Julie Burchill
Julie Burchill is an English writer. Beginning as a staff writer at the New Musical Express at the age of 17, she has since contributed to newspapers such as The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Times and The Guardian. Her writing, which was described by John Arlidge in The Observer in 2002 as "outrageously outspoken" and "usually offensive," has been the subject of legal action. Burchill is also a novelist, and her 2004 novel Sugar Rush was adapted for television.
Early life and education
Julie Burchill was born in Bristol and educated at Brislington Comprehensive School. Her father was a Communist union activist who worked in a distillery. Her mother had a job in a cardboard box factory. In 2010, Burchill wrote of her parents: "I don't care much for families. I adored my mum and dad, but to be honest I don't miss them much now they're dead"; three years later she contradicted this when she said she could not return to Bristol, as every time she heard someone speaking with her parents' Bristol accent it would remind her how much she missed them. She did not attend university, leaving the A-levels she had started a few weeks earlier to begin writing for the New Musical Express.Writing and broadcasting career
At the ''NME''
She began her writing career at the New Musical Express in 1976, aged 17, after responding to an advert in that paper seeking "hip young gunslingers" to write about the then emerging punk movement. She gained the job by submitting a "eulogy" of Patti Smith's Horses. She later wrote that at the time she only liked black music, and said: "When I actually heard a punk record, I thought, 'Oh my Lord! This is not music, this is just shouting'". She left her position at the NME at the age of 20, and started freelancing to be able to write about other subjects, although she has never completely given up writing about pop music.1980s
Her main employers after the NME were The Face and The Sunday Times, where she wrote about politics, pop, fashion and society, and was their film critic from 1984 to 1986. She admitted in 2008 to making up film reviews and missing screenings, and her ex-husband, Cosmo Landesman, has admitted to attending screenings on her behalf.During the Falklands War in 1982, Burchill argued that the military dictatorship of General Galtieri represented a greater evil. She wrote articles favourable to Margaret Thatcher. Her sympathy for Thatcher helped in gaining a column for The Mail on Sunday, where in 1987 she went against the paper's usual political line by urging its readers to vote Labour. Though she claims to like the MoS, she said of journalists on the Daily Mail in 2008: "Everybody knows that hacks are the biggest bunch of adulterers, the most misbehaving profession in the world – and you have people writing for the Daily Mail writing as though they are vicars... moralising on single mothers and whatnot."
Into the 1990s
Burchill has spoken repeatedly and frankly of her relationship with drugs, writing that she had "put enough toot up my admittedly sizeable snout to stun the entire Colombian armed forces". She declared that "As one who suffered from chronic shyness and a low boredom threshold... I simply can't imagine that I could have ever had any kind of social life without , let alone have reigned as Queen of the Groucho Club for a good part of the '80s and '90s." While Burchill has frequently drawn on her personal life for her writing, her personal life has been a subject of public comment, especially during this period, when "everything about her – her marriages, her debauchery, her children – seemed to be news."In 1991, Burchill, Landesman and Toby Young established a short-lived magazine Modern Review through which she met Charlotte Raven, with whom she had a much publicised affair. " was only a lesbian for about six weeks in 1995," she said in an interview with Lynn Barber in 2004, or "my very enjoyable six months of lesbianism" in a 2000 article. Launched under the slogan "Low culture for high brows", the magazine lasted until 1995, when Burchill and her colleagues fell out. It was briefly revived by Burchill, with Raven editing, in 1997. The "Fax war" in 1993 between Burchill and author Camille Paglia, published in the Modern Review, gained much attention.
In 1995, Burchill wrote a column for The Times, titled "I'm a bitch, and I'm proud", in which she argued that women should reclaim the word 'bitch,' used as a slur. She wrote: "it is the nature of these things that, in recent years, the slighted have taken steps to repossess the slight; thus, we have blacks who call each other 'nigger', pansies who call each other 'queer' and upper-class cretins who quite happily call each other 'Henry'."
In 1996, the actor, author, playwright and theatre director Steven Berkoff won a libel action against Burchill in respect of one of her articles, published in the Sunday Times newspaper, which included comments suggesting that he was "hideously ugly". The judge ruled that Burchill's actions "held him to ridicule and contempt." The late 1990s were a turbulent period for Burchill as she has recalled:
From 2000 to 2004
A user of cocaine, sharing in the activity in the company of Will Self among others, she was positive about her use in The Guardian in 2000 when defending actress Danniella Westbrook for Westbrook's loss of her nasal septum because of cocaine use. Journalist Deborah Orr, who was then married to Self, was scathing in The Independent of Burchill and her article: "She does not identify herself as a cocaine addict, so she has no pity for Ms Westbrook." In revenge for Deborah Orr's article, Burchill invented a supposedly long-standing crush on Will Self with the intention of upsetting Orr. A letter in The Independent in June 2000 from the head waitress at the Groucho Club at the time, Deborah Bosley, caused a minor stir. Responding to an article by Yvonne Roberts, Bosley, at the time the partner of Richard Ingrams, a long standing critic of Burchill, stated that Burchill was merely "a fat bird in a blue mac sitting in the corner" when ensconced at the Groucho.The following year's Burchill on Beckham, a short book about Burchill's opinions concerning David Beckham's life, career, and relationship with Victoria Beckham, attracted "some of the worst notices since Jeffrey Archer's heyday. 'Burchill is to football writing what Jimmy Hill is to feminist polemics'," wrote one reviewer. According to Robert Winder in the New Statesman: "The book fits in with Burchill's theme of praising the working class; Burchill presents Beckham as an anti-laddish symbol of old working-class values – he reminds her of those proud men of her childhood, 'paragons of generosity, industry and chastity'."
