Soames' saga keeps on rolling

Emma Soames picked a hopeful time to become editor of Saga magazine, last March. People used to make jokes about Saga - seeing it as a kind of travel mag for oldies - but the jokes stopped as the revenue and the circulation grew: last December ABC figures stood at 1,169,000.

The fact that Soames had been hired to edit the monthly was proof of Saga?s smartening up and confidence in the future: and, as she departed from The Daily Telegraph magazine, she vowed to ?put the hip into hip replacement?.

Then a ghastly event occurred, in April. Her fianc..., architect Christopher Bowerbank, died suddenly. They had been very happy together and planning to marry. It was a shocking bereavement and a deep loss. Hardly in the job, Soames took some time off before coming back to her desk with a renewed focus on work.

?Everybody here has been incredibly supportive. And, actually, it makes me feel as if I understand the Saga age group. It?s great to have an interesting job at this time. When one is working, one is so busy. To quote my grandfather, it?s K.B.O.?

Soames?s grandfather was, of course, Sir Winston Churchill, (whose portrayal she greatly liked in the recent The Gathering Storm: Vanessa Redgrave as Clementine was ?uncannily like my grandmother?.)

?K.B.O?? Is that ?Keep Battling On?? ?Ye-es,? says Soames, chortling. ?Or ?keep buggering on!?? A Churchillian joke, driven by a Churchillian fortitude. And it is true, too, that an absorbing job is the best therapy for grief.

Emma Soames is 52, exactly the right age to make Saga the magazine of the 21st century. The demographics have primed the market: 19 million people over 50 in the United Kingdom ? that is

40 per cent of the adult population. By the year 2020, this will 25 million. And these will not be the dear-little-old-grannies-inthecorner formerly associated with the elderly market. ?I firmly believe that attitudes to ageing have changed. More importantly, we are the generation that first took the Pill and took control of our lives.

?We questioned pretty much all the assumptions made by previous generations, and we are not going to stop doing that just because we hit our mid-fifties. Saga magazine should position itself to cater for this rather adventurous, open-minded and determined age group as well as providing soothing company and a whoppingly good read for an older body of readers.?

Marketing men traditionally prefer younger readers because that is when brand-consciousness tends to form consumer habits. Yet, nowadays, older people are much more likely to change brands in response to consumer information. Soames?s own mother, Lady Soames, who will be 80 this year, changes her car brand each time she changes her car.

Similarly, Soames has made big changes with Saga. A series of firings were reported in the purlieus of East Kent - Saga?s offices are in Folkestone, a light and airy pavilion overlooking the sea - though she says she hates sackings. Veteran writers Clement Freud and Michael Watts have gone, and in their place appear Libby Purves and Alexander Chancellor. Though these may not be fixtures: ?I don?t regard being a columnist as a job for life.?

The celebrity columnists, Keith Waterhouse, and Michael Brunson, will stay, as will Saga?s much-loved Agony Aunt for seniors, Katharine Whitehorn. She has introduced more picturedriven features, a series by Valerie Grove on ?Life?s Lessons? and interview features by Maureen Cleave.

Soames has a track record in editing successful magazines: the Literary Review, Tatler, ES and The Daily Telegraph. The most difficult was Tatler, at a challenging time ? the late Eighties, when Hello! magazine was the new publishing phenomenon. Hello! demonstrated, among other things, that there was a bottomless appetite for celebrity culture.

Soames absorbed that lesson, and Saga, too, will develop more of a celebrity culture. Selina Hastings has been appointed literary editor, and Saga is sponsoring a literary festival in Folkestone in September, with all kinds of illuminati. A Saga literary prize for the over-50s is in the offing, and we can imagine that it might be presented by some sexy oldie, such as Jilly Cooper.

Oh, and yes, there will be more sex in the Soames Saga ? not in the inyer-face register of Cosmo and Co, but, all the same, showing an interest.

Some of the territory that Saga covers has already been identified by Richard Ingrams?s The Oldie, which is pleasing and intelligent. Saga?s main advantage is that it has masses of money. The magazine, founded by Sidney de Haan, who died in February aged 83, grew out of his travel business, and is still distributed through subscription only (at £2 an issue).

Accordingly, it pays contributors very well: Soames says her rates are ?slightly above Daily Telegraph rates?, which would put writers? fees in the vicinity of £1,000 for an average feature. And why not: the 200-page mag is bursting with advertising revenue. (Her own salary was reliably reported as £150,000, a figure she will neither confirm nor deny.)

Soames has produced three Saga issues ? the August issue features Robert Fox, flags Lynne Truss on Botox, an interview with Debra Winger and a feature on the Sahara entitled ?Hot, hot, hot? ? and says that, really, she?s only just begun in her mission to make ageing cool. Despite the private anguish in her personal life, she is bouncily optimistic. New ABC figures for Saga are expected in August and she is confident they will be up again.

I believe that Emma Soames?s basic analysis is correct: the over-fifties are a fabulously under-exploited market. But I am not entirely convinced that the so-called Baby Boom generation is so utterly different from that of its parents?. My experience of age is that one gradually comes to identify more with those who have gone before, and that all the innovations we thought we had invented brought far more of ?plus ca change, plus c?est la meme chose? feeling than we had imagined.