when they rumbled him, I wanted to look like Oscar Wilde.
I enjoyed being the most hated student in Britain, if only for a short while. Unlike Philip Laing, I did not face a criminal charge for my mischief because what I did was not illegal, just irritating to a lot of people. I did, however, have to face interrogation from humourless university officials who desperately wanted to kick me out, and I had to endure the wrath of The Sun’s comment page.