The Magazine Whose Title Defies Feeble Punnery

Title: Maxim
Cover date: April 2008

In 2004, Maxim UK appointed an American editor, Greg Gutfeld, with the remit to revolutionise the title and make it stand out in an increasingly homogeneous market. The result was an astonishing magazine. Surreal, daring, iconoclastic, hilarious, unafraid to take risks – even some of the nudey pictures were given a bizarre twist, featuring concepts such as “You Are The Fly” and “You Are The Slug”, in which the reader got an insect’s or mollusc’s-eye view of a glistening topless lovely chasing him with a swat or a salt-shaker. But the inevitable glossy images of nearly-naked women seemed almost incidental to the mag, which showed a consistently fierce irreverence towards everything on its pages. I loved it. It was the first time in years I’d enjoyed reading a lad mag. I enthused about it to everyone I knew and urged them to read it.

No-one did. Maxim spectacularly failed to pull out of its sales nosedive. After two years, Gutfeld’s contract was not renewed and Maxim was relaunched as a monthly version of the weekly lads’ titles that had enjoyed so much recent success. It stopped taking the piss out of everything and started rotating its cover between the likes of Gemma Atkinson, Sophie Howard and Emily Scott. In other words, rather than genuine celebrities, women who were largely known – if at all – for being the sort of women who appeared on Maxim covers.

Surprisingly, this wasn’t what the readers wanted either. With sales dipping below 100,000 for the first time in 2007’s final batch of circulation figures, Maxim has been rejigged yet again. Although most magazines undergo regular overhauls, to go through so many different iterations in such a short space of time is unusual (certainly compared with US Maxim, which has stuck with pretty much the same boring template since its launch and is looking decidedly dated) and reflects the difficulties in which Maxim finds itself.

Maxim’s choice of cover girls since the relaunch clearly demonstrates the changing nature of the magazine. Goodbye WAGs and models; hello actual famous people.


I’m not convinced Mischa Barton is the ideal cover star, though. The new, classier look of the front page (steely grey background, dark red fonts) suggests Maxim is aiming for an older reader these days, not the teenage market it once attracted. I’m a 32-year-old man who sat through all four seasons of The O.C., and even I’m not interested in Barton. She is too young, for one thing; not notably talented, for another; and, crucially, not very sexy, certainly by the traditional standards of men’s magazines. March’s issue featured the far more sultry Eva Mendes and May’s has Sarah Michelle Gellar who, while also not classic men’s-mag totty, is at least age-appropriate. So Barton is an odd choice, one which I strongly suspect was influenced by the availability of relatively cheap photos from US Maxim.

Elsewhere on the cover, there are clues among the sex and football staples that indicate Maxim’s shifting target readership: fitness, property, exotic holidays and a promise of “223 ways to look your best” in a fashion special. Not things you would imagine drooling 17-year-olds care much about. The mag’s slogan, which for years has crowed “The world’s biggest men’s magazine”, has become “Your life made easy”.

Page 8 The editor’s letter – have I mentioned that these set the tone? – is fairly straightforward, a matey, chatty intro that sticks safely to pointing up a few of the salient features in the mag. Its most telling aspect is that Michael Donlevy doesn’t mention sex or women until the final paragraph, another sign of where the title’s priorities now lie. It’s followed by Mailbox, which contains two interesting things (not the letters!): instructions on how to download sexy (on second thoughts that should probably be “sexy”) pictures to your mobile phone, and encouragement to go to the website and see more pictures, win prizes and join the debate on subjects brought up by features in the mag. Yes, that says “join the debate”. Maxim appears to be suggesting that its readers think! (And increase web traffic.)

Page 14 The front section is now called Inbox, which is less a sign of embracing technology and more an appropriation of what’s now a familiar everyday term. It starts with pictures of a woman in her underwear! Who could have guessed? I think it’s interesting, though, that the woman is 28-year-old mother of one Donna Air, wearing a cardigan.



I’m not suggesting that this makes Maxim exactly progressive or anything. But choosing this over all the other women and other photos and other poses they could have included shows, once more, a determination to grow up.