For five years until 2003, Burchill wrote a weekly column in The Guardian. Appointed in 1998 by Orr, while editor of the Guardian Weekend supplement, Burchill's career was in trouble; she had been sacked by the revived Punch magazine. Burchill frequently thanked Deborah Orr for rescuing her. One of the pieces she wrote for The Guardian was in reaction to the murder of BBC TV presenter Jill Dando in 1999. She compared the shock of Dando's murder to finding a "tarantula in a punnet full of strawberries". In 2002 she narrowly escaped prosecution for incitement to racial hatred, "following a Guardian column where she described Ireland as being synonymous with child molestation, Nazi-sympathising, and the oppression of women". Burchill had expressed anti-Irish sentiment several times throughout her career, announcing in the London journal Time Out that "I hate the Irish, I think they're appalling".
She supported the Iraq War, writing in The Guardian in 2003 that she was "in favour of a smaller war now rather than a far worse war later", and criticised those opposed to the war as "pro-Saddam apologists". She justified her stance by stating that "this war is about freedom, justice – and oil" and that because Britain and the United States sold weapons to Iraq that, "it is our responsibility to redress our greed and ignorance by doing the lion's share in getting rid of him".
Burchill left The Guardian acrimoniously, saying in an interview that they had offered her a sofa in lieu of a pay rise. She stated that she left the newspaper in protest at what she saw as its "vile anti-Semitism".
From 2005 to 2009
Burchill was an early critic of the fashion for denigrating lower social classes as "chavs". In 2005, she presented the Sky One documentary In Defence of Chavs. "Picking on people worse off than you are isn't humour. It's pathetic, it's cowardly and it's bullying," she commented in an interview for The Daily Telegraph at the time. "It's all to do with self-loathing.... The middle classes can't bear to see people having more fun, so they attack Chavs for things like their cheap jewellery. It's jealousy, because they secretly know Chavs are better than them. They're even better looking."Following her departure from The Guardian, in early 2005 she moved to The Times, who were more willing to meet her demands, doubling her previous salary. Shortly after starting her weekly column, she referred to George Galloway, but appeared to confuse him with former MP Ron Brown, reporting the misdeeds of Brown as those of Galloway, "he incited Arabs to fight British troops in Iraq." She apologised in her column and The Times paid damages thought to have been £50,000.
In 2006, The Times dropped her Saturday column, and arranged a more flexible arrangement with Burchill writing for the daily paper. Later it emerged, during a Guardian interview published on 4 August 2008, that eventually she "was given the jolly old heave ho" by The Times, and paid off for the last year of her three-year contract, still receiving the £300,000 she would have earned if she had been obliged to provide copy. She later described her columns for her abbreviated Times contract, which ended abruptly in 2007, thus: "I was totally taking the piss. I didn't spend much time on them and they were such arrant crap."
In February 2006, she announced plans for a year's sabbatical from journalism, planning, among other things, to study theology. In June 2007, she announced that she would not be returning to journalism, but instead concentrate on writing books and TV scripts and finally undertake a theology degree, but she returned to writing for The Guardian newspaper.
Burchill's co-written book with Chas Newkey-Burden, Not in My Name: A Compendium of Modern Hypocrisy, appeared in August 2008, and is dedicated "to Arik and Bibi". According to Gerald Jacobs, writing for The Jewish Chronicle in 2008, "this book does not merely stand up for Israel, it jumps up and down, cheers and waves its arms". The newspaper described her as "Israel's staunchest supporter in the UK media". When asked if Israel has any flaws, she responded: "Yes. They are much too tolerant of their freaking neighbours, much too reasonable".
She declared in 2005, after Ariel Sharon's withdrawal of Israeli settlers from the Gaza Strip, that "Israel is the only country I would fucking die for. He's the enemy of the Jews. Chucking his own people off the Gaza; to me that's disgusting". Besides writing occasional pieces for The Guardian, she wrote four articles for the centre-right politics and culture magazine Standpoint between July and October 2008.