Tuesday, December 10, 2002
Farewell thy Fotheringham - THE COMMENTARY
By Joseph Planta
VANCOUVER – Zowee, Dr. Foth, you're still around? Yes Virginia, Allan Fotheringham, Canadian journalism's venerable old fart is still alive and massaging his own ego somewhere in this vast land. Where exactly we don't know. For the past 27 odd years he's been a staple, writing in the back page of Maclean's magazine, becoming one of this nation's biggest media stars. He wrote for the Sun Media chain for a while, ditching them when The Globe and Mail offered him a space in their venerable paper. Alas, after a year or so, he got dumped. Maclean's, under the direction of their somewhat new editor Anthony Wilson-Smith, not a Fotheringham fan, cut Foth's column. They evicted him from his back page, an institution he instituted himself. He appeared only a couple of times every month and now has largely become irrelevant. Now, his contract will not be renewed as the magazine wants to revamp itself. Fotheringham gone from Maclean's? Inconceivable years ago, now it's barely a passing whisper in media and media-consuming circles alike.
Truth be told, Allan Fotheringham is a hero of mine. He writes like no one else and his columns are pretty good. Alas, over the last couple of years he's been telling the same old stories, wrapped up in semi-analytical and semi-contextual columns that barely reflect the events of the current. His column in Maclean's was the reason I wanted to be a columnist. I wanted to be as arrogant and erudite as the one and only Dr. Foth. I wanted to craft phrases just like him, I wanted to be as condescending as he is in print. I have one red-striped shirt, but I hate it. I think it's rather odd really, and I don't own a pair of smartly shined Gucci's either.
Allan Fotheringham, of all people, has a healthy ego. As he should. He worked his way through the sports department at The Vancouver Sun, before being given his own space, his own column in the late 1960s. His, was the most talked about column in this town. The rest of the country got noticing. He became syndicated. When Peter C. Newman took over the editorial chores at Maclean's, he invited Fotheringham along. Foth dutifully typed out his first column for the mag, and when it went to print, he searched frantically through for the piece derived from the thoughts that came out of his fingers. Feeling dejected, he nearly thought he wasn't good enough for "Canada's News Magazine", until he glanced upon the last page. The back page, as it were, was where Newman placed his column. He thought he might feel insulted, but it turned out to be one of this nation's finest contributions to magazines in the world. It turns out that Newsweek and Time soon followed suit with their own back page scribblers.
Recently, the Jack Webster Foundation handed out its awards in journalism. Each year they single out one "legend" of sorts to be the recipient of the Bruce Hutchison Lifetime Achievement Award. In general, awards like these are sort of death wishes waiting to happen. Fotheringham's number came up this year and on the evening of the awards dinner in October, Pete McMartin, one of the Sun's finest stylists currently, wrote a piece lauding the indomitable Fotheringham. The point of his piece reflected the consensus held by Foth readers. He is good, but he was brilliant. The evidence McMartin used was terrific. Taken from an old Foth column, it's about seeing an old woman buying a powdered Christmas dinner, three days before the big day: "She invests 41 cents. Pensioners take their boxed, powdered Christmas dinners off the shelves. There's a 1970 trace of Dickens here, lonely flats with gas heaters. The check-out clerk is the real sociologist."
If you didn't note the brilliance of that passage, McMartin points it out: "That last line – which comes out of nowhere – is genius. You come away with the whole vignette in your mind despite that fact the sentence doesn't contain one word of description. You can see the woman's careful counting of change, and the grim pity on the clerk's face; and you can feel the dolour of both their existences. Here is a reporter revealing the world, not just describing it."
Fotheringham's columns now are regurgitations of previous columns. Previous stories of hanging out with the biggest and best in Canadian politics and journalism. (The imagery of Joe Clark losing his underwear in Tokyo is wearing.) He's become a namedropper and an arrogant one at best.
I admire Allan Fotheringham greatly. When I met him a couple of years ago, I told him I was a huge fan. He mockingly smirked, "I need every fan I can get." An awfully apt phrase as we were standing on the floor of a political convention. It was also an awfully arrogant phrase from a self-absorbed star. He has every right to be smug. He was good, and he probably still is. When asked for his thoughts upon getting dumped from Maclean's he said: "Rumours of my death are greatly exaggerated." And he went on to drop the fact he's working on three books. He'll be around, make no mistake, but not in the outlet that made him a national figure. Allan Fotheringham was a national figure in a nation that so badly needed its own famous people to gawk at, criticise and despise.
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An archive of Joseph Planta's previous columns can be found by clicking HERE .