She's A Lady

If you haven’t already, head to 4 on Demand to catch the hilarious doc The Lady and the Revamp. The Lady was founded 125 years ago and is the go-to mag for finding a butler, sycophantic coverage of the royal family, ugly covers of owls and kittens and articles on the history of cucumbers and cobnuts, whatever they are. The Lady fascinates me: how can it still exist? Its readership continues to drop and it haemorrhages cash. Anyway, here comes Rachel Johnson to wield her machete in the office she describes as a cross between an undertakers and a lunatic asylum. At one stage, Joan Collins wanders through to do "something" and tea and sponge cake is served. I so want to work at The Lady! Rachel knows she has an impossible task ahead - to modernize the mag without alienating the existing readers – and from this show, they seem like a rather scary bunch. She starts off the programme by describing the magazine’s appearance as a cross between an in-flight magazine, a funeral parlour brochure and a Bupa catalogue and towards the end of the programme says angrily: “In the real world this is a piddling magazine that nobody cares about or buys.” It’s clear Rach doesn’t care a jot for the mag or its readers but has been brought in to get some much needed publicity and for her valuable contacts. In exchange she gets lots of entertaining material she can use for the diary she’s writing on the experience. It’s not quite as glamorous The September Issue but it's infinitely more amusing. NOK