The rest of Inbox is largely composed of plugs for gadgets, games and kit and it’s fairly standard, but it also has The Maxim Debate, in which two writers (one woman, one man) consider the merits of couples fighting in public. Again, it’s not Plato, but it encourages readers to engage their brains – and it also gives women a voice in the mag, one that isn’t just talking about how much they love sex and being naked and kissing other girls and sexy sexy sex.


Page 34 The first feature is an interview with The League Of Gentlemen’s Reece Shearsmith, with questions provided by readers. A good subject and, as with Heat, a good way to interact with readers (although curiously this doesn’t appear to be connected with the website). The next one is World Of Maxim, pictures of women taken from editions around the world. In the previous Maxim incarnation this feature was in danger of taking over the mag, but now it’s just two shots over three pages. Considering these pictures must provide a fairly cheap way of padding out your content, its reduction is surprising and a little gratifying.

Men’s mags have always included what might be termed Dumb Adventures and this is no exception, as writer Jerome Starkey goes to Afghanistan and attempts to play Buzkashi, which is best described as a cross between rugby and polo with a dead goat for a ball. This is a fun read – unless you’re the goat – with some vivid, energetic pictures, although not for the squeamish.

Still, I’d rather look at these pictures than the Mischa Barton spread, in which the insipid starlet strives to vamp it up for the camera and fails comprehensively. The interview tries its hardest to make her sexy, as these interviews always do, but the suggestive questions about nudity and her character’s lesbian experiences in The O.C. don’t go anywhere. Not only is Barton not sexy, she’s not funny or interesting either. I appreciate it’ll need to get somewhat chillier round Satan’s way before men’s mag cover stars are chosen for their sparkling wit or ability to interpret Ibsen, but this is a feeble and wan interview. The captions – tellingly, likely to be the only part of the feature originated by Maxim’s UK staff – are the best things about it.

Page 54 Comedy is another staple of lad mags, and Maxim’s four-part comedy tour of the British Isles continues with Rob Brydon’s guide to Wales. This is a fine idea, and kudos to Maxim for netting the talented and in-demand Brydon, but unfortunately comedians are rarely as funny in interviews as when working with prepared material. Even with careful editing, this is a little dry. Next is an article on the psychology of football, examining why the sport can turn even intelligent men into emotional wrecks, which isn’t the liveliest piece either. But once again it shows that Maxim is no longer content to print the Ten Wackiest Own Goals or whatever.


I feel as though I’m defending the mag quite a lot, so happily here come five pages of dross to dismiss! The Sexy Seven Sins is a trashy sexy-girl shoot dressed up as helpful sex-life advice, and it’s poorly conceived. Some of the tips are about how to overcome “sinful” feelings such as sloth, while others are about making envy or gluttony work for you in the sack. Just nonsense. It’s followed by another Dumb Adventure, sending writer Martin Robinson to train as an SAS sniper, which is more like it.

Page 81 Fashion never sits all that comfortably in the mass-market men’s mags – whose readers probably feel buying a non-porn magazine is girly enough without it being full of shoes – but Maxim has embraced it thoroughly with this 27-page special. Strangely, it seems to be aimed at a younger readership than the rest of the mag, with lots of bright colours and not-very-classy brands (Ben Sherman, Fred Perry) although there are attempts to be more cutting-edge such as a focus on six up-and-coming British imprints. Perhaps it will take a while for the fashion pages, which after all are primarily designed to attract advertising, to catch up with the mag, which can’t afford to distance itself from its established ad clients.

Page 117 I do like a good reviews section and this, in the main, is one. It’s not huge, perhaps reflecting the fact that in 2008 we’re bombarded with promotional material every day and we hardly need monthly magazines to join in, but it’s smart and audience-appropriate. While the reviews are not in-depth, I like that it affords games the same space as movies or DVDs, acknowledging that they’re of equal importance to most young(ish) men. I also like the little featurettes sprinkled through the section, wittily comparing two straight-to-DVD releases or rounding up debut albums. I was already warming to it when I turned to page 122 to find an interview with Mark Heap and Kevin Eldon, two of the UK’s finest and yet most mysteriously underappreciated comic actors. Big hooray!


