Newspaper Article

Still trying to do the right thing

Guest, Katy

2015

Overview

In the case of Widows & Orphans, [Duncan]'s crew is a motley team of journalists who are struggling to keep afloat the newspaper that Duncan inherited from his father and grandfather. [Michael Arditti] certainly has a talent for throwing disparate characters together: a love affair on a pilgrimage to Lourdes in Jubilate; a gay curate, a stuck-up couple and a homeless man in a church, in Easter; and now, a small, dysfunctional family of hacks. \"I wanted to write about what it is to be in a community today,\" he says. \"And a newspaper became a wonderful nucleus because it's both reporting social changes and affected by them.\" Despite having worked for newspapers since becoming the Evening Standard's deputy drama critic in the 1980s (as well as being a successful playwright), he has hardly ever visited a newspaper office and spent some time at two London papers to get a flavour for this novel. \"There's a very important character, to me, the little girl with cerebral palsy,\" he says. \"I actually spent much more time talking to speech therapists and people who knew about cerebral palsy because it's sort of iniquitous if you get those sorts of things wrong.\" I suspect that Bible readers often become writers and lovers of words, and Arditti agrees. To him, it's a combination of the \"mystery\" in the words, the \"richness\" of the stories and a sense of \"interpreting something bigger, and thinking about a world outside yourself\". He adds: \"I think we're very lucky to have it ... But also it's done a lot of damage. Sorry, that's wrong, the way people have used it has done a lot of damage.\"

• Publisher: Independent Digital News & Media
• Subject: Arditti, Michael