Toffs, vicars and dogs on bikes

When the Telegraph ditched its Peterborough diary column, it was swiped by a rival. But the Daily Mail editor, Paul Dacre, soon tired of tales of obscure peers with Captain Bird's Eye beards. Brian Jenner reveals the inside story

It was a curious time. The UN was in turmoil over the imminent Iraq war, Londoners were braced for a possible chemical attack, and I was thumbing through the Public Schools Yearbook, reading about bursars, Hilary Term and Divinity. I was investigating whether Harrow school had had its CCF machine gun requisitioned for the Gulf. A world I had completely forgotten about had suddenly sprung back into life. After an absence of nine years, I was back doing shifts on the Peterborough column. Not on The Daily Telegraph but on the Daily Mail.

The Telegraph had rebranded its diary London Spy, and two former Peterborough editors decided it would be a great wheeze to pinch it for the Mail. However, since the mid-1990s, the Peterborough column had admitted Hollywood celebrities and soap stars. The revival would be different. They were going to dust off the old cast of characters: vicars, majors, performing animals, dotty spinsters, hapless policemen, dons and busybody club secretaries. It was as if ITV had decided to recommission Dad's Army.

The career of a diarist is usually short and full of trouble. It had been so in my case. Bristling with enthusiasm for a career in journalism, I had heard that Peterborough was the way in. The column provided me with a wonderful social life. Once event organisers were aware that Peterborough was in the house, pretty girls came up to talk to you. Indeed, finding a pretty girl for the column was one of the easier ways to get a story. There were three criteria. Is she pretty? Is her father a lord? Does she have a double-barrelled name? Then, any tenuous hook - her charity expedition to Namibia/new novel/toff boyfriend - would get her in.

It all sounds tremendous fun. But as a job, it was most impractical. During the day, you would discover that a famous historian's daughter was taking your place next week because she was on half-term. Often, like Oliver Twist, you would have to phone up to ask for your payments.

It became clear that time was up. The younger generation didn't want to read about aristocratic hairpieces, Captain Bird's Eye beards and WI ladies reaching for the smelling-salts. They wanted celebrities. So, it was with some surprise, when others and I were settled in more mundane and obscure employments, that a call came through to say that the Daily Mail was going to bring it back. But maybe the Daily Mail does have a hotline to Middle England, because for the first few weeks it worked well.

I confess I was a bit rusty. I had forgotten how to address the toffs and phoned up the House of Lords and asked for Baron X. The former royal correspondent Robert Hardman overheard me and nearly passed out. "It's always 'Lord'," he sighed.

Peterborough is actually the cutting edge of journalism. It is no coincidence that titans such as Auberon Waugh, Bill Deedes and Charles Moore began their careers there. Columnists have to employ sharp lateral thinking to fill the page each day. Whenever there was something like a town criers' contest, it was our job to phone round the chemists to see if there was a run on throat lozenges. If Mr Putin was in town, had consumption of vodka gone up? We had to use great ingenuity to generate copy about Trafalgar Day, Empire Day, hot cross buns and Maundy money. And we identified the things that the readers really cared about: the demise of the steak-and-kidney pudding.

However, it wasn't long before I experienced diarist's despair: sitting in front of a totally flat story, bereft of facts or jokes, with only two hours left before the column went to the subs. A colleague on Dempster called it "polishing a turd". Another old hand told me that an even older hand had advised him that having a few snifters or some recreational drugs was the way to make your sentences soar. I did develop an admiration for those old hands who could turn base metal into gold. They deserve the high salaries that top diary editors earn.

While the Mail continued to support the column, it soon became hesitant about building an infrastructure around it. It wanted to eschew metropolitan gossip in favour of heartwarming stories from the provinces. It cut the incentive payments for bringing in stories. Going out of the office was frowned upon. The column was using six experienced writers, who frequently rewrote one another's material. Morale dipped. To run a successful diary, you need to answer all the readers' letters, you need a budget to encourage a band of freelances in remote outposts to look for stories, and you need to convince the journalists that they will still be there in two weeks' time. The galling thing was that the readers wrote in to say that the things they liked most about the new column were the bits they sent in themselves - the "One Line Philosophers" and the "Out of the Mouths of Babes" panels.

As the tension surrounding the Gulf war subsided, we realised we were under threat. We were safe if Dacre, on his return, mistook the column for a hearing-aid advertisement. If he read it, we were doomed. However much the readers wrote letters such as: "I agree with everything Peterborough says," and: "I've given up the Telegraph to go over to the Mail", we were aware that maintaining the column was expensive - and they already had Dempster (recently replaced by Richard Kay), Ephraim Hardcastle and Wicked Whispers. We arrived one Monday in late August to learn that all of us were no longer required.

We had got some classic stories along the way. How John Prescott got stuck in a train lavatory. The youth who ran off with the bishop's mitre during an ordination service. The policeman who hurtled to the scene of a dangerous gas-leak and heroically plugged the hole with a Liquorice Allsort.

But, to be honest, it was a bit of a relief to be fired. In the modern world, there is no place for those wry stories of English eccentricity from the provinces. It is presumed that people live in communities. Peterborough writers knew that most people didn't and actually preferred to live in an imaginary world of timeless camp.

The Mail hasn't lost the Peterborough column; it has just decided to make it an extension of the letters page. We had a few days of trying to encourage the readers to send in their own stories of how they overcame adversity, but the elegance and wit has been replaced by chicken soup for the soul. The end result is the same as the first magazine I put together, when I was 11, with my grandfather: limericks, banal tales and jokes. The tone of repressed English melancholy has been replaced by American mawkishness. The fogeys have had to slink away and contemplate reinventing themselves for a harsher world.

A longer version of this article appears in 'British Journalism Review', Vol 14 No 4, available from SAGE Publications (020-7330 1266; subscription@sagepub.co.uk)