Page 131 Outbox, whose section name seems even more arbitrary than Inbox, contains the stuff to fulfil the “Your life made easy” pledge – tips for all the most important things in men’s lives today: fitness, travel, cars, poker. Poker? It may sound a little silly, but with the game’s popularity increasing, it’s useful to know at least a little about it these days – just so you don’t feel left out of conversations, if nothing else. This is also a handy pretext for some cross-promotion of Maxim’s sister magazine, betting title Inside Edge! The fitness and food pages in particular are simple and practical, although it must be said these few pages aren’t going to make your life that easy. If this stuff is what Maxim is about now, it could do with more space.

Page 162 Where other mags might stick a list or an interview, Maxim devotes a page to Girl Talk and, once again, this isn’t two young nubile wannabes in their M&S underwear chatting about groping, as you might expect from a lad mag. It’s a proper column, written by proper writers. It’s thoughtful, witty and not shy of using words like “unmitigated” and “chivalry”. All right, this one’s about sex and has “DILDO” in the headline in big bold capital letters, but I think the crucial point is that it’s what a woman thinks, not a man’s idea of what women think.

It’s official: unlike Jackie Treehorn, Maxim has decided that it no longer wants to treat objects like women, man. The focus of the relaunched magazine is on men and what they want out of life, rather than women and how we can get their bras to fall off. That’s not to say it doesn’t contain any female flesh but, as with the Gutfeld version of Maxim, it really feels as if the shots of partially dressed women are the least important component of the issue, included mostly because it’s expected of lad magazines rather than because the editor wants them there. To put it crudely, Maxim was turning into a wank mag, and it certainly isn’t that any more.

Maxim’s problem might be that it’s spent too long being Maxim. A magazine-buying man in his late 20s and early 30s who has outgrown the loutish teenage idiocy peddled by lad mags since the early 1990s is going to pick up Men’s Health or GQ, while teenagers themselves are buying Nuts. I don’t doubt that the readership exists for a non-laddish middle-market magazine. The difficulty for Maxim lies in letting potential readers know that it is that mag. I think it needs to take more risks with the cover. Unlike the upmarket men’s mags and its rival Loaded, Maxim has never had a man as its cover star. If it’s serious about changing its image and readership so totally, it needs to shake things up even more than it already has. That could be a place to start.

Preaching to the Esquire

Title: Esquire
Cover date: December 2007

The UK edition of Esquire has lost around half its readers over the past ten years, and yet it’s not in anything like the slump affecting the monthly lad mags. It can’t get near the sales of its main rival GQ, but it comfortably outsells its upstart competitor Arena. Like all other magazines, it must be suffering from the advertising recession; still, its publisher NatMags obviously had enough confidence in it to approve an expensive relaunch in 2007. Some perceive it as a stuffy old title but, with its drastically overhauled shape and look, it’s at the cutting edge of magazine design. It’s both a relative failure and a partial success story. It’s a bit of an odd one.

This issue isn’t on the shelves any more, but I’m reviewing it for two reasons: (1) it was followed by an issue featuring Rufus Wainwright on the cover and I simply can’t face anything to do with his wretched whiny warblings [Heresy!! Get off the blog, unbeliever! -- Canyon]; and (2) I love, love, love this cover.



This cover actually made me stop in my tracks, turn to stare at the shelf and, within seconds, make the decision to give up four – yes, four – of the pounds in my pocket to own a copy. It’s cheeky, it’s sexy, it’s funny, it’s arresting, it’s fan-effing-tastic. It helps that Becki Newton is the sexiest woman on US TV at the moment (give or take Connie Britton), or was in season 2006-07 anyway, before the Ugly Betty writers decided the way to get the best out of her was to heap humiliation on poor Amanda – ah, I digress. Anyway, it’s that knowing, faux-wide-eyed, how-much-do-you-want-to-bet-I’m-crazy-enough-to-do-it look on her face that makes it. A shot of a dimmer actor, and I’m not thinking of anyone in particular here, in this position would be less appealing and probably distasteful.

