Paper!! Tele!!

The Telegraph was first published on 01 October, 1872.

Pay-PUH! Te-LE!! Unthinkable now, but not too long ago, small boys ranged about the city at twilight, yelling on street corners and dodging fearlessly in between vehicles to sell the evening paper, The Telegraph.
Small children don’t work now, let alone run about the city unsupervised in the gathering dark with pouches of cash for takings and change. And the evening paper died 30 years ago.

Anyone who had a parent who worked In Town, got to read the Tele. It was an afternoon tabloid, thick with the latest news, for reading on the tram, train or bus. It broke stories that the morning papers were too early for – I can remember two in particular – “Grace Kelly Dead” and “John Lennon Dead”. The journalists worked under very tight deadlines to get those stories out in time for the evening commute. Its sporting coverage was unrivalled.

Pay-PUH! Te-LE!!
When your grown-ups were finished with The Tele, you could peruse the cartoons. This introduced me to the mysterious world of Andy Capp, a man apparently without eyes who spent all his time nursing beers at the pub or endeavouring to get to the pub to nurse beers. There were no pubs outside of Town as far as I knew, and my rather strict family would not dream of propping up a bar in one. This must be how the other half lived, I decided. I would embarrass my mother by trying to peer into the city pubs when I went to Town, looking for Andy Capps. (Though to be honest, I preferred the Courier-Mail in the morning. It had Snoopy.)

At some point, without me noticing it, the little boys selling the Tele disappeared. Then the Tele disappeared in early 1988. It wasn’t a surprise. By then, everyone had a television or two and a VCR, and preferred to go home and watch the latest news in living colour and via satellite from our affiliates around the world.

And the inner-city pubs turned variously into sports bars, micro-breweries, hipster-infested gastro pubs and in one case, a flagship Hermès outlet. I assume that by then the Andy Capps had become extinct. Or had been encouraged to enter a nice rehabilitation facility.