How he asked are the economics of Hollywood affecting you? Miss Taylor’s reply shook him

How, he asked, are the economics of Hollywood affecting you? Miss Taylor’s reply shook him. She greeted him in a negligee and with champagne at the ready. Cameron was so taken with her charms it was some while before he popped the first real question. long enough to have reduced their frames to skeletons, their sinews to string, their faces to a translucent terrible grey.. They are roped and manacled…

Then, almost overnight, he became the quintessential foreign correspondent. Equipped by nature and upbringing with infallible irony and bullshit detectors, he roamed the globe, filing reports of sharp wit and world-weary wisdom.From the Inchon landings, Korea, 1950: “There was a wandering boat, marked in great letters PRESS, full of agitated and contending correspondents, all trying to appear insistently determined to land in Wave One, while contriving desperately to be found in Wave Fifty.”From his famous suppressed account of how the UN’s ally, South Korea, treated prisoners: “They have been in jail … One officer said he’d sooner be interrogated by Internal Affairs than by Buchanan. The result was an extraordinary portfolio: the rape victim who, running in distress down the street, came across another rape victim running in the other direction; the 72-year-old man who ran away from home because his 103-year-old mother wouldn’t buy him a car; the mother who framed her own two-year-old for the murder of his playmate; and a murderer who found that an iron security door had slammed shut and trapped him with his victim.Her stories were typified by crackling one-liner intros: “They called it Operation Snow White because the drug was cocaine and the suspects included seven Miami police officers” (1982); from 1985: “Bad things happen to the husbands of Widow Elkin”; and, most famously in March 1985, on the ex-con shot by a security guard before he could order at a fast-food joint: “Gary Robinson died hungry”.She was famous too for her three rules of reporting: “Never trust an editor, never trust an editor, never trust an editor.”JAMES CAMERONForeign correspondent, Daily Express, Picture Post, News Chronicle etcCameron was, until his mid-30s, a writer of mawkish features for a Scottish paper and a sub on the Daily Express. Buchanan was a relentless collector of detail (“Ask one more question, knock on one more door, make one last phone call, and then another …”), and a relentless questioner of those in authority. She covered the festival of mayhem that was the city of Miami, a place so lawless in the 1980s that at one point, as Buchanan reported, the Dade County morgue was so stuffed full of corpses that officials had to hire a refrigeration truck from Burger King to cope with the overflow. No one offered to interfere.”Probably no reporter has challenged popular orthodoxies as effectively as Russell did.EDNA BUCHANANCrime correspondent, Miami HeraldWas deemed useless by her teacher, never attended college, and went from dead-end job to dead-end job until a writing course and a spell on a tiny Florida paper set her on her way to becoming the greatest crime reporter in history.

Then he had the guts to go to India and report the racism he found there and atrocities against the “natives”, including, in 1858, one captured mutineer: “He was pulled by the legs to a convenient place, where he was held down, pricked in the face and body by the bayonets of some of the soldiery whilst others collected fuel for a small pyre, and when all was ready – the man was roasted alive! There were Englishmen looking on, more than one officer saw it. Nancy Banks-Smith THE GUARDIAN Doyenne of the broadsheet bunch, the consensus in TV land is that the veteran Banks-Smith is bang on form again, following a spell where she became too obscure for even The Guardian’s pointy-headed readership. Literate, literary and lateral, Banks-Smith’s witty critiques have entertained Guardian readers since 1969. The self-proclaimed “old cow” is subversive without being condescending, and she does great one-liners. Of BBC import Kath & Kim, she wrote: “[It] is an Australian sitcom, which began life as a sketch and still looks like a cartoon.” Ouch. A A Gill THE SUNDAY TIMES Like him or loathe him, no Sunday newspaper addict or TV producer can afford to ignore the verdict of A A Gill.

Connoisseurs of Gill’s sermons delivered from the pulpit of the Culture section claim he’s mellowed. Even Gill’s detractors acknowledge that the ego-tripping is elegantly worded. He famously denounced the Channel Islands in a review of ITV1’s Island at War drama “What have the Channel Islands ever done for us?” he asked. “A couple of really expensive potatoes, a few flowers and fatty milk.” He’s pretty good on the programmes too. Stephen Pile THE SATURDAY TELEGRAPH Pile’s weekend reviews in the Saturday Telegraph’s Arts and Books section are essential reading for anyone who wants to enjoy a well-informed, crisply written and perceptive TV reviewer devoid of malice or self-indulgence.

Measured and lucid, this veteran of assessing the week’s programmes avoids being grumpy despite being a man of middle years. Pile possesses real enthusiasm for good TV and shows no signs of being jaded. His put downs are economical, sometimes to the extent where it’s necessary to read between the lines. Isn’t it about time someone gave Pile a daily column? Peter Paterson DAILY MAIL In common with most Daily Mail columnists, Paterson is low on youth appeal and tends to hark back, John Major-style, to a mythical England of quaint village pubs. No prizes for guessing where he stands on Big Brother (” appalling, unspeakable”).