SAVING RICHARD MADELEY...

“I’m looking for a good reason not to close this blog....I’ve lost my sense of fun.”

Evidently in a state of mental exhaustion, here’s a man who believes that
he has lost his call. A man who is looking for a reason not to close his blog. A
common complaint among authors, together with imagining they’re suffering from
writers’ block, and can’t, for the life of them, think how to escape it.

And yet, this is a valuable moment, Richard. A moment of catharsis.

We all crave attention, status and approbation. Indeed, approbation is
fine thing, but what about scepticism, spite, jealousy and ridicule? The fact of
the matter is, that I’ve often been in precisely that position and, invariably,
I have found that, by persisting, I left something inferior behind and advanced
to new and higher levels.

Only way to go!

Such are the necessities of war! And so far as your blog is concerned,
apart from momentary lapses, I have seen some absolutely cracking posts, crafted
to an exacting standard. In fact, rather depending on those standards, The Richard Madeley Appreciation Society is arguably the leading weblog of its kind. Equally witty,
equally mercurial, but more in the Wodehouse mode, perhaps, than Elberry’s
somewhat surrealistic or Mutley’s sardonic dogs-day humour - Richard’s is a
compromise between genius and farce...

My own blog, too, I see as having a strongly farcical and ingenious
flavour. But what matters, as in every literary hyperbole, are the effects
created, and Richard’s effects are striking. Their derivation, indeed, is
ambiguous, caught between Channel 4 celebrity and Manchester anonymity, they owe
a credible touch to both. If he is a writer of rare eloquence, his talent is
something more than just loquaciousness. It may well turn out to be valuable,
certainly in the sense that some observers have already commented on his blog
being an ill-disguised form of self-disclosure. If so, Richard may even be the
first celebrity to be found guilty of impersonating himself. But since the sheer
length of some posts makes his droll and almost compulsively ironic manner
somewhat heavier to absorb, my first suggestion would be, leave some of your
volume behind.

Also, for the record, you’re the recipient of some of the blogosphere’s most sincere declarations of love and loyalty. All six-foot-one of you, have a flair for rapid captivation of the opposite sex. And female fans in particular - especially myself - are prone to write to you, pleading that you
are an essentially misunderstood, even quite tragic, figure whose intense moral
revulsions for the job in Manchester are all the more wounding for being so true
to life.

One senses genuine outrage! And here's the rub:

You might say that Madeley is a man of curiously mixed motivation, and
that it is sometimes difficult to discern a logical purpose in his meanderings.
But it is the contradiction between his semantic eloquence and his ready
acceptance of temptation and a willingness to compromise that makes his blog so
complex and intriguing. Richard is a compulsive player of power games. A master
of dissimulation. A raging egocentric possibly, totally wrapped up in the
frivolities of his own existence. But that's the real point of being a blogger.
Whatever our literary preferences, blogging is all about the subtle
reverberations of scale, about the critical relations between things that the
majority of us spend the greatest part of our days steering clear of. And since
bogus literary pretensions are invariably the most tedious aspect of any
biography, what is clear from Richard’s confessional is, that he gets those
of us who care too little about others into caring about life in the first
place. Which is why, if it is any consolation to you, Richard, nobody but a
blogger worthy of salvation can be troubled to go to those lengths for the mere sake of
a lousy post....

Dreamy

PS.: (God help me if the blogosphere finds out that I am Richard Madeley)