I lock my loud cat out of my dining room for the duration of my Zoom interview with Guardian columnist Marina Hyde. “So, if you hear weird shrieks, it’s not a person,” I explain. “It’s a cat.”
“My daughter is being brought from school by my husband, so if you hear weird shrieks here that is a person,” says Marina Hyde. “And my best to your cat.”
Shrieking children and animals feels like an appropriate backdrop for a discussion of What Just Happened?! Dispatches from Turbulent Times, a book collecting six years’ worth of Hyde’s columns on pop culture, sport and, most crucially, politics. It’s been six particularly unhinged years, including Brexit, Trump, Brexit again, Jeffrey Epstein, Prince Andrew, Boris, Getting Brexit Done, Dominic Cummings, Partygate and Liz Truss. I laughed on every page, but I also felt my rage level rise at the general malevolence and incompetence.
Maybe, says Hyde, readers should “burn each page as they go”. In a few weeks we’re doing a live event together in Dublin’s Liberty Hall. “We could have a brazier on the stage we can drop the pages in one at a time,” she suggests.
‘You’d get completely crazy people ringing in. Most of the people who were in the papers were celebrities who wanted to be in the papers. They would ring and tell you who they were in bed with’
Hyde is as funny in person as on the page. She’s even got a sense of humour about herself. She refers to herself as a “Sloane” a few times in this interview because, she explains, “I sound sort of posh”. She is sort of posh. Her father is literally a baronet. But she never pretends otherwise. “Do you remember when Guy Ritchie brought out his first film and he pretended he came from the East End?... I don’t think you should hide anything. I just try and make a joke about it first in case you think I haven’t noticed.”
In her early 20s, she wasn’t sure what to do with her life. She was working as a temp and ended being sent to answer phones at the Sun’s showbiz desk. “You’d get completely crazy people ringing in. Most of the people who were in the papers were celebrities who wanted to be in the papers. They would ring and tell you who they were in bed with. Then you’d get calls with people saying, ‘I’m going to kill Chris Evans on TFI Friday tonight, are you interested in the story?’ And you would be like, ‘I guess, if you do it?’” She laughs. “Before that I worked in solicitors’ offices and banks and the calls were far less interesting.”
[ US Marina Hyde: OK, America, so what the hell happens now?Opens in new window ]
She became a general “dogsbody” at the Sun before eventually becoming a writer. She’d never considered writing before that, though weirdly, as a child she wanted to be a politician. “I was radically and suddenly disabused of that notion when I was 18, when I met lots of people who I realised would be the future people in politics, and I just thought, ‘Oh, my God, these people are awful.’”
She was back working with “these people” when she worked on the Guardian’s diary column a few years after starting with the Sun. “We would just ring [politicians] and try and get them off message. It was so rude, the things we would say, but I think because I was such a Sloane they didn’t really realise until it was too late... So you’d ring Archie Hamilton, who was this incredibly stupid Tory MP… and we would say, ‘They found an amazing chimp in a zoo who they think can communicate.’ ‘Yes, very interesting.’ ‘And we know you like animals.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘We just wondered if you would do an intelligence test against the chimp?’ And then we would transcribe the call.”
Lost in Showbiz
She first found a groove, she thinks, writing about sport and then about celebrity in her Lost in Showbiz column. She still enjoys writing about celebrities. “When Mark Wahlberg revealed his daily routine, and I discover that he gets up at 2.30 in the morning and does four workouts a day.” She starts to laugh. “To be ‘Mark Wahlberg’? Why are you killing yourself in the pursuit of being someone who stars in Daddy’s Home 2?”
[ Mark Wahlberg’s day: a 2.30am start, mega-workouts and cryotherapyOpens in new window ]
The noughties was a golden age of celebrity culture but it was also toxic. “There was a major obsession with young women ‘trainwrecks’, people like Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton, Britney Spears,” she says. “The magazines were disgusting… They would circle sweat patches and body parts of celebrities that were deemed inadequate. They were really vile… I remember writing an article about the celebrity magazine editors once in the style that they would have written about Amy Winehouse or Britney Spears… Someone got in touch about that saying, ‘Why have you done this?’ I said: ‘You do it every week in your magazine.’”
‘Cabinet ministers behave, in many ways, like they’re crazy popstars who say anything they like… It’s the decadence of Studio 54′
It took longer to find a voice when writing about politics. She thinks it first began to click for her when she stopped trying to write worthily and deferentially and was carried away by the ludicrous white heat of Brexit. She realised that politics was no longer hugely different from show business. “The biggest reality TV star of that era, Trump, ended up in the White House,” she says. “Cabinet ministers behave, in many ways, like they’re crazy pop stars who say anything they like… It’s the decadence of Studio 54.”