Apart from Newton, I love the stark scarlet/black/lots-of-white colour scheme, I like the twiddly font they use, I appreciate how it’s not cluttered with SHOUTY coverlines imploring us to buy it buy it buy it, I even like the frivolous little thing they’ve done with the barcode – all of it. It reeks of class. (And free aftershave samples.) If you accept that the primary function of a magazine is to get people to take it off the shelf, Esquire is a roaring success with me already. But will I be going back?

Page 24 After countless ads, and contents and credits that stretch over 15 pages (a bugbear of mine with glossies – when do we get to start reading, for goodness’ sake?!), here, finally, is the editor’s letter, doing its job of setting the magazine’s tone. It’s wordy, dry and takes quite a long time to say not very much. Not promising.

Page 29 Inquire is Esquire’s up-front section, full of short, punchy pieces designed to be digested quickly. The first of these is In Conversation With Russell Crowe, an interview with one of the biggest movie stars in the world that takes up just a single page. Its appearance here seems deliberately casual – “Yeah, other publications might put Crowe on the cover, but we’re not overawed by him, so this is all the space he gets”. Esquire’s older male reader is unlikely to be impressed by celebrities, and no-one needs another eight-page star profile about how great a given actor is, but the result is an unsatisfying mini-feature. Between plugging American Gangster and praising his frequent collaborator Ridley Scott, Crowe doesn’t have time to say anything much. His most revelatory comment is that he’s never worked just for the cash, because “you’ve got to have a higher level of motivation than money”. Which isn’t true. I find money motivating. I imagine I’d find the kind of money Crowe earns inordinately motivating. Russell Crowe is a liar!

Page 33 A list! For this is a Men’s Magazine with Men’s Things and, as we know, Men Like Lists. 30 Things Not To Do After 30 made me laugh a few times.

6. PUT ANYTHING IN A CLIP FRAME
You might as well have posters on your wall

13. PRETEND YOU LIKE HIP HOP
You don’t, really. And that’s OK

30. MAKE NEW FRIENDS
Far too much like hard work

“It’s funny because it’s true” has become a phrase of mockery, indicating trite obviousness, but you want your magazine to understand who you are and how you think, so it works here. I could do with fewer in-jokes about getting off with the office intern, a recurring theme in the issue (and why can’t they call them “workies” like everyone else, the great ponces?), but this piece is amusing.

Page 37 The feature trailed on the cover as A CHAIRMAN’S CONFESSION: The True Cost Of Football turns out to be a forum for tikka-tinged Crystal Palace FC bigwig Simon Jordan to air his dirty laundry and beg for investment in the club. In two pages, the Tony Hadley lookalike slags off three players, two coaches and a fellow chairman. They say if you meet three arseholes, maybe you’re the arsehole; if you call six people arseholes in print, I don’t know what that makes you. He also goes into super-boring detail about how much money he’s poured into Palace and how he’s done it all himself and how, like, no-one appreciates how hard it is for multimillionaires like him and it isn’t fair and he didn’t ask to be born! This is exceedingly tedious.

Page 46 Among the plugs for fancy gear and restaurants that make up the rest of Inquire is Good Against A Wall, Esquire’s sex advice column by Maria McErlane. She is described as a “sexucation specialist”, which is excruciating enough, but more to the point, isn’t she in fact a sometime actor/comedian/TV presenter/voiceover artiste of indeterminate age whose main claim to notoriety is a few appearances on The Fast Show? Why yes, she is. How this qualifies her to be a sexuca… no, I can’t even type it again – a sex expert, I’m not sure. Did she get this gig off the back of a stint narrating childish Channel 4 bongofest Eurotrash? Tellingly, the column is illustrated by a “sexy” silhouette (a ludicrous, Barbie-shaped fantasy figure that is about as sexy as an episode of Torchwood) rather than a picture of McErlane.




As if to prove my point, the column is inane and uninformative, and mostly it isn’t even about sex. Male waxing? Can you be friends with your ex? This is just pointless. Aren’t these subjects covered in every form of media eight thousand times a day?

Page 111 After Inquire ends with a bit of a personality injection – a short Flashman story and a witty column from David Baddiel about his history of buying crap cars – here is Design, a completely impersonal section full of sterile pictures of inanimate objects. Magazines are obliged to include such stuff, but I think this could do with a bit more gadgetry and a bit less bathroom cabinet. Gadgets, like lists, are popular with men, especially wealthy men, but few men care which style of cupboard their toothpaste is kept in.

