Celebrity sex is the UK’s favourite media gossip and IPC’s Now is the
latest in a series of magazines providing us with intimate details of
the lives of the famous.
For joint launch editor David Durman, sex and magazines are a natural
fit. ‘Launching a magazine is brilliant,’ Durman says. ‘It’s as good as
sex with the nicest person you know.’
Durman should know. He worked on the Leeds University student newspaper
in the permissive 1960s under its editor, the now legendary Paul Dacre.
On graduating, Durman trained on the Newcastle Journal before following
Dacre to the Daily Mail in Manchester.
The Daily Mail believes in ‘creative tension’ between journalists.
That’s creative tension between journalists on the same title, the same
newsdesk and even the same story. For a child of the 1960s like Durman
it was Hell on Earth. ‘I hated the Mail from the moment I walked in the
door,’ he explains. ‘I ended up going down to the Mail in London because
I thought it would be different, but it wasn’t. It was so frustrating. I
knew I could write, but I couldn’t write for them.’
Durnam decided to hit the freelance trail and began working for IPC’s
Woman’s Own, became deputy features editor and rose to deputy editor
before departing for the IPC owned rival title Woman. He was editor for
six and a half years which he thinks may have been one and a half years
too long.
‘Most of us hang on to relationships after we should have let go,’
Durman says. ‘The same is true for jobs. I spoke to Jenny Green, a long
established editor of Country Life, just before she retired. She said
editors spend the first year improving the magazine, the second year
getting rid of people who are in the way, the third year coasting, the
fourth year looking for another job and the fifth year panicking because
they haven’t got one.’
His love of the job can have telling effects, however. ‘We keep going on
these management courses where they tell us not to dedicate our lives to
the job,’ he says. ‘I didn’t take it all that seriously until this
weekend. We’d been working on Now so hard that I was exhausted. I got up
Saturday lunchtime, went into the kitchen and found a veal and ham pie.
I’d never had one before so I tucked in and wasn’t that impressed.I went
back to bed, woke up early evening, went into the kitchen again and
found I should have heated up the pie for half an hour. No wonder it
tasted like cat food. In a few year’ time, that’ll probably be a
defining moment in my life.’
HIGHLIGHTS
1981 Features editor, Woman’s Own
1982 Deputy editor, Woman’s Own
1988 Editor, Woman
1994 Launch editor, Chat
1996 Editor-in-chief IPC Woman’s Group, overseeing the launch of Now, as
well as Woman, Woman’s Own and Chat
