Readers' enthusiastic response to last week's column, which dealt with classic witty headlines, has persuaded the Spice Trader to return to the topic. Here's an inside peek at how the tradition developed.
Picture the scene. We're in a shockingly untidy office in Fleet Street, London, circa 1985. Your Humble Narrator is staring at the grizzled old news editor before him and the words of a song flash through his head: 'Hold me, love me, hold me, love me, ain't got nothin' but love, babe, eight days a week.' The words of the Beatles' song did not sum up my feelings towards the crabby old man, as death by torture would have been preferable to touching him.
No, they referred to the working system imposed on the newspaper business by British trade unions. News editors hiring headline writers had to pay them a day's wage for every seven hours in the office. This meant eight days' pay or more for every five days' work.
The unions also had ensured that work took as long as possible - they had banned computers, so all the writing had to be done with scratchy ballpoint pens.
The result was a communal and creative atmosphere at the tabloids, as teams of sub-editors would sit around developing puns until the early hours.
The Guardian had started the tradition to have puns in headlines early this century. (A classic British headline from the war: 'Eighth Army push bottles up Germans'.) But the London tabloids and a few US newspapers (such as the New York Daily Post ) had picked up the habit in the 1970s. By the 1980s it was a competitive art form.