Page 129 At this point Esquire pulls a surprising move and switches from shiny glossy paper to stiff almost-card for its Critics and Business sections.



It’s clear that this is what the mag is really about – serious, knowledgeable essays, verging on prolix, that give the reader something to get his teeth into. The Critics section covers film, TV, music, design, sex, food and books, while Business has interviews, advice, reviews of kit and general ideas. This is meaty and sophisticated stuff, and it demands that the reader devote some time to it – this definitely isn’t Nuts or Shortlist, to be flung aside after a bus journey. You’ll need numerous trips to the toilet to get through Esquire.

As well as the Business section, there’s a 36-page business pull-out, which is more high-end editorial and presented with some style. One thing I’m not keen on is the condescending tone of Women On Top, an article which clearly thinks it is celebrating women’s success in business despite the salacious headline and sentences such as these:

Men drool about how feminine [Jimmy Choo Ltd president Tamara Mellon] is, ‘unlike a lot of women bosses who are ball-breakers’

Working with [Ann Summers founder Jacqueline] Gold is probably not for every bloke. For many, it would be a touch intimidating

The fact that [Texperts chief executive Sarah McVittie] is a motorbike fanatic and triathlete is rumoured to get many a male pulse racing

Esquire seems determined to avoid appearing blokey, so the assurance that successful women fall into two categories – “still hot, don’t worry!” or “dragons” – is feeble and disappointing. Otherwise, this is a fine supplement and adds considerable value to the mag. But it does beg the question: do men turn to glossy magazines for business advice? Are they really thought of as serious career tools? Aren’t they just a bit of lightweight fun? Esquire is staking a lot on the idea that its readers are “men who mean business” in every sense.

Page 146 Becki Newton! I’d almost forgotten she was in here. Sadly, as delightful as Newton is, this feature falls flat. Esquire has decided to treat it as a fake interview for a job in the magazine’s office and, while this may be preferable to endless variations on “So what’s it like working with…?” or “Don’t you just love being naked?!”, it doesn’t work. Its tone is inevitably smarmy, the interviewer’s “notes” are inappropriate and frankly a bit creepy, and Newton for the most part fails to come up with amusing answers to standard questions such as “What are your strengths?” and “Where do you see yourself in five years’ time?” She’s a funny woman, but man alive, give her something to work with.



In fact the whole features section is a non-event. James Brown gets five pages to witter on about divorce and how it’s, like, a universal problem for us men these days! In other words, I and most of my friends are divorced which may be because we made horrible, shitty partners. I tried to get through this, but when Brown mentions that one of his divorced friends LIVES NEXT DOOR TO PAUL McCARTNEY, I had to stop. Next is an interview with Paul Whitehouse, plugging The Ultimate Fast Show Collection on DVD, illustrated with pictures of Whitehouse and Mark Williams as saucy tailors Ken and Kenneth because apparently it’s 1995. Whitehouse is a talented guy, and has recently become retrospectively more interesting because he starred in a programme about psychoanalysis with a convicted sex offender [Later convicted, of course – Legal Ed.], but he hasn’t produced anything significant since Happiness ended five years ago. Besides, Whitehouse understandably refuses to be drawn into conversation about Chris Langham, preferring to keep the chat to The Fast Show and Harry Enfield. This is just nostalgia.

It’s followed by an in-depth story about Kevin Davies, the young Gloucestershire man who died in 2006 after being held captive in a shed by his supposed friends. Like the earlier essays, this is commendably serious (I seem to be using that word a lot) and detailed, but it does suppose that Esquire’s readers rely on the mag for news coverage. Surely most of them prefer a quality newspaper or the web. Incidentally, Esquire hasn’t quite figured out what to do with the web – at the time of writing, esquire.co.uk is promising “an all-singing, all-dancing, out-of-this-world, info-heavy, user-friendly, interactive website”, but there’s no hint as to exactly what this means or when it will arrive.

The best feature is one I’d normally look past – the fashion spread, shot in London’s shiny new Eurostar terminal at St Pancras. It’s strikingly lovely.