How would she define how she writes? “I think really associatively, so I’m always imagining things in terms of what they resemble. I can’t really watch sport without thinking, ‘That’s a little bit like what happened in the House of Commons last week.’... I think that people like football and movies and pop music and they really hate politics. They much prefer if it’s being filtered through something that they like. There’s something quite gatekeepery about a lot of the way politics is written about.”
Which writers influenced her? “I loved Nora Ephron. Katharine Whitehorn wrote hilariously about tiny things in the domestic sphere... One of the best things I wrote after Brexit was a pure lift off her. She wrote once: ‘Have you ever gone back into your laundry basket on the basis that something that you thought was dirty is now cleaner than anything else you have?’ She said that rather more eloquently. I really felt that was what happened with Theresa May. If at the start someone said, ‘Theresa May will be prime minister in four weeks…'” She shakes her head sadly. “But by the end when it was only her or Andrea Leadsom, you were thinking, ‘Oh My God! Look, this is fine, I can wear this. It’s clean enough.’”
What does she think this kind of column writing is for? “I’ve been able to make much more serious points since I started mostly trying to tell jokes. You can do quite a lot at the top, and then you can be a bit like a DJ, that needle scratch, a little serious bit at the bottom. I don’t think it changes anything, by the way, not for one second... But I do think it’s very comforting. I try to be a friend to the reader, to try and make them laugh, saying let’s be in a gang of ‘us’ laughing at ‘them’…. Swift was an amazing satirist, but what did A Modest Proposal change? Absolutely nothing.”
Do editors ever stop her going “too far”? “I will go to the wall for a joke. If someone says it’s bad taste, I really argue the toss and say it has to stay in… I’m always thinking about it… I’m not thinking ‘What would somebody on Twitter say about it?, because I don’t care about that.’ But I am thinking, ‘What would I feel if I had to really justify this to that person?’”
What about legal restrictions? “There’s almost always a way around… a way that means that the reader will understand exactly the same thing from [a joke], but somehow I am not going to court for it. I really try and get as close as possible to that line. It’s been my life’s work!”
Verbally abused
She rarely writes about herself. But the week the story of Sarah Everard’s awful death broke, she was followed and verbally abused by a strange man as she was collecting one of her children. She decided to write about it because it was so commonplace. “The vogue 10 or 15 years ago was everybody writing first-person pieces about terrible things that have happened to them. I do so sparingly… I suppose it’s exposing, isn’t it? I’m really quite private, so I don’t like to do that. But I thought that there was a reason for it.”
‘I mean, the business secretary is a man who hates the nanny state, but still has a nanny’
Does she find writing cathartic? “There is something quite cathartic about having to quite dispassionately sit there and contemplate whatever Jacob Rees Mogg has done that week and think, ‘But what is the actual joke?’ Once you’ve found your way through to it, or to one that will do, to some extent you have processed it. I mean, the business secretary is a man who hates the nanny state, but still has a nanny.”
She has penned some incredibly funny descriptions of Boris Johnson over the past six years. How does she write those? “I’m letting you into my process, which I feel is the least interesting process ever. I go on Google Images, and I just look at the pictures and I kind of let my eyes drift a bit. And then you just think, ‘Oh, yeah, he’s a Cabbage Patch Draco Malfoy.’ Or, ‘Oh, he looks like an Oxfam donation bag torn open by a fox.’”
[ Marina Hyde: Britain’s best hope is to pray for an EU invasionOpens in new window ]
We end up discussing how we write our columns. She talks about how much she learned from having to write to small word counts and how you should put your best jokes near the top in case readers don’t get to the end. She writes quickly. I’m gratified to find that, like me, she leaves gaps in her first drafts where she knows jokes will be placed later. “It’s all gaps!” she says. “Only at the end does this creature stagger from the lagoon.”
Is there an internal conflict between her citizen self and her writer self, where one hates the rise of clownish politicians but the other can’t wait to write about them? “There is a conflict,” she says. “But if you’re asking me if I would swap [good material] for smoother times for the country, I would definitely choose smoother times. I think everyone deserves a break for at least an interval, an ice cream and maybe a drink at the bar, and then we’ll go back in for the second half.”
What Just Happened?! Dispatches from Turbulent Times by Marina Hyde, is published by Guardian Faber. What just Happened?! An Evening with Marina Hyde and Patrick Freyne, takes place on October 18th in Liberty Hall.
