My Greatest Mistake: Cristina Odone Deputy Editor of the 'New Statesman'
'The editor sent me an angry note: "Did you not think you would be found out?"'
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Your support makes all the difference.It was in a media column precisely like this one that I made my biggest mistake. I had just been fired in 1995 from The Catholic Herald, which I used to edit, and I was looking for a new job. The Guardian's Media section asked me about my views on the media. It asked who my favourite media personality was – how much time I gave to learning from the media – and then it said, "And what do you think of television?" I said, "Television? I never watch it." The Guardian sat on that little column.
A few days later, before it was published, Charles Moore, editor of The Daily Telegraph, approached me to become TV reviewer of his newspaper. He said, "What do you think about television?" I said, "I love it." He said, "Would you like to be a television critic?" I said, "Fantastic." So he announced that I was to be the Telegraph's television critic in a little item in his newspaper. Whereupon The Guardian, very mischievously and cleverly, published the media column that said that I "never" watched TV. So Moore penned a really angry note to me saying, "How could you? Did you not think this would be found out at some point?"
He was cross, but that wasn't enough. I received a letter in the morning, and then in the afternoon I got a phone call from his secretary. I thought that Moore was going to yell at me some more, so I put on a foreign accent and said, "No, sorry, this is Anna. Cristina not here." Moore must have picked up the line at the same time as his secretary and said, "Cristina, would you just stop pretending to be your own daily? I have forgiven you."
But he kept a close eye on me afterward to make sure my reviews showed that I was watching television avidly during the entire two-year tenure.
The moral to this tale is: try not to lie to your boss and pretend to be your own daily. And, if you are going to be interviewed for anything – even the parish newsletter – you have to be really careful never to talk in absolutes, because then you can be caught out. Never say never. Never say always. Choose your words carefully.
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