Pages and pages more fashion are next. I guess men do turn to glossy mags for fashion, because you don’t get it anywhere else, but personally I find style pages frustrating because of the lack of content – there’s nothing to bloody read, nothing to take in. The mag ends with a few pages of travel and another list, Manifesto. This month: ten reasons Esquire doesn’t give money to tramps. We’re in funny-because-it’s-true territory again, except this time it’s not as funny.

Esquire is convincingly weighty, from its physical dimensions to its content. Not for this magazine the throwaway gags-n’-girls mateyness of so many modern men’s titles – it’s a thoughtful, sophisticated publication for thoughtful, sophisticated men. Men who mean business, in fact. Unfortunately, this means it’s more than a little dull. The flashes of wit don’t do enough to leaven the overall tone, and if you buy it to provide a lighthearted diversion on your commute, you’ll be staring out of the window before long. If you aren’t looking to get ahead in business, you’ll find a huge chunk of it inaccessible.

It’s admirable that Esquire is catering to an older, educated readership and not just slavishly following the T&A formula, and the design is undoubtedly sleek and alluring, but that isn’t enough – it simply needs to be more entertaining. In the end, though, Esquire’s worst offence is deception. I bought a publication with a funny, sexy picture of an attractive lady’s bottom on the cover, only to find a wordy, worthy magazine seriously lacking in humour and titillation inside. It’s not an encouragement to buy it again.

The Long And The ShortList

Title: ShortList
Cover date: 17 January 2008

Free stuff: it's good, right? Ask anyone and they'll tell you that they love getting something for nothing, right? Ask anyone in London, though, and you may struggle to hear their answer over the cacophony of people complaining about free newspapers. Specifically, the way they're left all over the Tubes and trains (I have a sneaking feeling that Londoners are more bothered by the untidiness than the environmental issues or that some poor sap has to clean up), and the perceived aggression in the way that they're handed out on the street.

Strangely, few people seem to let these concerns stop them from reading the freesheets, and even more strangely, even fewer people seem to complain about the papers' most obvious problem -- that they're terrible. All right, no-one's expecting Truman Capote, but surely readers are entitled to better than the cut-and-pasted newswire copy and tedious celebrity titbits that make up the freesheets. (Metro gets something of a pass because its worst crime is blandness, and at least it comes out in the morning so you haven't necessarily read all its content on the internet already. London Lite and especially thelondonpaper, with their pseudo-funky design, lame attempts at humour and desperate paparazzi-pic splurges, make my blood boil.)

But it's evidently a successful business model, because two weekly magazines have followed it in recent months: first Sport and now ShortList, a men's mag which is distributed in six major cities around the UK. Although some monthly titles are floundering, the men's market is not exactly moribund, with strong sales in the weekly and health-and-fitness sectors, and the quality monthlies staging a recent comeback. So is there a gap in this market for a free title? And is ShortList the mag to fill it?

One benefit of being free is that ShortList doesn’t need to fill up its cover with endless lines telling us what’s in the mag, as newsstand publications do, all of which boil down to “Please buy me please buy me please please please!” It can pick a single bold image designed to get the reader to open it once it’s in his hands:


This is a particularly good example. Tony Soprano will appeal to its male readership, whether they’re the type who prattle about the classical drama of The Sopranos or the type who just like it when Tony breaks people's faces. But even if I weren't a fan, I'd read this feature. As I would 20 Greatest Anything, really. Men like lists. That’s the genius of the concept. The editorial quality doesn't matter all that much -- if it gives men something to argue about, it’s done its job.

Page 3 The contents page gives us ShortList’s motto, “For men with more than one thing on their minds”. I get it, ahaha, and I’m gratified by the mag’s recognition that men aren’t interested only in tits, but it feels like they’ve got a slogan purely because other men’s mags have one (“For men who should know better”, “The magazine for men who mean business”, etc). But surely this should be a key part of the mag’s image, and hence it should be on the cover. If it’s not strong enough, why bother? Elsewhere on the page, most of the space is devoted to a large picture reminding the reader that he is a Man and likes Men’s Things:


Page 4 Next, “Notebook” is the magazine’s news section, and it’s pretty much PR-led guff. Someone who used to work on Cold Feet has directed a political action thriller that comes out in March; we’ll all have sexbots by 2050; Grant Mitchell from EastEnders reports from Afghanistan in a new hard-hitting Sky One show. It's possible that you think I've made up one or more of those, as an arch comment on the stupid triviality of modern culture. It would probably be best if you carried on thinking that.

