‍By CHRISTOPHER WILSON, former William Hickey Editor

‍From Angry Young Man to furious old fart, John Osborne never stopped spitting bile till the day he died. But he saved his biggest bollockings for the noble profession of journalism — and of this elite group, his particular target was the gossip columnist.

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‍The foremost playwright of his generation felt able to dish the dirt on anyone who took his fancy, but the same could not be said when the guns were turned on him. He had a skin thinner than a Durex Invisible Extra.

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‍So it comes as no surprise to learn the gossip pedlars of the late 50s and early 60s constantly had the bed-hopping Osborne in their sights.

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‍And vice versa.

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‍The battle, for that's what it became, came to a head on on 5 May 1959, the opening night of The World of Paul Slickey — the much awaited follow-up to Osborne's blockbusters Look Back in Anger and The Entertainer.

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‍The Slickey of the title was a not-so-clever amalgam of the two leading celebrity columns of the day, the Express's William Hickey, and its opposite number on the Mail, Paul Tanfield. Both papers had dusted Osborne's pants on numerous occasions and here, finally, was his chance to get back at them.

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‍I don't know, but I very much hope that among that first-night audience at the Palace Theatre were the current Hickey (Peter Baker) and Tanfield (Alan Gardner) — because Osborne's play was a stinker. So bad in fact that it has never, ever, been revived.

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‍It tells the story of columnist Slickey exposing the secret lives of Lesley and Michael Giltedge-Whyte, a rich and well-connected young couple proposing to solve their marriage problems by having sex changes.

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‍That night the audience booed its disapproval so loud that at one point the leading lady, Adrienne Corri, raced downstage throwing V-signs at them and shouting "Go fuck yourselves!"

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‍Among those booing loudest was Noel Coward, who later wrote in his diary, "Never in all my theatrical experience have I seen anything so appalling — appalling from every point of view!"

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‍As Osborne, pictured, left the building he was chased by angry theatregoers all the way down the Charing Cross Road, and next morning the critics got their turn, one writing "The World of Paul Slickey is pure spit and vomit thrown directly into the teeth of the audience."

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‍So — game, set and match to the gossmongers?

‍Not quite. Because quite soon after that, Osborne hooked up with the writer and critic Penelope Gilliatt, who proceeded to rock posh society by writing an article in the 13 April 1960 edition of Queen magazine [prop. Jocelyn Stevens] called 'The Friendless Ones'.

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‍Yep — that's us, the gossip columnists (though I wasn't one yet). She named them one by one — Rex North of the Sunday Pictorial, John Smeaton of the Sunday Express, Fred Newman of the Daily Sketch, John Moynihan of the Evening Standard, Nancy Gillespie of nowhere in particular — and she shamed them.

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‍Hickey's Peter Baker had his jaw smashed by an irate victim of his pen. From Tanfield's Alan Gardner, whose column gushed with "awe, disgust and envy" she reprinted a series of corrections occasioned by sloppy night lawyers or, possibly, the fact Gardner swore to legal that the story was true when it most certainly wasn't.   

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‍Gillespie, no need to whisper it, was a drunk.

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‍"The gossip world is a limbo without worry, love, or conscience" she seethed — which though I, erstwhile practitioner of the dark art, might be obliged to take offence at such outright snootiness, I must confess that when I arrived at Hickey in the mid-70s its motto was "Their Despair Is Our Delight" (I even had it engraved on a silver spoon — Desperatio eorum nostra delectatio est) - so maybe she had a point.

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‍Even so her piece read a bit harsh, and therefore in returning the compliment I can exclusively reveal that Gilliatt's conspiracy with Osborne to bury the hacks feet uppermost bore little fruit beyond a permanent case of the DTs on her part, and the complete repudiation of the couple's love-child on his ("I was relieved he never spoke to me," the kid said later).  You read it here first.

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‍However, Gilliatt's piece shivered the timbers of the then Lord Rothermere, who overnight killed Tanfield and replaced it with a milk-and-water shadow of its former contagion, a column called Charles Greville.

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‍As a result Gilliatt was to spawn a platoon of disciples who over the next few years tried to do to the gossip columnists what the gossip columnists did to their victims — ie, stuff them royally.

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‍One such was the young Tina Brown, just down from Oxford and determined to out-Gilliatt Gilliatt. I was in the Hickey office, then edited by Peter Tory, the day she turned up — all blonde curls and guile. I don't remember much about her subsequent piece beyond the fact that she described Hickey stalwart Graham Bridgstock as "the photofit of a child-molester".

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‍Bridgsticker's subsequent libel action could easily have blown Brown's journalistic career out of the water, but he shrugged his shoulders with a 'don't-dish-it-out-if-you-can't-take-it' grimace and forgot about it.

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‍People didn't forget Graham, however. He wasn't one of the champagne cocktail crowd, and rarely attended the zillions of parties he was invited to — but he was known, with some awe, as the Divorce Desk. If there was even the smallest shaft of light visible between a devoted couple, he'd have them apart in a trice ("Lord Blunderbuss, I'm sorry to hear on good authority that you and Lady Blunderbuss have parted, is there any chance of a reconciliation?")

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‍And Bridgstock took no shit from any pompous old fool questioning his right to invade their privacy — "Don't you take that tone with me, Your Grace!" — and if people slammed the phone down on him, he'd call them right back. And again.

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‍And again, till he got what he wanted.

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‍Small, bespectacled, and clerklike in appearance, Bridgstock was probably known to very few on the Express editorial floor — but as a journalist he was easily their equal — ruthless, inventive, and resourceful. If Hickey needed a picture caption he'd ring up Katie Boyle, then still in full bloom, and ask her if she wouldn't mind going and weighing her breasts. And that's what Katie did.

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‍Another of his regular pin-ups was Adrienne Corri, the fuck-off actress who'd nearly blown her career with The World of Paul Slickey all those years before but had undergone a Pauline conversion and now adored taking his calls in return for a nice mention (the pic caps were rarely nasty).

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‍But best of all, sweetest revenge of all, was the actress Jill Bennett, who'd made the foolish mistake of becoming Mrs John Osborne IV.

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‍From the off she hated him — "impotent and homosexual" — and got the message out to the wider world through Bridgstock. The playwright went wild when she revealed their bedroom secrets — he with his pickled onions in a bedside fridge which he'd breathe over her; she with her tinned new potatoes as loyal pillow companions — and, death of a thousand cuts, Jill Bennett slowly took the great man down with the help of her clerkly amanuensis.

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‍As we all agreed at the day's end, in the Poppinjay or in The Ritz, it was dirty work. But somebody had to do it.

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‍12 April 2026