Up the tabloid tree

There is undercover reporting as a long and rare form and there's undercover reporting as a tabloid matter of course.

In Denmark, the first kind is tried out perhaps every one or two years, and the reporter, sometimes an artist as such, is likely to get a lot of attention for experimenting with journalistic form and playing with identities. At one point in my studies I was looking around for more cases like that, involving perhaps even some women working under cover. My cousin who was living in London at the time didn't really get the point when I asked her about it: '- Cases of women doing under cover reporting---The tabloids do it all the time of course...how do you mean?' And of course they do, in Denmark too, if not as often and intensively as the British.

Tracing the term 'under cover' in the Danish print media a few years back produced one hit concerned with a British female wallraffer - and it was Jamie Oliver who told us about her in an interview. Here's how he described the event in his web diary as part of an overall Bummer Weekend:

One of the receptionists [at Restaurant Fifteen] who had been working for us was secretly a journalist and had been spying on us for one of the tabloids. She seemed like a really nice, bright girl but obviously the hunger of working up the tabloid tree has eaten away at her morals. To be honest it's made me a bit paranoid and a bit vulnerable as I'm working 70 hours a week, not getting paid for it and could do without the worry of looking over my shoulder and wonder who is going to shaft me next. The good news is that it wasn't a bad piece but it's knocked my confidence a bit. I think the students [the ca. Fifteen chefs to be] were very upset. Oh well, c'est la vie!

All the best
Jamie O x x x