How to be successful when you complain (From Worcester News)

How to be successful when you complain

12:47pm Monday 8th March 2010 in

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WHEN your journalistic career starts off under the byline of Captain Cosmic there’s a fair chance it’s all going downhill after that.

Representing the forces of sonic heroism in print was always going to be a hard act to follow.

Whether becoming consumer affairs columnist of The Guardian quite carries the same cache, I’m not sure. With the under-eights, probably not. Although harassed housewives and Irate of Islington are likely to think it’s a step up.

Either way Anna Tims, whose alter ego is a clergyman’s wife living in Malvern, has now ditched the red cape and Starship Enterprise gear and settled for the rather more mundane sobriquet Dear Anna.

Under that moniker, she fights for the small man, woman or child against giant utilities, intransient airlines, unhelpful hotels, unconcerned insurance companies, rogue travel agents etc. Same battle, different universe.

Anna, who is actually mother of two Mrs Dowler from Hornyold Road, but more of that later, has written a book about how to become your own consumer champion. money Back Guaranteed shows how to get refunds, how to complain, how to get angry and, just as importantly, how not to get screwed in the first place.

She cuts an unlikely figure for a battleaxe. Give her a guitar and with her Mary Hopkin hair she could blend into any folk club in the land and the interview got the hurry-up because she was off on the school run. Not quite Anne Robinson But Anna Tims has journalism, if not necessarily consumer rights, coursing through her veins. Both her parents were in the business and although after a degree at Cambridge their daughter had aspirations towards a career in the Foreign Office, she began earning money by writing the Captain Cosmic children’s club column for the Surrey Comet, which must have come a pretty distant second.

Having taken the first steps along the family path, there was never much chance Anna would end up sipping G and Ts on the balcony of the British High Commission in Botswana.

However, life did get more interesting than Captain Cosmic’s children’s club. She landed three month’s work experience on Robert Maxwell’s newly-launched, but ultimately ill-fated publication The European and stayed for the duration.

She said: “We were based in the old Daily Mirror offices in London and used to see Maxwell’s helicopter land on the roof. I remember the day he died (November 5, 1991, when Maxwell apparently fell overboard from his luxury yacht off the Canary Islands and drowned). It was almost surreal. Later Andrew Neil took over as editor and I worked for him, which was interesting.”

In the best traditions of jobbing journalism Anna turned her hand to most things that came her way. She edited the wine page, “although I can’t stand the stuff, much prefer beer”, wrote about jazz and started a consumer column.

When The European folded in December 1998, it was her growing expertise in consumer affairs that proved a lifeline. The Guardian was keen to begin a consumer page and with her track record Anna was called in.

She said: “I had to write the first few letters myself to get it going but then they started coming in and I thought ‘Gosh, people are actually reading this’.” Suddenly Miss Tims had to write with authority on the thousand and one topics of consumer concern, grappling with European as well as British legislation.

Anna said: “When someone complained they had discovered a maggot in a piece of cod, I had to find out how many maggots per ton of cod are permitted. Things like that. The internet’s invaluable. Trading standards come in very handy, too.”

Today most communications to Dear Anna arrive not as letters, but as e-mails, which allows her to work for The Guardian from her home in Malvern, husband Edward Dowler being a priest at Old St Martin’s in Worcester. The considerable experience she has garnered through 10 years of producing and researching newspaper columns has led Anna to write her book, which comes with rider “How to be your own consumer champion”. So she sets out her stall to some order.

She said: “The biggest complaint people have, especially when dealing with the big companies and utilities, is they can’t get past the barriers that are right up.

“They get the feeling they are being given the runaround until they give up. They feel they can never get through to the right people.”

This is where Anna’s insider knowledge and experience helps.

Having said that, her opinion of the British consumer is not always rose tinted. She said: “We whinge but we don’t always complain hard enough. Some things I know people could sort out for themselves quite easily or they’re just being picky.

“I mean, I had a letter from a man who wanted to know if could sue a rail company because he’d banged his head on an overhead shelf. I thought, for goodness sake man, you’re 6ft 7ins tall. Get a grip.”

Or in Captain Cosmic-speak: “You might have a complaint Jim, but not as we know it.”

l Money Back Guaranteed by Anna Times is published by Guardianbooks, £7.99