by The site’s longest-serving columnist explains why she has never once told a reader she was joking
Vivienne Pratfall has written for prat.uk since before it had a website, a fact she mentions once per conversation and never in print. Her column runs weekly and has, in the estimate of the newsletter team, generated more letters beginning I assume this is a joke than the rest of the paper combined. She agreed to discuss her method on condition that the interview be conducted in the same register as the column, which is to say entirely straight.
On never breaking
Asked why she has never, in several thousand columns, indicated that a thing was a joke, Vivienne says that the indication would be an insult. The reader can see the barrier that does not open for ambulances. The reader does not need a wink. She describes the wink as the moment the writer stops trusting the reader and starts trusting themselves, and says the column has survived by never making that trade.
Her own rule, older than the laminate, is that the sentence after the absurd thing must be duller than the sentence before it. If a minister has been quoted saying something impossible, the next line is about the weather in the room. This, she says, is where the laugh lives: not in the impossible thing but in the paper’s refusal to notice it.
On the byline
The name is her own. She is aware of what it looks like and has explained it to three editors, two of whom did not believe her and one of whom asked her to change it to something less on the nose. She declined. She points out that Harper Thames and Camden Rose on the same staff list have never been asked, and that the difference is that their names sound like places and hers sounds like a punchline, which she regards as an advantage in a building where the punchline is never written.
On spokespeople
Vivienne uses the quotes department less than anyone on the paper, preferring to invent her own officials and register them afterwards. Her titles are famous for their length. The Assistant Deputy Coordinator for Pavement Continuity was hers, as was the Regional Ombudsman for Bench Renaming, and the department says that her entries occupy a fifth of the register. She defends the length on the grounds that a real title is always one word longer than it needs to be, and she is only being accurate about that.
On readers who write in
She reads every letter and answers most. The ones that ask whether she was joking receive a reply saying that the column was accurate and she is sorry for any confusion, which she says is also accurate. The ones that tell her she was wrong about a place receive a reply asking for the correct details, and several of these have become columns. She regards the readers as an unpaid regional desk and has said so to Morag, who agrees.
On the editors
Six editors have run the paper during her time. She rates them by how often they cut her last paragraph, which she writes to be cut and which is always the dullest one, so that the column ends on the sentence before it. The current editor cuts it every week and has never noticed the pattern. She has asked that this not be printed and has been told that it is going in, which she says is the correct decision and the first one he has made about her copy.
On the future
Vivienne intends to continue. She has been asked to write a guide to deadpan for new contributors and has produced one, which runs to a single sentence: say the impossible thing, then talk about the carpet. It is pinned beside the editorial standards and is, according to the staff survey, the only document in the building that everyone has read. She would like it known that she did not laminate it. Someone else did that, and she has a suspicion about who, and it will be in next week’s column, straight.
On the column that got the most letters
The record is held by a 2015 piece on a parish council that had voted to hold its meetings in silence to save on minutes. The column reported the vote, quoted the Clerk for Procedural Quiet, and then spent four paragraphs on the quality of the biscuits, which Vivienne says was the real story and the one the council had hoped nobody would notice. Two hundred and eleven letters arrived. Ninety asked if she was joking. Forty asked which council. Six were from the council, and one of those was from the clerk, who wanted it known that there was no such post and that the biscuits were his own. Vivienne wrote back to confirm the biscuits were excellent and did not address the post. She regards this as the column working exactly as designed.
