The idea of owning a listings magazine with a pronounced political bent would never have occurred to Branson had it not been for the strike that hit the magazine in May 1981. Like his counterpart at Virgin, Tony Elliott had soon learned to distinguish between the political ideals of his staff and the practicalities of running a business. But Elliott had made a damaging error in 1973, when his magazine was still small enough for a minor negotiating concession to seem unimportant. At that time, most of his staff were paid £25 a week; the editors of the sections received £30. When the local chapel of the National Union of Journalists demanded an increase in the rank-and-file wages to £35, Elliott had conceded the principle of a weekly wage of £32.50 – equal pay for all his staff, no matter what jobs they did. As Time Out continued to grow, the system became untenable; the standard company wage was at once too high for Elliott to be able to diversify into other publishing ventures, and too low for him to be able to attract talented writers into the magazine from outside. By the end of the 1970s, Elliott had made a firm decision: cost what it may, he would win back the right to pay some staff more than others. ‘I was pretty confident that we would in the end have either a Pyrrhic victory, in which the whole business would disappear,’ he recalled later, ‘or we would win.’
Initially, the former outcome seemed more likely. As soon as Elliott had insisted on changing the company’s wage structures, the staff struck in protest. The management locked them out, with the help of a court order; and some dismissed Time Out employees established a picket line outside the magazine’s Covent Garden offices. But the magazine itself had to cease publication.
A week after the publication of the last pre-strike Time Out, Branson telephoned Elliott at home.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘I’ve been thinking about your problem. What would you say to the following scenario?’ And Branson then outlined a plan that he would set up a new magazine called Stepping Out, or something like it, and would get it established quickly as a successor to the old Time Out. That would give Elliott the time he needed to outlast the patience of the pickets outside his office door. ‘Then,’ said Branson, ‘when you’ve sorted that situation out to the satisfactory conclusion that you want, I’ll close down Stepping Out and we’ll become the joint owners of the new Time Out.’
Elliott was no fool. He realized how much power such a plan would give Branson over him, and how little room for manoeuvre he would have once a magazine with a similar name was on the streets with his ostensible approval. But he swallowed his suspicions, and accepted Branson’s invitation to come down to the Manor on a Saturday afternoon with his girlfriend and two other people.
At Branson’s suggestion, he and Elliott went off for a walk at three o’clock, leaving their respective girlfriends behind. They returned several hours later, to the barely disguised irritation of Elliott’s girlfriend, and Branson insisted that they stay for dinner. The dinner – which the more sophisticated Elliott later dismissed as ‘school food’, citing it as evidence of Branson’s lack of attention to detail – proved to be a social disaster. Talk turned to the subject of the Social Democratic Party, the recent breakaway from the Labour Party led by a group of four senior politicians; and Branson, rarely someone to talk with interest about politics, became embroiled in a flaming row with Elliott’s girlfriend.
Elliott and his girlfriend left immediately after dinner. By the time they reached London, the Time Out proprietor had arrived at two conclusions. First, he wanted to solve the problem of the strike on his own, rather than admitting an outsider to his life on what might well prove a permanent basis. Second, he wanted nothing more to do with Richard Branson. Whatever the reason – whether perhaps he drank too much and became aggressive, or whether simply the personal chemistry had been wrong – Branson’s charm offensive had failed totally. Elliott turned down the proposal.
But Richard Branson’s interest had been tickled, and it was too late to go back. If Elliott would not start Stepping Out in partnership with him, then he was quite entitled to do it on his own. And thus it was that Branson set to work hiring an editorial staff for a new London listings magazine to fill the gap left by the old Time Out. The team was assembled in three months, and the first edition of the magazine – which Branson decided to call Event – appeared in September.
There was just one problem. A week earlier, Elliott’s former employees had established City Limits, their own listings magazine. A week before that, Elliott himself had come back with a new Time Out, staffed by a fresh corps of journalists but in many respects identical to the old. To make matters worse, Elliott had put some subtle changes into effect during the months that his magazine was off the streets. ‘Agitprop’ became less strident, and was renamed ‘Politics’; a gay section, previously vetoed by the staff on the grounds that it was ‘ghettoist’, brought together the clubs and events of most interest to homosexuals; the ‘Sell Out’ department provided more pages of consumer and shopping news than before; and a much-overdue section on nightlife covered a subject that the magazine’s former staff had dismissed as trivial and politically incorrect. The new Time Out’s first cover story, symbolizing the nascent metropolitan affluence appearing under Margaret Thatcher, was about all-night London.
Elliott knew that he would face competition, for Branson had poached Pearce Marchbank, Time Out’s design guru, to co-edit Event with Al Clark. But Event proved to be a damp squib. Its editorial approach was just a little too middlebrow; it went in for slightly tacky competitions; and it committed a fundamental error by printing the listings – for many readers, the magazine’s principal attraction – in a point size so small that it was barely legible. The staff were at each other’s throats.
Despite the undoubted literary and artistic talents of the team that Branson had assembled, the magazine soon began to go downhill. The real competition to Elliott’s new Time Out was not Event, but City Limits. As the months roiled on, Time Out’s circulation began to rise above 60,000; City Limits stayed put at around 30,000; and Event declined, equally immune to changes of personnel and of style, to below 20,000 by the turn of the year. Tina Brown, later to become editor of the Tatler, Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, described Branson’s venture with scathing accuracy as ‘a triumph of managerial incompetence over editorial flair’.
Proof of the fall in the magazine’s morale could be seen in its in-house magazine. As if it was not enough of a struggle to put the next issue of Event together, a group of mischievous members of the magazine’s staff decided to start an underground gossip sheet, entirely for internal consumption, that would chronicle its lurching progress from issue to issue. The sheet was called Non-Event, Rod Vickery, usually one of Branson’s most faithful lieutenants, did the artwork, while another couple of employees wrote the stories and a fourth ran off a copy for the desk of each member of staff. Terry Baughan, the man in charge of the Virgin Group’s finances at the time, was at first speechless with fury. ‘I’d love to get my hands on the people who did that,’ he said. Vickery, kept safe from suspicion by virtue not only of his long service but also of his seniority in the company, said nothing.
The tough decisions forced on Branson by the tottering fortunes of his magazine turned Event’s journalists against him. Jonathan Meades, one of the later editors he appointed, recalled that Branson had disputed a £30 expense claim submitted by the magazine’s film critic. ‘But he also had three phones going at the same time, and on one of them he was trying to sign the Stranglers for £300,000,’ Meades remembered. The experience of working for Branson also left him with a jaded impression of the young entrepreneur. ‘He’s impossible to conduct a conversation with because he is inarticulate … Branson’s very good at making money, but the rest of him hasn’t kept up. It’s like a form of autism.’
But Branson was never one to give up. With creditable bravado, he telephoned Elliott six months later. Brushing aside Elliott’s questions about the restyles and the firings at Event, Branson came straight to the point.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘We’ve had a really good run with the Human League. We’ve done really well, and I’ve got at least