A bit of football news, a bit of highest-paid-sportsman-in-the-world blah, a bit of technology news, a bit of coverage of the US primaries. Sorry, what? Yes, that’s right, the US primaries -- but just to show you that ShortList doesn’t take these things too seriously, it’s about celebrity endorsements of the candidates, and thus is illustrated with a teeny tiny picture of Barack Obama, and a huge picture of Scarlett Johansson, who is supporting him. Or she met him once. Or she’s heard of him. Who cares -- look at her cleavage!


I thought this was a mag for men with more than one thing on their minds…? (In fairness to ShortList, this is the only sign of anything that could be called gratuitous T&A in the mag.) The other celebrity endorsements mentioned include noted conservative Sean Penn's support for hardline rightwinger Dennis Kucinich.


Shall we give their fact-checkers the benefit of the doubt and assume that this is another attempt to show that they don’t take these things too seriously? No.

Then there’s a bit about how James Gandolfini is looking for another job now that The Sopranos has finished, which sure raised my eyebrows, I don’t mind telling you. Oh, and did they mention the 20 Greatest TV Shows Ever on page 26? I wonder if The Sopranos achieves a high placing.

Page 13 “Playlist” and “To-Do List” are ShortList’s pick of the best cultural things around. “Playlist” promises to “fill your ‘at home’ time with magic and wonder”. Really. It really says that. This seems at first to be more PR gubbins -- the sort of thing that could feasibly be called “What we received in the post this week” -- but it’s actually a little more highbrow than might be expected. The featured album is Cat Power’s Jukebox, while they also plug Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach (which, by spooooky coincidence, I had just started reading on the morning I picked this issue up) and Mark “E from Eels” Everett’s book about living with a genius physicist. In “To-Do List”, as well as the Coens’ No Country For Old Men and Chris Rock live, they encourage their readers to see the adaptation of Kafka’s Metamorphosis at the Lyric Theatre. It is safe to assume that the current issues of Zoo and Nuts do not echo these recommendations. ShortList is clearly not content to hype any old rubbish and -- especially considering the unashamed dumbness of its freesheet rivals -- should be congratulated on this.

Page 16/18 These pages are occupied by ShortList’s star columnists, Danny Wallace (“Is A Man”) and Sam Delaney (“Wants Answers”). Columnists are the love-’em-or-hate-’em element of any publication, and any opinion about them is inevitably completely subjective. With that in mind, there’s no doubt whatsoever that Wallace’s droll whimsy is superior to Delaney’s pseudo-laddish posturing.


Why is this page illustrated with a still from Goodfellas? It seems Delaney has managed to turn a trip to visit his nan into a piece about how his life is just like Henry Hill’s, because he was driving in a hurry while wearing a suit. This is the very definition of trying too hard.

Page 20 The ShortList “Tens” are the magazine’s raison d’être, the lists that aim to enliven pub chats, although I wish they wouldn’t signal this with the subheading “Enlivening pub chats since 2007”. If the copy’s doing its job, you shouldn’t need to tell us. This issue has the ten weirdest gig venues; ten classic Stallone quotes; the top ten French protests; the ten best Have I Got News For You presenters; the ten worst foods to be canned; and Big Brother -- Where Are They Now? This is classic men’s-mag journalism and well done it is too. Although I started reading fully aware that their choices are meant to be provocative (hey, pubs aren’t going to fill themselves with conversation, you know!), my argument muscles tensed reflexively when I read that they had picked Boris Johnson as the best HIGNFY host. What?! He’s a spluttering fool and an objectionable tosspot! He can barely read the autocue! You haven’t even mentioned Alexander Armstrong! Etc.

