Tony Parsons (British journalist)

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Tony Parsons (born November 1953) is a British journalist and author.

Born in Romford, Parsons grew up on an Essex council estate and began his career as a music journalist on the NME, writing about punk music and "taking drugs with the Sex Pistols". Later, he wrote for The Daily Telegraph, before going on to write his current column for the Daily Mirror. Parsons briefly hosted a series on Channel 4 called Big Mouth.

Parsons married fellow NME journalist Julie Burchill - they had both answered the same advert in the paper requesting "hip, young gunslingers" to apply as new writers. He and Burchill collaborated on a book in 1979 – The Boy Looked at Johnny –. They divorced acrimoniously, and Parsons has been quoted as saying "my career is my revenge on Burchill"[citation needed]. Julie Burchill is invariably critical of Parsons in interviews, although he generally prefers to demur on the subject of their relationship. Together they had a son, Bobby Kennedy Parsons.

In 1990 he wrote Bare, an authorised biography of his friend, popstar George Michael. Despite not having a written contract with the singer, proceeds from the book were split equally between the two. However, they fell out in 1999 after an interview Michael had given to Parsons was published in the Daily Mirror.

In 1993 he presented a film for the British television documentary series Without Walls, focusing on the controversy surrounding the 1971 film A Clockwork Orange. Director Stanley Kubrick and distributor Warner Brothers unsuccessfully sued broadcaster Channel Four to prevent clips from the film being shown on television. In the programme, Parsons is seen taking a cross-channel ferry from England to France to watch the film, which at the time was still embargoed in Britain due to a self-imposed ban by the director.

Before finding widespread success as a mainstream novelist, he was a regular guest on the BBC Two arts review programme The Late Show though his contributions were parodied in Private Eye as he frequently dropped in seemingly random references to the work of Nabokov. He still appears infrequently on the successor to that programme, Newsnight Review. He has written several books of cultural criticism, including Dispatches from the Front Line of Popular Culture and Big Mouth Strikes Again, the title a reference to the Smiths song of the same name.

Parsons wrote a number of novels including The Kids (1976), Platinum Logic (1981) and Limelight Blues (1983), before he found mainstream success by focussing on the tribulations of thirty-something men, in a series of novels which include Man and Boy (winner of the 2001 British Book of the Year award) , Man and Wife, The Family Way, and One for My Baby. He is consequently often credited as being a prominent exponent (along with Nick Hornby) of the so-called lad-lit genre, and as such has become something of a target for feminists. His most recent novel, Stories We Could Tell , reflects Parsons' Seventies' career as an NME journalist.

Parsons was best man at the wedding of fellow NME journalist and author Paul Wellings, who wrote about their friendship and about Julie Burchill in his book I'm a Journalist, Get Me Out of Here!

British magazine Viz currently runs a recurring feature entitled "Tony Parsehole", a parody of Parson's weekly column in the Daily Mirror, and in particular the pieces in which he pays tribute to the recently deceased (e.g: George Best, The Pope).


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