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The Duck Press

by Allan Hall

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Dick Durham said: " There are a lot of people who would like to do a lot of things to Kelvin MacKenzie, former editor of The Sun newspaper and one of them is Allan Hall, his one-time US editor who has at least managed to ridicule him in this surreal and comic novel.
Whe There are a lot of people who would like to do a lot of things to Kelvin MacKenzie, former editor of The Sun newspaper and one of them is Allan Hall, his one-time US editor who has at least managed to ridicule him in this surreal and comic novel.
When you’ve spent the better part of your working life dealing with folks on behalf of a red-top national you can be forgiven for not holding humanity in the highest regard and the characters in The Duck Press are positively Hogarthian in demeanour. Even the heroes are grotesque: one a racist alcoholic football fan, the other a thieving rent boy who has served Jimmy Savile. As residents of English territory north of Grimsby their diet is beans on toast and Boddingtons; their idea of class Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and Dolcis footwear; and their religion ‘footie’, in this case practiced in the cathedral of Anfield Stadium.
What brings these poorly bathed citizens into the world of MacKenzie is his coverage of the Hillsborough Football Disaster in which 95 died when the sainted Liverpool supporters are traduced as drunken looters who urinated on rival supporters and attacked ambulancemen. No newspaper in the land ignored these unsubstantiated facts released by a local news agency but only The Sun decided to brand them The Truth.
So retribution on MacKenzie is planned by our heroes – one of whom lost a son in the accident – with the help of a disaffected reporter who’s career has been cut short by the bullying editor.
The details they gather on their prey include the laughable aspirational trophies of middle class shoulder chippery which MacKenzie doesn’t quite get: an E-Type Jag, OK, but one playing Acker Bilk on the stereo? Definitely not OK.
His ‘mattress dancing’ with a tarty female reporter, OK, but her nickname for him – Kellybeans – as naff as you like.
The booze details such as ’40 glasses of vintage Fonseca 1975 port are suspiciously even more authentic and are likely to have been gleaned from autobiographical aspects weaved into the novel, rather than courtesy of Google.
Other authenticities which light up the prose include the description of MacKenzie as ‘luxuriating in his own abrasiveness’ and MacKenzie’s own bully Rupert Murdoch as a ‘supreme pontiff…. cast in ghostly green light like soft water rippling across the increasingly wrinkled flesh as Murdoch continued to scroll up the financial indices for further information on his considerable riches…’
The inclusion of a man-eating Komodo dragon as a guard ‘dog’ is also accurate: a homage to the madness of the red top world’s obsession with, as James Cameron put it, ‘human interest stories which are mostly about animals.’
A good yarn and an original one.
ends ...more "

Apr 10, 2026 01:12PM · see review