Sex, Sensation & Significance

"What a swinging world it is," chirruped London's Sunday Mirror. After changing its name from the Sunday Pictorial to the Sunday Mirror, putting on a fresh coat of makeup and dedicating itself to becoming the paper for "more SIGNIFICANT weekend reading," the Mirror claimed an immediate, thumping circulation increase of 150,000. Said Editorial Director Hugh Cudlipp, 49: "The intention of the Sunday Mirror is to try to reflect more accurately the disturbing thoughts in the minds of people."

Get With It. For years, the tabloid Pictorial had disturbed its readers with little more than sex and sensation, a formula that kept it third in the Sunday field, with a circulation of 5,172,000, trailing only the huge News of the World (6,484,455) and another Mirror Group publication, People (5,532,199). But several of London's popular Sunday papers have long been losing readers beguiled by television, "quality" newspapers and busier weekending. In the last three years, the Pictorial lost 205,000.

To Cudlipp, and to burly Cecil Harmsworth King, 62, boss of the huge Mirror Group, it was obvious that the Pictorial needed some juicing up. Not that they wanted to change its pro-Labor politics, or any of the staples that have so long attracted its working-class readers--sports, animals, crime, anti-Establishment articles and lots of sex. But there would have to be more, and the answer was to season the Sex-and-Sensation recipe with a third S--for Significance.

With a flurry of TV ads, King and Cudlipp billed the new Sunday Mirror as a paper for "THE MODERNS" (meaning those under 35), for "people who not only want to be with it but way out ahead." They promised to give readers "restless thoughts," and the ballyhoo paid off. Since the revamped paper made its first appearance last month, circulation has shot up to some 5,320,000. But except for a cheerier makeup and a few new features, the paper is not all that new.

Creepy Gold Mouse. Recent issues have featured the standard rear view of a well-rounded starlet in straining stretch slacks, a panel discussion by teen-agers on guess what ("You know it's wrong," said a pretty 16-year-old, "but you just can't stop"), a piece that answered the question on everybody's lips, "What the Queen Looks At When She Takes a Bath" (her new "honorable bamboo" bathroom wall paper). For significance, the Mirror got the Bishop of Woolwich to warm over his controversial views on the modern world's need for a new concept of God (TIME, April 12), added a Sylvia Porter-type column of financial advice from "Our Young Man in the City." A new "With It" page offers tips on how to achieve instant sophistication (among them: "barbaric feet for summer," festooned with a "slinky gold mesh snake's head anklet" or "a creepy gold mouse toe ring").

Cudlipp, a working-class Welshman who at 25 became editor of the Sunday Pictorial, denies that sex looms large in the overhauled paper. The country has entered what he calls the "do-it-yourself" sex age, he says, and Britons no longer need titillation from the tabloids. To prove the point, one Mirror executive held up a picture of a demurely necklined deb and declared: "I defy you to find her cleavage." Nobody bothered to search, for the Mirror can still be counted on to reflect racier stuff. Only last week it ran a picture of Kim Novak that posed no plunging-neckline problem because there was no neckline. In fact, there were no clothes at all.

Watch Out, Girls. Under the guise of advice to teenagers, to brides and to mothers--in or out of wedlock--the Mirror squeezes several additional columns of sex into its pages each week. "WATCH OUT, GIRLS," wrote Audrey Whiting in a discussion of illegitimate births. "You are asking for it--and too many of you are getting it." Columnist Marjorie Proops advised brides-to-be: "The quick tumblings in a not-very-private corner at a crowded party, or the rapid assaults upon each other in the back of a Mini-Minor, do not add up to the kind of sex you will share after the wedding."

Whatever other publications may say about the Mirror's prurient preoccupations, its editors are well aware that the readers are coming back for more. "Newspapers," says Publisher King in the current issue of the highbrow quarterly, 20th Century, "have helped to create a social atmosphere in which change has become possible. This has been achieved almost exclusively by the popular press, presenting news vividly so that millions who would read nothing else read newspapers."

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