Go and Make the Tea, Boy!

BEATLE haircut, one set of smart clothes to his name. and with a rock 'n' roll attitude hewn out of five resentful years at a boys' grammar school. This was the 16-year-old John Phillpott who, in that long-lost summer of 1965, started out on a life-long career in Midlands journalism. It was the era when a young trainee reporter could be sent to a fatal road accident one moment and ordered to make the tea for the entire editorial staff the next. These were the days when a young journalist might cover a budgerigar show on a Saturday afternoon and a few hours later interview Ray Davies of the chart-topping Kinks. Yes, it's all there in Go and Make the Tea, Boy. The reprobates, drunks and various other paid-up members of life's Awkward Squad all splash across these pages in glorious technicolor, as this no-holds-barred narrative of life on a provincial newspaper back in the Swinging Sixties gets into gear.