Pigeon tattoos and a stain that looks like Elvis: the weird wonders of local news

If you have ever run a village fête, complained about potholes in your street or become a regional Scrabble champion, you may have met a journalist like Roger Lytollis. A writer for the Carlisle News & Star and its weekly sister, The Cumberland News, he spent 25 years in the dying world of local newspapers, which have a generous definition of what counts as “news”. His is a realm of headlines like “Gatepost painted” and “Coffee poured”, where the opening of a new kitchen at a Carlisle community centre gets the kind of coverage normally reserved for royal weddings.

Perhaps not surprisingly, he finds many of his stories tedious – as do some of his readers, whose online feedback includes “utter drivel”. And he feels guilty about not moving on to bigger things. While a former colleague interviews Donald Trump, Lytollis’s career highlights include meeting The Man with the Pigeon Tattoos, a Cumbrian pigeon fancier whose favourite birds are inked on his arms.

Yet Lytollis has now achieved what few of his peers have ever done: writing a book about his experiences. Many former local paper hacks have dreamed of doing this, convinced that the absurdities of small-town reporting beats would make a hilarious tome. Alas, the London-based publishing world – traditionally sniffy about hacks’ memoirs anyway – has seldom been keen, and to date, there exists no local newspaper answer to Evelyn Waugh’s 1938 novel, Scoop.

That Lytollis is now himself out of a job may account for his publisher’s interest. In 2019, after a quarter of a century serving Cumbrian readers, he was made redundant – yet another casualty of the meltdown in local newspapers that has seen hundreds close in the past decade. Sadly, it seems that the only story worth telling in local newspaper journalism is that of its demise, given its implications for holding local power brokers to account. After all, as last year’s shenanigans at Handforth Parish Council proved, tinpot tyrants thrive when nobody is there to report on them.

Lytollis’s book, Panic as Man Burns Crumpets: The Vanishing World of the Local Journalist, is a love letter to the trade, though written with a touch of poison pen. Some of the stories he covers, such as interviewing Stevie Las Vegas, Cumbria’s leading Elvis tribute act, are fun, while others – such as a curtain-raiser on a new Primark store – are “a bit crap”. A feature writer rather than a reporter, his job was technically at the “glamorous” end: while colleagues are stuck at the magistrates’ court or in council meetings, he is the man-about-town doing various stunts, be it joining the local nude swimming club, going out with the fire brigade, or being pulverised while trying his hand at traditional Cumberland wrestling. “I was Cumbria’s answer to John Noakes,” he says.

This may not be Pulitzer stuff, but it takes skill. Writing about a local Crematorium Open Day, for example, hones a journalistic talent for getting something out of nothing. Especially if the editor wants it “upbeat”. And on local papers, facts are still sacred. Get something wrong, and people won’t just troll you online, they may turn up in your office demanding retribution.

Still, Lytollis doesn’t spare us his moments of ennui, some of which could have come from The Framley Examiner or The Onion, the spoof online newspapers. On one day when the parish pump has run particularly dry, a colleague is sent to report about a stain on a reader’s wall that is said to resemble Elvis. It turns out to look nothing like him, and is, well, just a stain, but the paper runs the story big anyway.

Lytollis also interviews various passing celebrities, most of them aware that speaking to The Cumberland News proves their careers are on the wane. Fish, lead singer of prog rockers Marillion, seems philosophical about this – unlike Toyah Willcox, who retorts, somewhat frostily, that she is now “in a band with the drummer from REM”. Worse still is Belinda Carlisle, who can’t even come up with a quote about playing in the city that shares her surname.

Even these encounters now feel like glimpses of a golden age. In his newsroom’s rush towards online clickbait, mobile phone footage of fights in local supermarkets does far better than Lytollis’s thoughtful interviews with the Bishop of Carlisle. In 2018, after years of tumbling sales figures, Lytollis’s employers are bought by Newsquest, a US firm “known for making massive profits while ruthlessly cutting costs”. Staffing levels drop to a third of what they were a decade earlier, and Lytollis, now pushing 50, is eventually shown the door.

I did enjoy this book, not least because, as a graduate of The Grimsby Evening Telegraph, I’ve dreamed of writing something similar myself. However, despite jacket endorsements from Cumbrian cultural luminaries such as Melvyn Bragg, some of the anecdotes feel unpolished, perhaps in need of attention from one of those many redundant Cumberland News sub-editors. There is indeed a need for a definitive book about life on local papers – not least because they may soon disappear altogether. But I’m not quite sure this is it.

Panic as Man Burns Crumpets: The Vanishing World of the Local Journalist is published by Little, Brown at £16.99. To order your copy for £14.99 call 0844 871 1514 or visit the Telegraph Bookshop