Another Magazine Gone

 I was sorry to learn that the UK edition of that old warhorse Reader's Digest is to close down, unable to stay afloat in today's magazine market. When I was a boy my parents, like almost everyone else, had Reader's Digest (and even a few of the books they published) in the house, and from an early age I would leaf through it, often mystified – especially by the 'humour' ('Laughter the Best Medicine', 'Humour in Uniform') – but finding plenty to interest me, sometimes in 'Towards More Picturesque Speech' or 'It Pays to Increase Your Word Power', often  in the articles on science and medicine: in those days I wanted to be a doctor, a desire that left me as soon as I found out how much dreary science I'd have to do at school. Readers' Digest was a product of its time – aspirational, self-improving, decently conservative, unchallenging (though it campaigned hard to establish the link between smoking and lung cancer) – and was still in its heyday in the Fifties and Sixties when I first knew it. Not only was it in every home (or so it seemed) but in every doctor's or dentist's waiting room, along with the long since departed Punch.
   In my youth, of course, I had no time for it, but much later I did once have the curious experience of writing for it. The excellent Russell Twisk, the Listener editor who had bravely taken me on as radio critic in the course of a successful shake-up of the magazine, went on to be the UK editor-in-chief of Reader's Digest, so naturally I tried to get some work off him. I needed the money – and, by golly, the money turned out to be good. However, I had never had to work so hard to write a piece that amounted to little more than extended picture captions (it was to celebrate the tercentenary of the Glorious Revolution that brought William and Mary to the throne). Then, when I thought I'd finally crossed the finishing line, I came up for the first time against American-style fact checking. For one who tended to rely on winging it, bluffing and improvising, this was a major shock to the system. I was quite relieved when a couple of further ideas I put to Reader's Digest were turned down.
  And now Reader's Digest is following Punch and indeed The Listener into the ever growing graveyard of defunct magazines. Many more will follow it, I fear.