A by-word for B-grade celebrities in bikinis and coarse blokey humour, Ralph magazine breathed its last VB-scented breath last week.
ACP took a look at circulation figures plunging further than the necklines on the title’s heavily air-brushed photo shoots and decided the July issue of the 13-year-old magazine would be the last. The masthead will continue, in online form, probably restricted to screen savers of women with unfeasibly large boobs that will be downloaded by office juniors the length and breadth of the land.
Ralph was ACP’s response to Britain’s mid-1990s glut of wildly successful lads’ mags, such as Loaded. It was launched in 1997 under editor Geoff Seddon, whose experience as a motoring writer shows in the early editions, which were as much about hotted-up cars as they were about near-naked girls.
It was under Mark Dapin, now a feature writer for Fairfax, that the magazine assumed its readers could actually read. Dapin interspersed the T&A shots with longer features that said more than “[insert this month’s model name here] has always thought about doing it with a girl”.
Despite its oafish image, Ralph was often surprisingly politically correct. While News Limited’s blue-collar tabloids assisted John Howard’s demonisation of asylum seekers, Ralph ran a testosterone-laden feature on the living hell Afghans were escaping, humanising boat people in a language its readers could understand. Jokes about race and sexual preference were banned in the style guide, despite earlier attempts by ACP management to get Dapin to produce a magazine that was politically incorrect simply to get attention.
The magazine also gave Aussie blokes something girls here have long had in titles such as Dolly and Cleo — sex advice. Its first advice columnist “Yvonne Firman” says she was surprised at the “incredibly raw and naïve” letters she received.
“Teen mags had been giving girls answers for years — and making us toughen up,” she said. “Men had no such resource. All they had to fall back on were the crass humour and brute mythology that gush from the mouths of other men. Yvonne was trying to tell guys it’s OK to be nice to women.” She was later replaced by a porn actress as the magazine coarsened to match the more downmarket titles such as Zoo, which were eating into its readership.
And Ralph’s attempts to match the cheaper, coarser Zoo for the building-site-toilet market were always doomed to fail. As former editor Dapin said: “Lads’ mags don’t sell to lads, they sell to middle-class boys living out lad fantasies.”
If the magazine has aimed itself more at the white-collar than the blue, maybe there would be an issue on the news shelves come August.
In the end, though, Aussie blokes will just have to go back to “humour and brute mythology” when they can’t satisfy their girlfriend. Crikey will have to re-invent the Dickhead of the Year Award so often won by Kyle Sandilands, and the army of workers who airbrush the blemishes from the likes of Mercedes Corby (dear God, what on earth were they thinking?) will have to look for somewhere else to practise their Photoshop skills.
* Jason Mountney was Ralph’s gadget reviewer for most of the past decade. He also worked as a sub-editor early in the magazine’s existence. You know, when it was good.
I loved Sex and Money, Mark Dapin’s memoir of his time at Ralph. My favourite bit was his descriptions of the backroom Photoshopping, like the Sisyphean task of ridding a Mimi Macpherson spread of some dreadful fungal skin ailment caused by Macpherson’s wetsuit.
YUCK. Good riddance. Were ANY of the readers actually reading the thought provoking articles? Isn’t that like the smirking associated with saying the articles in Playboy were interesting? If men want sex advice, Men’s Health is a great way to go and in addition, gives them some interesting reading and a bit of health advice to boot. Spare me any serious RIP for Ralph.
That’s pretty unfair, KC. At their best, both Ralph and Playboy featured excellent articles by good writers and, in Playboy’s case, gave a space to later-influential writers who couldn’t get recognition in conventional publications because of their style or content.
The “smirking” about Playboy is mostly ironic. Claiming to buy it for the articles as an excuse to look at naked women doesn’t render the articles poor. That’s no more accurate than saying that because I have porn open in one Firefox tab, the Crikey I’m reading in another must be total crap.
As for Men’s Health, pffft. Dry, condescending, metrosexual, clean-as-a-whistle dullness for physiotherapists and med students. Ralph’s educated-yob take on bars, women and things that explode beats the sterile rubbish in Men’s Health with a pool cue, then sleeps with its girlfriend.
When Ralph first appeared I thought it would last less than 12 months. I’m surprised to read here that it lasted 13 years.
As I understood it, the T&A or building-site-toilet market was best served by what were known as the “P” magazines: Pix, Post, People, and later by The Picture which, I’m told by a mate from the publishing word, survives because, not only was it a favourite of Kerry Packer, but it brings in cash flow from sex ads.
Sounds like The Picture and Zoo have the “real” market for this stuff cornered.
How telling that Ralph died once he became a teenager.