This is followed by ShortList “Expert”, which is reviews of stuff you don’t need like skis, personal media players and, er, houses, and a curiously unrevealing interview with Tommy Lee Jones. In it we learn that he has a new movie out, he has made a few movies in the past, and he is planning to make more movies in the future. This reads like a one-size-fits-all syndicated interview. If it isn’t one, that makes it even worse.

Page 24 It’s “Donald Trump’s Rules Of Corporate Warfare”! I suppose making lots of money’s never going out of fashion, but Trump seems so silly and naff and ’80s, I can't believe people still want to be him. And I can't believe anyone thinks reading this will help them become him.

Page 26 To no-one's surprise, The Sopranos tops ShortList’s “20 Greatest TV Series Ever”, and the rest of the list is similarly predictable: (post-) modern sitcoms like The Office (UK version), The Simpsons and Curb; classy drama like The West Wing, The Shield and Prime Suspect; bona fide classics like Fawlty Towers and Blackadder; and sci-fi-it’s-OK-for-non-geeks-to-watch like Doctor Who, Battlestar Galactica and Heroes. The inclusion of Minder is an understandable sop to the slightly older and more traditional male TV viewer, but I have to say, although naturally I remember it fondly, The Fricking A-Team can hardly lay claim to being the 14th best show ever. I mean, Spaced isn’t even in there! Or The Wire! And where the hell’s Buffy?! And… oh, they’ve done me again.

At the end of the feature is a preview of some upcoming, hotly tipped programmes such as Mad Men and Dirty Stupid Monkey. It’s heartening that they didn’t make previewing these the focus of the piece, because there’s nothing more boring than a feature about programmes that are coming to British TV in the next few months -- either you’ve already downloaded it (if it’s a US show), or you’ll have forgotten the preview long before the show finally arrives. I wish the editor of The Guardian’s Guide would realise this, because that seems to include a TV season preview every other week these days.

Page 30 We’re getting to the nuts and bolts now: a spread of grooming products, three pages of fitness and a travel page. All these are necessary because they target the high-end readership that advertisers love, but magazines often struggle to find a vaguely interesting way to present them. It’s particularly difficult to make workouts attractive on the page but ShortList, with its sunny colour scheme and no-nonsense san serif font, does a better job than many.


The other pages are bog-standard and dull, and the TV previews continue the mediocrity. Although it’s not a great time of year for telly, surely they could find something better for their main preview than a programme about Justin Lee Collins crashing a magic convention. Like, well, let’s see what else is on… Gordon Rams -- ah, no. Echo Bea -- um, well, eh. There must be someth -- look, Mike Bassett: England Mana… Oh. It really is January, isn’t it. And I suppose that isn’t ShortList’s fault.

Page 38 For “The Guest List”, ShortList invites a personality to plug their book or TV show create his or her own list for the reader's edification. I’m glad I got this issue, because I wouldn’t have wanted to miss Dr Iain Stewart’s top ten geological wonders of the world.


Wow, these rocks sure are interesting. It’s just a shame the pictures are so small, and so stationary. What’s that you say? Earth: The Power Of The Planet is available on DVD now, priced £20? I’m sure you’d love me to provide a link to the Amazon page for that exciting series right here!

When considering whether or not ShortList is a worthwhile publication, you need to decide if you’ll add “…you know, for a freebie” to your conclusion. Is it a good read, full stop? Or is it a good read…you know, for a freebie? I’d tend towards the latter, which sounds like damningly faint praise, but I don’t mean it to be. It does its job admirably, holding the attention for the length of a commute, with simple features done well, a pleasingly light-hearted tone and the excellent Danny Wallace column. Considering I would literally rather stare into space contemplating my own mortality than read the pukesome London Lite or thelondonpaper, this is something of an achievement. However, I wouldn't consider paying money for it, which -- despite its good points -- shows it isn't an unreserved success.

ShortList’s other great benefit is that it doesn't have to worry too much about the threat of the internet. Until we can all download web pages straight into our brains wherever we are, ShortList isn't competing with the net's, ahem, boundless glories for the reader's attention; it can be confident of having your undivided until you get off the bus. As long as it can satisfy advertisers that that's the case -- and until those advertisers find a reliable way of making money from the internet -- it's safe to say ShortList is here to stay, and it deserves to be.