Paper Roses

The setting is a Fleet Street newspaper office, probably based on the sort of tabloid experience Potter had known while working for the Daily Herald which was later to become the Sun. Clarence Hubbard (berated by his fellow hacks as "Old Mother") is coasting towards retirement but harks back to the good old days of his long journalistic career. These days he is fobbed off with trivial assignments though he rings in his stories with all the enthusiasm he had once brought to more significant copy in the past. Nowadays he is limited to obituaries and horoscopes. Potter employs a wide range of non-naturalistic devices to unsettle the audience and to give them an entry into Clarence's head. Flashbacks take us to earlier successes Clarence has gathered; freeze-frame caricatures of pressmen are punctuated by voice-over and graphic tabloid headlines. Towards the end of the play Hubbard orders all the cuttings of his old stories to be brought up from the library. He then proceeds to throw them all out of the top-storey window and, in his final act of defiance, storms out of the office to take the lift out of the building. Unfortunately, the lift is under repair and is not there. Hubbard plummets down the shaft to his death. Throughout the play we have been introduced to an inattentive viewer who has apparently been watching Paper Roses on his TV set at home. He turns out to be a television critic for a national newspaper. He offers us his review in the following terms: "Last night's TV play, Paper Roses, gave us about as true a picture of popular newspapers as a funfair distorting mirror ... We are told the author used to work in Fleet Street but if this led any viewer to think that the sour caricature on the screen was based on real experience of real journalists, he has only to open this morning's newspapers to see how ludicrous the idea really is. Full stop. End." (cited in Cook 1995: 68)